CS4 Camera Raw Support for Sony A7R2?

[OnTheOutside]

I have a Sony A7R2 and am using Photoshop and Bridge CS4, but my raw files (.ARW) cannot be shown as a thumbnail preview or opened in Photoshop. Can I install a driver so that I can use CS4? All the links I've found seem to want me to purchase the updated software to support the camera driver. Help?

[Terri_Stevens · Accepted solution]

I am afraid you are out of luck with your camera as it is much newer than the CS4 software you are using. If you really want to use Camera Raw files then you have a few alternatives

1) Subscribe to Creative Cloud Photography Plan at $10/month

2) Buy a copy of Photoshop CS6 as it will recognise your camera, but at $999 it might be rather an expensive solution-and actually not advised

3) Use the free Adobe DNG converter. This will recognise the camera output and convert the raw files losslessly into digital negatives that Photoshop can open.

Adobe - Adobe Camera Raw and DNG Converter : For Windows https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/camera-raw-plug-supported-cameras.html

Adobe - Adobe Camera Raw and DNG Converter : For Macintosh

[OnTheOutside]

This is all very helpful, thank you. Do you know if I use the DNG converter, will I see thumbnail previews when browsing in Bridge?

[War Unicorn]

OnTheOutside wrote:

This is all very helpful, thank you. Do you know if I use the DNG converter, will I see thumbnail previews when browsing in Bridge?

Yep.

[Terri_Stevens]

and in addition if you double click the *.dng it should open in Photoshop via Camera Raw

[OnTheOutside]

Very well! Thank you.

[OnTheOutside]

I followed the steps above, downloaded DNG Converter 9.1.1 which supports the Sony A7R2 and when I try to open the DNG files it states "Cannot open file. Not the right kind of document"  Any idea what is going on? Also, no thumbnail preview shows up in Bridge.

[Guest]

seems common some cameras don't work with some software

[Jeff Arola]

You most likely need to update the camera raw plugin for cs4 to camera raw 5.7

or set the dng converter compatibility preferences to camera raw 4.6 and later.

You can use newer versions of the dng converter than the one that first supported a particular camera, since camera support is cumulative and

newer versions have bug fixes.

windows

Adobe - Photoshop : For Windows : Camera Raw 5.7 update

mac

Adobe - Photoshop : For Macintosh : Camera Raw 5.7 update

sample images from

Sony A7R II Review - Gallery

[Terri_Stevens]

I actually loaded DNG Converter 9.1.1 onto a virtual machine that doesn't have any other Adobe software on it. I also used imaging-resource.com to get a raw Sony AR7II image . I used this one

Digital Cameras, Sony A7R II Digital Camera Test Image http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/sony-a7r-ii/sony-a7r-iiTHMB.HTM

I set it up this way

Processing starts

and finishes after about 30 seconds.

There is a 50% increase in file size, but the settings I used do incorporate a full sized jpeg preview.

The DNG file shows as a preview in Bridge anmd when double clicked opens Camera Raw

and after making adjustments you can 'open image' in Photoshop

I did however see online that Sony introduced a firmware update in October 2015 that supported uncompressed 14 bit raw files and these don't seem to be supported. I can't test this without having the camera, but maybe it would be an idea to try conversions using compressed AR7II raw files-assuming that option is selectable on the camera.

Sony a7r II uncompressed raw file support in Camera Raw and Lightroom

[OnTheOutside]

Thank you both for the helpful information. I updated the camera raw using the link R_Kelly sent and immediately the preview images show up in Bridge and open with Camera Raw. Thank you! And thank you Terri for all the scrrenshots and info for another workaround! So helpful!

Success!

[Terri_Stevens]

very glad to hear that it is now working for you. There is not any great disadvantages to using the converter apart from the fact it takes a little time to work. On my system it did 3 conversions in batch mode in 45 seconds, so 15 minutes to do 60 exposures which isn't too bad.