+ Camera Raw Feature Requests +

A couple of minor ones that would be very helpful to me.

1. have the same screen sizing hot keys as Photoshop, ie CTRL-ALT-0 for 100% and CTRL-0 for fit to screen and maybe something like CRTL-P for print size. My usual 8x10s easily fit in the available space. I also like having icons to click but on a 24in monitor it's a long way up there when I'm working on something near the bottom-right.

2. display a cross-hair in the center of the crop area. Camera Raw's crop tool is so much better than Photoshop's but it's hard to center something without a cross-hair. It doesn't need to be the movable target like in PS, just a mark.

Other than that 4.1 issue talked about elsewhere Camera Raw is just about perfect. A Camera Raw-Canon that reads picture styles and WB is a dream but somehow I don't think that you could get Canon on board. They're pretty secretive.

Add in ACR the same Targeted Adjustment cursor behaviour seen in Lightroom. It is fine for single color adjustment on the whole image.

Add also the same interactive histogram controls and response (histogram zones can be edited directly on the histogram itself) seen in Lightroom.

Thanks

Thomas acknowledged here:

Thomas Knoll, "NOT happy with image quality of Lightroom 1.1" #100, 1 Jul 2007 11:17 am

that there is a change to the demosaicing algorithm going on based on camera and ISO.

I'd like this function, which is now automatic and/or pre-programmed, to become a slider in the UI, similar to the detail/NR balance slider in RSP. I'd also like this value to be storable in the by-camera and by-ISO defaults. It can certainly come with the defaults set the way they are inherently in ACR 4.1.

To me, the improvements in noise and sharpness in 4.1/LR 1.1 are vast and the resulting image quality is acceptable. However, having another degree of freedom in this area would still be helpful, since the NR system is still just two sliders, and improvements are always welcome.

I am now using Camera Raw to process images from a Leica M8. The native 'raw' format for the M8 is dng which Camera Raw sees, from my point of view, as an image file rather than as a camera raw file. As a result, any image settings which are changed in Camera Raw are written to the original dng file and not to either an xmp sidecar file or the Adobe Camera Raw Database as selected in the Camera Raw preferences. This is difficult for me from a workflow point of view since I may have multiple backups of the original dng file but unless I select the correct one I will not have access to the previously chosen image settings.

My request is that for cameras using dng as their raw format that we be given a choice in the Camera Raw preferences of having the Image Settings written to the Camera Raw Database, a sidecar xmp file or to the original dng file.

Thanks,

Howard Clarke

I want the max pixel dimension to increase to the PS level.

Add a feature that lets you store colors (skin tone, sky, etc) from other images and then click on the area in another image and colors are changed to match the stored values. This would make it easier to color balance images that don't have gray.

Related to what we discuss here, there is a lot of discussion in Lightroom forum about the new demosaic algorithm in 4.1/1.1 ( Thomas Knoll, "NOT happy with image quality of Lightroom 1.1" #100, 1 Jul 2007 11:17 am). Some people seems to prefer the old way of rendering files (more noise but less artificial look). I could imagine a situation when a feature to use old engine (without resorting to install old version of ACR) would be desirable even when one is convinced that 4.1 is an improvement - for example when aiming for harsh grainy b/w look (as opposed to an impressionistic one ;-> )

Of course this is not easy to implement - suddenly there would be different metadata instructions for different engines - and this is just the beginning of ACR development (I hope). But those problems will only get bigger with time - we saw it when 3.7 could render LR 1.0-specific changes (vibrance etc.) but you could not adjust the sliders. Then again when you changed the new sharpening controls in 4.1 but LR 1.0 could not render them - even worse: when you changed _anything_ else in LR 1.0 the metadata instructions for 4.1 sharpening got wiped out. So maybe there should be mechanism to preserve metadata which could not be understood by the application in case it comes from newer version of the engine.

In the future I can see huge synchronize dialog which shows you that you have 3 different sharpness instructions for 3 engines and an earlier version of fill light adjustment with a masking bug. It could show you how the image would look like when you use different controls and would let you keep or clean the legacy instructions... Ouch!

Anyway - just thinking out loud.

Regards
m.

Thank You for clarification. So mere snapshots of parameters won't do. I still think that a mechanism in apps dealing with RAWs that would embed pixel preview in DNG every time the engine changes would be a worthy option.

To be honest it's not something I'm paranoid about. though (I hope ;-)). By this request I wanted to see how others feel about their images changing themselves over time.

Regards
m.

Uh huh. . .well, in the case of image sharpening in Camera Raw 4.1, the old code is gonesville...meaning one couldn't process with the old sharpening even if you wanted to. So, you can snapshot all ya want, but it's like a sex change op...once it's cut off, it ceases to function, ya know?

Thomas has already built in the ability to use current and original color profiles for backwards compatibility issue regarding Calibrate. But changes to things such as sharpening, new Camera Raw controls, and demosiacing and nose reduction won't carry the old code functionality...and there's nothing to be done about that except using the older Camera Raw versions if that's what you need.

I would like to see a mechanism for storing snapshots or even pixel previews of files automatically every time the underlying algorithms that helped render them change.

Jeff Schewe wrote (http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?128@@.3bc03c04.3bc413f2):

"(...)people are seeing substantial and some might say radical improvements in software that make people's current and past work better. That's a new concept for photography...imagine that shots you did (as long as they were raw) in 2003 or 2004 can now be processed BETTER than they could then. Which means really that the images themselves have been improved (at least the potential has been) just while they've been sitting there..

I like that..."

I like that too, but. The problem is that they can change without us knowing. Imagine one time noise reduction in CR changes, and then a more aggressive sharpening can be applied, but even without a change in sharpening algorithms actual sharpening in the image changes, because suddenly it sharpens different image.

The differences in rendering could be minor, but they can build up in time. And what happens if the new algorithm doesn't have the ability to simulate the old one?

RAW supposed to be archival format, but the very nature of parametric editing takes for granted the fact that in the future it will be possible to process the data in the same way.

What do You think? Maybe something along the lines of PS history palette preference to save the snapshot of a file every time the file get saved (here: the engine introduces changes). Would the snapshots (as in Lightroom) be enough (when a new engine can simulate old behaviour) or maybe a whole new DNG pixel preview is needed?

Regards
m.