Lightroom 3.3 and lens profile downloader

Tom Hogarty from Adobe has announced that Lightroom 3.3 is available from their research labs site. It fixes one bug that annoyed me for a while, which is that if you are still using PS CS4, Lightroom would not offer to render as a tiff. This meant that "Edit in PS" would not render the lens correction adjustments built into Lightroom 3. Another thing that Adobe did was to make available a standalone app to download lens profiles from their server. This includes lots of community profiles for lots of exotic lenses. Previously, you had to use PS CS5 to download the profiles. I noticed that all the ones I created and submitted are in there and are highly rated. Making profiles is very easy and my geeky nature couldn't resist generating profiles. One example is a profile for my highly valuable Tokina 11-16 mm lens generated on my D300. You no longer have to email me to get it, but you can download it directly from Adobe! It works great.

Lightroom 2.5 is here

Time to pludge! Check it out here. Delivers support for some new cameras, better support for cameras with a unconventional Bayer mosaic where the two green sites have a different spectral response. It also fixes an issue that many windows users had where you could not make Lightroom NOT popup when you insert a memory card. That one frustrated a lot of people apparently.

Snow Leopard

As everybody by now should know, Apple released their update to their OS - Snow Leopard. For photographers, this update packs a lot of punch. According to these benchmarks, you get quite large speed increases in Lightroom (64 bit version especially), CS4, and Aperture, from going Snow Leopard and even bigger gains if you have a machine that can run the 64-bit kernel. So if you run Mac OS X and use programs like Lightroom or Aperture, this seems a no-brainer update. Even more exciting than the 64-bit part is the promise of even larger speedups with technologies that make it easy for developers to use the computing power on your graphics card (openCL) or trivial multiprocessing (Grand Central). So even bigger speed increases might be expected especially for image editing programs. Interesting times.

EDIT there is now a fantastic review of Leopard on Ars Technica. If you're a nerd like me there's lots to be excited about. The review is 23 pages and quite thorough.

December 16, LR 2.2 update?

See here. Wonder what it will fix. At least the scaling will finally be acceptable!

Adobe camera RAW and DNG converter update

Adobe has released the 5.2 update for camera RAW (only works in CS4) and an update for DNG converter. Contrary to what it says on the camera raw download webpage, the camera RAW and DNG converter are now separate installers (use the popup to find them or use the links further in my post), which is a good idea. If you have Lightroom 2.1 and CS3, only get the DNG converter installer. If you have LR 2.1 and CS4 install both. The separate DNG converter installer is here for Mac and Windows. Installing DNG converter will also give you the final release version of Adobe's new camera matching profiles. What's great about DNG converter is that it will allow you to convert RAW files from cameras not currently supported (at least until December) in Lightroom 2.1 to dng such as the Canon G10 and the 5D mk II. You can load the dng files in LR 2.1 and they will be fully supported.

Lightroom 1.1 is out!

And it's grand. I absolutely love the new Clarity control and the improved sharpening. Seems quite a bit faster too. Go check it out here. I'll do some more testing soon and report on it soon.