Hasta La Gadget!

We cover a lot of new cameras here at Gadget Lab, and if you go right out and buy them, often you’ll find you can’t actually do much with the pictures (unless the camera shoots JPEG only, in which case this is not the post you’re looking for. Move along). Manufacturers’ software is almost uniformly execrable (even Nikon’s Capture NX2, which gives great results, is real pain to use).

So it falls to the third party software to update regularly to play nice with new cameras. This pretty much means Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom and Camera Raw software. It’s Lightroom’s turn today, and it adds support for a huge amount of new cameras. 31 of them, in fact, and although most of those are Hasselblads, the Canon EOS 500D and Nikon D5000 sneak in, along with the latest Sony DSLRs (A230, A330 and A380) and the Panasonic DMC-GH1.

This last is accompanied by an interesting snipe at Panasonic fix for the kind of shenanigans carried out by Panasonic with the Lumix LX3. The LX3 uses some tricksy software to fix the large amount of distortion from its wideangle lens. These algorithms are applied to the RAW file in-camera, which is a big no-no for RAW.  To address these kind of shenanigans.  This is applied to either the in-camera jpeg or, for the RAW file, on the computer. Adobe has updated to DNG spec to allow this kind of heavy processing to be done on powerful computers rather than weakling camera chips, and should mean that in future camera makers can add these corrections directly to the DNG interpretations rather than Adobe needing to work with everyone individually. The tools are called Opcode Lists:

This also allows processing steps to be specified, such as lens corrections, which ideally
should be performed on the image data after it has been demosaiced, while still retaining the
advantages of a raw mosaic data format.

Sadly, this still relies on camera makers to make these algorithms and processes open instead of squirreling them away as some kind of “intellectual property”, something that Panasonic has done, working with Adobe to make sure that Camera Raw and Lightroom users get the picture they should be getting. Hopefully this trend will continue, and allow access to these deep parts of the cameras’ hearts which remain locked away unless you use the manufacturers’ own software. Tell me. You have spent your money on a camera. Who should control what is done to the pictures by that camera. You, or Canon or Nikon?

Post updated upon receiving new information from Adobe. The original title to this post was “Adobe Lightroom Updated, New DNG Spec Takes Shot at Panasonic.”

Lightroom 2.4 and Camera Raw 5.4 Now Available [Lightroom Journal]

Digital Negative (DNG) Specification [PDF. Adobe]