The Download Blog

Updated 10:10 a.m. PDT with further Adobe confirmation.

Adobe Systems on Wednesday plans to release an update to its Lightroom and a related Photoshop CS4 plug-in for processing raw images, bringing the software up-to-date with many of the latest SLR cameras and fixing some bugs.

"The release and release notes will go live later today," Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty said. Specifically, 9:01 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, Adobe added.

The new software has support for several new SLRs, Adobe said: Canon's newer entry-level EOS Rebel XS and brand-new midrange EOS 50D, Nikon's freshly released midrange D90 and full-frame D700, Pentax's newest entry-level model, the K2000, and Sony's ambitious 24-megapixel full-frame Alpha A900.

Lightroom is used to edit, catalog, print, and export photos, especially the flexible but labor-intense raw photos taken directly from camera image sensors with no in-camera processing. The new support in version 2.1 go hand in hand with Camera Raw 5.1, the processing engine used in the brand-new Photoshop CS4.

In addition, Lightroom 2.1 fixes a keyword problem for people who had upgraded from Lightroom 1.x, cuts down on crashes while using the Web module on 64-bit Windows Vista, and speeds performance on Mac OS X machines, Adobe said.

Those features had been promised in the Lightroom 2.1 beta, released last month. More of a surprise, though, are several new camera profiles, a feature that has dramatically improved the appearance of my own photos. Indeed, I dearly miss it for processing some images I took with an Olympus E-3, which doesn't yet have profiles. The profiles are on Adobe Labs, separate from the Lightroom and Camera Raw.

Profiles essentially recalibrate an image's basic colors to better match camera settings, such as portrait, neutral, standard, and landscape, and using them can make it easier to match the punchier, more saturated JPEG images that cameras often produce. Newly profiled cameras are the Leica M8, the Canon 50D and PowerShot G9, the Nikon D90, and Pentax models, Adobe said.

For ordinary raw support, Lightroom 2.1. also supports some higher-end compact cameras that can produce raw images, including the Sigma DP1, the Olympus SP-565 UZ, and the Nikon Coolpix P6000.

And some high-end models also are on the list: Leaf, the Aptus II 6 and 7 medium-format digital backs and AFi II 6 and 7 medium-format camera bodies, and the unusual Fujifilm FinePix IS Pro, an SLR that can be used to take infrared and ultraviolet light photos.

Adobe already had added support for the newer cameras in Camera Raw 4.6, a plug-in that works in Photoshop CS3.

(Via Photography Blog.)

Now supported by Adobe: Sony's new top-end Alpha A900 SLR.

(Credit: Sony)

Adobe Systems has updated Photoshop's ability to deal with raw-format images from several of the latest SLR cameras with its new version 4.6 of the Camera Raw plug-in. Adobe's John Nack has the download links.

Less than a month after beginning beta testing, the final version is out with support for Canon's newer entry-level EOS Rebel XS, its brand-new midrange EOS 50D, Nikon's freshly released midrange D90 and full-frame D700, Pentax's newest entry-level model, the K2000, and Sony's ambitious 24-megapixel full-frame Alpha A900.

Also released is a new version of the DNG Converter software, which can help out people with older, more limited, or slower-moving software handle the newer file formats by converting them into Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) format. Raw files, which are taken directly from camera image sensors with no in-camera processing such as sharpening or color balance, preserve more detail than JPEG but require manual processing. And keeping up with the numerous proprietary raw formats is a lot of work for software companies.

In more rarefied realms, the new software supports several medium-format products from Leaf, the Aptus II 6 and 7 digital backs and AFi II 6 and 7 camera bodies. Also on the list is the more unusual Fujifilm FinePix IS Pro, an SLR that can be used to take infrared and ultraviolet light photos.

The software also supports some higher-end compact cameras that can produce raw images, including the Sigma DP1, the Olympus SP-565 UZ, and the Nikon Coolpix P6000.

The new cameras are also supported in Lightroom 2.1, currently in beta. And if the fleeting lag between the Camera Raw plug-in beta and the Lightroom 2.1 beta is anything to judge by, the final version of Lightroom 2.1 should arrive soon.

Add another name to the roster of feature-rich freeware image editors: PhotoScape. Although it eats and leaks about as much memory as Firefox--no, really!--this editor is just about perfect for those making the jump between JPEG and am-pro digital SLR work.

The program loads fast and possesses an interface completely different from those familiar with Adobe's industry-leading tools. Users are greeted by a circular navigator complemented by a tabbed nav. on the top of the main screen. PhotoScape supports RAW, as well as all other major image formats from JPEG and PNG to animated GIFs. It comes with prebuilt templates for users to create photo collages, fumetti, and Web comics, and has a standard set of red-eye removal, light/shadow, and contrast-editing features.

One warning about the RAW processing: Although it looks like you can drag and drop, the converter doesn't change RAW to JPEG unless you load the RAW file from within the native file navigator. It's a minor bug, but one that can lead you to believe that there's no RAW support at all. You can also batch-edit images, combine them, and print them out one at a time or several at once. It might take some people time to get used to the unusual layout, but PhotoScape's only unusual for its genre. Otherwise, it's intuitive, fast, and lacks only the most advanced of image-editing features.

Google wants to help you put a name to that face.

With a face recognition feature set to launch at noon PDT Tuesday, Google's Picasa Web Albums will help users label their photos with the names of subjects. That and other changes to the photo-sharing site are joined by a new beta version of the accompanying Picasa 3.0 photo-editing software.

The "name tag" feature presents users with collections of photos with what it judges to be the same person, then lets them click a button to affix a name. Once photographic subjects are named, users can browse an album of that individual on the fly.

The Picasa Web Albums name tag feature groups like faces together to let users tag them with names a batch at a time (click to enlarge).

(Credit: Google)

"Once you've started naming people, we'll start suggesting names for you based on similarity," said Mike Horowitz, Google's Picasa product manager. "The process of naming people is really addictive and tremendously fun."

Having tried the new service on dozens of photos, I wouldn't go that far. But it is a major advance in what I believe is a very important area, photo metadata.

Tagging is a powerful way to sort digital photographs. Photo albums are useful, but with rich tagging, people also can slice and dice their photo collection to show particular people, activities, or locations. Even with face recognition technology or other computer processing, the textual tags in photos are a far more reliable way for computers to understand image content.

And tags become even more powerful as photos are assembled into publicly accessible collections such as those at Yahoo's Flickr, Picasa, or Fox Interactive's Photobucket.

Eat your vegetables, exercise regularly, tag your photos
The problem with tagging is that it's a chore, so most people don't bother. But Picasa's name tag feature automates the process enough--and provides enough reason to use it--that I believe many users will take the tagging plunge.

It took me less than 15 minutes to tag close to 200 faces in a set of more than 100 photos, and that included some start-up time such as figuring out how the system worked, establishing names for various common subjects, and correcting a few errors. The most impressive moments are when Picasa presents a large array of photos with the same face, and you can label them all with a single click.

Picasa editing software now lets users export movies with musical soundtrack to a file or YouTube (click to enlarge).

(Credit: Google)

I speak here from experience. I do tag my own photos--for example the 700 I took on a weeklong backpacking trip earlier this month--and something like Google's facial recognition assisting would have dramatically sped the process. It wouldn't help with other tags such as "swimming," "waterfall," or "Sierra tiger lily," but let's face it--people are the central feature in most people's photos.

Overall, Google's Picasa moves show that despite a long period of near-dormancy, Google still evidently is committed to the photography site and software.

However, Picasa overall still feels like a staid place to store photos, share them with friends, and maybe order prints. It doesn't match the vibrant community of Yahoo's Flickr. And though Flickr also has been slow to change, Yahoo has at least been nudging it in the right direction with additions such as online editing.

Picasa Web Albums' most conspicuously erroneous identification of a face, actually the spokes on my bicycle's front wheel.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Face recognition blemishes
Picasa's name tags are helpful but imperfect. The feature failed to find faces in several photos where I thought the faces were reasonably obvious. It also thought my bicycle wheel's spokes and wife's ear were faces. One excusable error: it thought a mask in a mural was a face, though for some reason it didn't bother with a couple of real humans in the same mural.

"Our face-matching technology works best when a person is looking at the camera," Horowitz said. "There are a variety of factors that may limit our success in matching faces, including profile views and challenging lighting conditions like shadows."

The most annoying error was that during the initial period when I was adding names to the system, it somehow came up with three separate versions of me and two versions of my son, despite the fact that I entered the same name and e-mail address. I fixed it by telling Picasa my alter egos were erroneously labeled, at which point they re-entered the labeling pool and I assigned them to the remaining identity. Too bad I didn't notice the "merge" option until later.

Picasa Web Albums asked me to identify this face it found--actually a mask in a mural (click to enlarge).

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Knowing the privacy implications of face recognition, Google is proceeding somewhat cautiously. Picasa users must specifically enable the name tag feature, and default name tags aren't shared publicly. Picasa users may only tag photos in their own account.

With the "name tag" feature, which users must specifically enable, Picasa presents groups of images sharing the same face. Users can label them with a person's name. Eventually users can click a tag to find shots of a particular subject in their photo collections,

The face recognition technology came to Google via its 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, Horowitz said.

There are other changes coming to Picasa Web Albums (though a change to Google Photos isn't one of them, at least right now). One is an "explore" view that lets people browse the total collection of public Picasa photos. It lets people browse by popular tags, location, and peer at recent uploads. Another is the ability to e-mail photos to the service.

Picasa 3 beta
Google also plans to release a beta version of the Picasa 3 image-editing. It works on Windows, though a Google Labs version has been transmogrified to work on Linux via the Wine software layer. Horowitz wouldn't confirm whether a Mac OS X version is anything more than an idea: "Macs are important to us," he said. "We're always looking for new ways making sure our users are happy, so it's something we're looking at."

The new Picasa software brings several changes:

• A movie maker mode lets people combine photos with music to export movie versions of galleries to watch on a PC or upload to YouTube.

• A new retouch brush lets people edit out skin blemishes and other trouble spots. And the tool can automatically fix red-eye problems caused by flash photography.

A collage mode in Picasa lets users create poster-size collections, sizing and placing each snapshot. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Google)

• A new collage mode lets users compile many photos into one composite image. This time, users get precise control over image placement for example by moving, rotating, and resizing photos, and the software can produce a high-resolution composite for poster-size prints.

• A photo viewer for quick slideshows, an option that during installation politely asks to own the file associations for JPEG, TIFF, raw images from higher-end cameras, and some other formats. The slideshow software can view PNG files, which is handy, but the editing software still can't, which is a significant limitation for me.

• Online synchronization. If photos have been uploaded from Picasa to the Web site, they can be edited later and the changes, including tags, are synchronized to the Web site. This is very handy since you might want to get images up quickly to share with friends then edit them later. Unfortunately, changes on the Web site aren't mirrored back to the PC, so all those name tags will stay put in the cloud for now.

Click, drag'n'drop, and click again is all it takes to convert image formats in XnView.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Power Downloader tries his best to help all, but recently his friend Francois Foto approached him with a tricky problem: is there a way to easily convert photos from one format to another? ''Ze emphasees,'' said Francois, ''eez on easy.'' Power had a simple solution, a freeware program called XnView.

XnView is a robust program, an image browser and viewer as well as a converter. For conversions, though, it can handle more than 400 formats from Camera RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and other still image formats all the way through AVI, MOV, MPEG, and a multitude of movie formats. Metadata EXIF and IPTC formats are also supported, ensuring that you don't lose any location or shooting data. Setting up a conversion was so basic that even Francois, who's far more proficient with cameras than he is with computers, was able to figure it out.

On the Toolbar, click on the red arrow button. A window will open--simply drag and drop your files or folders into the open text field, select the output directory, format you want to convert to, and tweak the other settings, and then you're good to go. Francois' workflow has now simplified considerably, since converting from RAW to JPG for Web publication takes no more than a few minutes, and Power Downloader can rest easy that another computer crisis has been averted.

PhotoScape comes with templates for arranging image collages.

(Credit: CNET Networks Inc./Photos by Seth Rosenblatt)

If you're looking to put together a Valentine's Day collage for your sweetie, it's mighty late to be worrying about creative gifts from the heart. So get a jump on that photo mashup (or is that car crash?) you've been planning for next year's Valentine's Day with PhotoScape, a freeware image editor that's surprisingly feature-rich.

... Read more

Apple's Aperture is used to edit and catalog photos.

(Credit: Apple)

Update 11:35 a.m.: I added information about Aperture 2.0's plug-in architecture, which could provide an advantage over Adobe Lightroom.

After pioneering a high-end photography software niche, then losing ground to Adobe Systems' Photoshop Lightroom, Apple on Tuesday counterattacked with Aperture 2.0.

The software, like Adobe's Lightroom, is aimed at enthusiasts and professionals who need to edit and catalog "raw" images, the unprocessed data from higher-end cameras' image sensors; raw files preserve more detail than JPEGs but require time and specialized software that can deal with the profusion of different proprietary raw formats.

Aperture 2.0 has a new raw image-processing engine and streamlined work flow, and the first new feature Apple touts is better speed, one of the common knocks against it, compared with its rival.

Other features (this list should sound familiar to Lightroom users) include highlight recovery to better deal with bright areas; tools to deal with vignetting, the darker tones some lenses leave in the corners of images; a retouching tool to clean up sensor dust specks or unsightly skin blemishes; a repair tool to subtly clone one area of an image to another; vibrancy to boost saturation without making skin look blotchy; and local contrast to give a bit more definition to images.

It also benefits from new camera support of Mac OS X 10.5.2. And for when Adobe's camera support is ahead of Apple, Aperture can handle raw images converted into Adobe's Digital Negative (DNG) raw format.

The upgrade from Aperture 1.5 costs $99, and buying it new is $199--about $100 less than Lightroom and Aperture 1.5.

Another core element of Aperture and Lightroom is managing photos. Aperture lets photographers rate images; sort them into projects; add keywords, titles, and other metadata; click on GPS coordinates for photos that have been geotagged with location data to see where on a map the photo was taken; and export photos directly to a Mac gallery on the Web or to a photo book--even hardcover, foil-stamped books that likely will carry appeal for the wedding photographer crowd.

Specifically regarding metadata, Aperture can write titles and other information into raw files, recognizes lens metadata, and can adjust photo time stamps. And scripts can be used to add other metadata when images are exported.

Aperture has a significant ability Lightroom lacks: quick preview, which speeds culling, ranking, and labeling tasks by showing only preview images that load much faster than the raw images.

Aperture 2.0 lets photographers pull overexposed highlights back from the brink.

(Credit: Apple)

Lightroom's come-from-behind victory
The update no doubt will be welcome to Aperture users, several of whom have crabbed that Aperture stood still for more than a year while Lightroom benefited from many updates. And worry over Aperture's fate was a common subject at the Photo Marketing Association trade show two weeks ago.

Adobe began creating Lightroom, code-named Shadowland, between the release of Photoshop 7 in 2002 and Photoshop CS in 2003, according to Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of professional digital-imaging product management. But Apple brought the first such product to market, releasing Aperture 1.0 in October 2005, more than a year before Lightroom 1.0 arrived, in February 2007.

Aperture fanned Adobe's competitive flames and helped prepare the market for a new category of software, Adobe has acknowledged.

However, by October 2007, Lightroom had won the raw-conversion software popularity contest over Aperture: an InfoTrends survey of more than 1,000 photo professionals found 23.6 percent using Lightroom and 5.5 percent using Aperture.

Even just looking at Mac OS X users to account for the fact that only Lightroom runs on Windows, Lightroom had 26.6 percent to Aperture's 14.3 percent. (Both lost out to the incumbent, the regular version of Photoshop, with 66.5 percent.)

Plug-in architecture
One significant departure in 2.0--and a potentially dramatic advantage over Lightroom--is the arrival of a plug-in architecture that will let third parties add their own editing features, according to David Schloss of the Aperture Users Professional Network, who has worked with the new version of Aperture and wrote about it extensively Tuesday. However, there's no software development kit (SDK) yet to write the plug-ins, he said.

"Apple has added the ability to create editing plug-ins for Aperture, which will, over time, revolutionize the program," Schloss said. "It'll be possible to create plug-ins that replicate film effects, add borders, allow for selective edits like dodging and burning--the possibilities are pretty endless."

Schloss elaborated in a post on Apple's Aperture forum: "Here's the word on the plug-in architecture. It's in Aperture 2, they just haven't released an SDK on it. Personally, I hope Apple starts to really push this, as it will change everything. From what I understand, there's very little that can't be done in the plug-in. Right now, if you go to Images>Edit With, you'll see 'no plug-ins installed.' Once those are available, that's where you'll find them."

Adobe has released a beta SDK for Lightroom that lets people add export options but not editing options. The nondestructive nature of Lightroom editing, in which all changes are reversible, complicates editing plug-ins, Adobe has said.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used to edit and catalog photos, chiefly the raw images that come from higher-end digital cameras.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Good news for photo enthusiasts who wish they could they could use Photoshop Lightroom for high dynamic range photography and panorama stitching: support is on Adobe Systems' radar screen, if not necessarily its roadmap.

That's the word from Kevin Connor, Adobe's senior director of professional digital imaging product management and the executive who oversees Lightroom, Photoshop, and the Digital Negative (DNG) format. I spoke with him Wednesday during the Macworld trade show here in San Francisco.

Connor is intimately familiar with these two fast-changing domains in digital photography. High dynamic range (HDR) photography combines multiple exposures of a single subject into a single image that better spans the full range of dark and light tones; a good example is a photo of a cathedral interior that shows both the bright stained-glass windows and the dim stone arches. And the ultrawide views known as panoramas have been around for decades, but the ability to stitch digital photos together--for example with Photoshop's new Photomerge feature--has injected new energy into the area.

It's fair to be optimistic about HDR and panorama support in Lightroom, but don't hold your breath. Both are within the scope of Lightroom, Connor said, but he was careful not to promise whether or when that support might actually arrive.

Of HDR, he said, "It's definitely a natural thing to do. I don't know when. At some point, cameras will be capturing HDR. At some point, Lightroom will have support for that."

And of panorama stitching, Connor said, "An argument can be made for it. It's more about recreating a scene than about creating something that isn't there in the first place."

The Lightroom vision
Those endorsements, however qualified, illustrate Adobe's philosophy with Lightroom. Unlike with traditional Photoshop, Adobe envisions Lightroom as a tool to get the most out of what the camera recorded when a photo was taken.

Certainly Lightroom can alter a photo with some special effects, but, Connor said, "We want to stay true to optimizing what you saw when you shot it."

For that reason, Lightroom is chiefly designed to work with the raw images--the files taken directly from a camera's image sensor without in-camera processing into the more limited but convenient JPEG format. Lightroom's core operation is "developing" many raw images into finished products, but the software also can be used for cataloging and describing photos and for printing them and sharing them as galleries on the Web.

Photoshop, in contrast, permits not just photo editing but all kinds of original creation, from compositing multiple images to digital painting and sketching to elaborate visual effects on text. Also different: Photoshop presents myriad editing options at any moment, but Lightroom's interface is designed to march along with a photographer's import, edit, and export "workflow."

One of the key features in Lightroom--and another major difference from Photoshop--is nondestructive editing. Not only is every adjustment in Lightroom reversible, but the software keeps track of those changes and stores them as metadata associated with the file. That means an underlying raw image is preserved but can be accompanied by instructions such as how to crop it, adjust its tones, and sharpen its edges.

The SDK challenge
That nondestructive philosophy poses a big challenge for Adobe: how to design a software development kit for Lightroom. SDKs can let others extend a product with new features, and indeed Photoshop's rich array of third-party plug-ins illustrates the value of the approach.

Adobe has released a beta SDK with a very limited scope, but Adobe plans to expand it, Connor said. One tough balancing act the company faces now is deciding how much developer attention to focus on building the SDK and how much on building new features in Lightroom.

A Lightroom SDK is thornier than one for Photoshop because the latter can accept a filter that permanently changes an image, Connor said. Image-processing plug-ins are "trickier in Lightroom because it's nondestructive," and filters must be applied and reapplied in real time as new adjustments are made.

In addition, because adjustments are stored as metadata, there's a risk that an image edited with a plug-in on one machine will look different on another machine lacking that plug-in, if it can be opened at all, Connor said.

Adobe began developing Lightroom, code-named Shadowland, between the release of Photoshop 7 in 2002 and Photoshop CS in 2003, Connor said. But the company that brought the first such product to market was actually Apple, with its Aperture software.

Aperture fueled Adobe's competitive flames for Lightroom, Connor said. "It did raise the urgency. We didn't want people to think we were ignoring (that market) or that Lightroom was just a response," he said.

But Aperture also did Adobe a favor. Adobe's biggest hurdle with Lightroom was defining what the product was for, and Apple actually ended up doing a lot of that work, Connor said.

Adobe took a very work-in-progress approach to Lightroom, releasing multiple open beta versions, then 1.0, then 1.1, then 1.2, and most recently, 1.3. Significant new features were added with each update, leading me to suggest that version 1.3 might be best thought of as the real 1.0.

Indeed, things look a bit more settled now, and Connor suggested Adobe's attention is now turned toward a more substantial update. (He wouldn't even commit to a version 2.0, much less say when one might arrive, but you can bet it's in the works.)

"I can't rule out" a version 1.5 update," Connor said, "but I think we've done the bulk of what we wanted with the updates."

Note: I've updated this posting to note that the Adobe didn't sponsor the study.

Apple Aperture beat Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to market as a tool for processing raw images from higher-end cameras, but Lightroom has taken a solid lead in adoption among professional photographers, according to a survey touted by the image-editing powerhouse.

Market researcher InfoTrends surveyed 1,026 pro photographers in North America, and of them, 23.6 percent use Lightroom and 5.5 percent use Aperture, according to the blog of Photoshop senior product manager John Nack Tuesday.

Photoshop's raw-image converter beats both out, though, with 66.5 percent using it, though.

Windows is more widely used than Mac OS X, and Aperture is available only on the latter operating system. But even among Mac users, Aperture is used by 14.3 percent to Lightroom's 26.6 percent.

The survey was part of InfoTrends' continuing studies and wasn't commissioned by Adobe, though Adobe is one of the syndicated clients who received the results, InfoTrends said.

In other Photoshop news, co-architect Scott Byer offers some detailed advice on maximizing Photoshop performance, and Nack said Adobe is preparing fixes to Photoshop CS3 printing problems.