Adobe on Tuesday announced an update to Camera Raw, its plug-in to enable Photoshop CS2 to read the Raw file format of leading digital cameras — it supports five new models. What’s more, the company has released a Universal binary version of DNG Converter, its translation utility for the .DNG file format. Both are free downloads.
Camera Raw 3.5 enables photographers to manipulate Raw file data without first encoding the image in another format like TIFF or JPEG — this prevents the image data from being changed, so you have optimal image quality. The 3.5 release adds support for Nikon D2Xs, Kodak EasyShare P712, Panasonic DMC-FZ50 and DMC-L1, and the Sony A100. With these models now supported, Camera Raw boasts Raw image support for more than 125 digital cameras, according to Adobe.
DNG Converter translates any Photoshop-supported raw photo formats — including images from the new cameras supported in Camera Raw 3.5 — to the universal .DNG format instead. This is the first time the software has been available as a Universal binary which runs natively on Intel and PowerPC-based Macs.