Adobe Camera RAW 4 is an integral part of Photoshop's NEW CS3 (Photoshop 10). The RAW conversion engine and tool set from ACR 4 is also embedded in Adobe's new multi-function imaging program, Lightroom.

In June of '06 Adobe purchased the rights to Pixmantec's Rawshooter Premium (RSP) RAW converter software and it was announced that there would be no further development of RSP. This acquisition news was a little disappointing to me since I'd become very fond of RSP. When Lightroom first became available Adobe took care of all of the registered owners of RSP. Early this year I received an email from Adobe. The email stated that as a registered owner of RSP I was entitled to a complimentary serial number to register a full featured downloadable edition of Lightroom. ACR 4 in Lightroom and Photoshop CS3 contains the best of RSP and Adobe's previous versions of ACR. I think Adobe did a marvelous job of merging these two very capable RAW converter applications. The ACR toolset in Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom is about 99% the same and the RAW conversion engine is exactly the same in both Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom.

ACR 4 is now one of the most feature rich RAW converters available. At the time of this writing, Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom were shipping with ACR 4.0. Updates to ACR 4 that include new camera models will become available at Adobe's discretion and so far they have a history of updating to include new camera models and features on a very timely basis. Adobe Camera RAW 4 is only available as part of Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom. Adobe's Camera RAW 4 updates for Photoshop CS3 are free and made available to download from Adobe's web site. ACR 4.2 is now available as an update and includes enhanced image editing features as well as some new camera models. Updates to Lightroom are also made available to download. An update to Lightroom 1.2 is already available to download. Lightroom at 1.2 has ACR 4.2 functionality. If you want to see a list of ACR 4.2 supported cameras or check for ARC 4 updates, click here. This article was written using ACR at 4.1 level.

I'd like to add some comments about ACR 4's parent programs. Most people already know that Photoshop is the industry standard for professional image editing. If you can't get it done in Photoshop, most likely, it can't be done. While Photoshop was designed to be used by professional digital imaging artists, the basic user interface is not difficult to master. Many intermediate to advanced level imaging enthusiasts are taking advantage of Photoshop's power too. With the inclusion of ACR and Bridge (Bridge is Photoshop's file browser) Photoshop has every key element needed by the digital camera photographer.

The most pleasant image editing 'discovery' for me this year was Lightroom. Just after I acquired Lightroom my wife needed a slide show of her business trip to Argentina. She is a professional trip planner, yeah, a hard job but somebody's got to do it. I imported her images into Lightroom's 'Library' module. It was easy to remove the unwanted photos from the collection without deleting them from the original folder. I used Lightroom's embedded ACR 'exposure' and 'fill' tools to fix my wife's chronically underexposed indoor shots and ACR's 'recovery' tool to fix the blown outdoor photo highlights. Setting the viewing order of the presentation was as simple as drag and drop in the Lightroom Library's film strip view, just like a time line in video editing. We used the 'slide show' module to make a PDF format slide slow and the 'web' module to make a flash based web presentation. The PDF and web presentations utilize pre-made templates.The whole project took less than 20 minutes. This feat was accomplished with less than 10 minutes of total time previously invested in working with Lightroom. I was hooked. Lightroom Library module has very full featured data base driven image management features including; image rating, multi-method sorting or filtering, keywords, IPTC data and image grouping by catalog. All of your individual image adjustment settings are also saved to this database. Lightroom also supports color managed print output. I have two very minor complaints with Lightroom. The 'color picker' reads out in percentage of R, G and B instead of the more traditional 0-255 color numbers we are used to working with. The only other thing I would like to see is more html based web templates. The 'Web' module is heavily stocked with 'flash' based web page templates. A few more frames based or simple html pages would have been nice. The only thing redundant between Photoshop CS and Lightroom is ACR. Both programs can stand alone or be considered to be complimentary to each other. In fact there is some built in integration in Lightroom for editing in Photoshop. You can choose to save your Photoshop edits as a copy or just replace the existing image.

You can now open and edit JPEG and TIFF (8 or 16 bit) files using ACR's tools in both CS3 and Lightroom. This gives you the opportunity of using the aforementioned smart tools on these common image files. These tools really speed up post processing workflow for me. In fact, all of the other image editing tools in ACR are just as appropriate for use with JPEG and TIFF as they are for RAW files.

The ACR 4 user interface in Photoshop CS looks the same but the tool group tabs have grown from 5 to 8 and the number of tool slider adjustments has tripled from 20 to 60. ACR 4 is seamlessly integrated into Lightroom but the toolset and features remain about 99% the same. The tools, features and workflow features in ACR 4 are now second to none. Since this is article is an overview, I'm not going to describe all of the tools and workflow options. However, there are a few of these tools and features worth special note. New in the basic tool tab are slider and numeric adjustments for Recovery (highlight), Fill, Blacks, Clarity and Vibrance. There are three tools I like to refer to as 'smart tools'. Exposure, Recovery (highlight) and fill (shadow). These are the tools I enjoy using the most because they allow you to correct exposure errors, pull out shadow detail and fix slightly blown out highlights with just a few clicks. I call these smart tools since they use intelligent algorithms to do a levels type adjustment within a certain range of the image histogram. Duplicating these types of adjustments with standard image adjustment tools like levels and curves would entail a lot of work and it would be very difficult to achieve similar results with some image content. Also, you would probably need the level of tool tuning sophistication found in Photoshop. While the exposure tool has been around since the inception of RAW converters, the other two 'smart' tools, fill and recovery, have just been showing up in RAW converters now for the last couple of years. If the software developer doesn't get the design of these tools just right, they aren't so smart after all. Adobe's implementation of these tools is among the best, if not the best. In fact, all of the image editing tools in ACR generate predictable results. They do what you expect them to do.

The file browser in Photoshop CS3 is part of a multi-function image file browser called 'Bridge'. ACR 4 can be accessed in any of the following ways: from Bridge by file>file open for RAW files or as file>open with camera raw for JPEG and TIFF. From Photoshop use the file>file open command with any supported RAW file.

I'll add just a few more comments on the tools and workflow in ACR. The 'Presets' tab lets you save tool settings as a group and apply them later to future images or collections of images. One thing Adobe could change that would avoid some user confusion is the profile dialog under 'Camera Calibration' tab. If the Adobe designed camera profile for your camera model hasn't changed since ACR at 2.4 level, you'll see ACR 2.4 under profile. It would be a lot more straight forward to list the camera model and not the ACR time frame during which the profile was generated. The horizon leveler tool is much like an arbitrary rotate feature. However, you can't input a +/- numerical rotation. You must 'drag a line' across the image to indicate where the horizon line should be. ACR 4 rotates and automatically crops the image. ACR's eight color parameter hue and saturation tool is the best color correction tool in this group of RAW converters. The chromatic aberration tool set comes in quite handy when you have color fringing in adjoining areas of high contrast. The vignette control tool allows you to compensate for light falloff in the corners of your image. Or contrarily, add a positive or negative vignette to your image. This tool does a nice job. It has a slider for controlling the amount of vignette effect to remove or add, and a slider for setting the radius of the vignette area to be removed or added.

RAW converter Image adjustment tool settings for previously converted images can be saved in the same folder as the RAW file with Adobe's adjustment settings file format (.xmp) or the image adjustment settings can be saved in the image preview cache database. Lightroom can also save image adjustment parameters as xmp files. However, Lightroom's and ACR's xmp files are slightly different formats and not mutually readable between the two program iterations. It would have been nice to edit an image in lightroom and open the same folder using Photoshop's ACR and have your previous adjustments read from the Lightroom xmp file. You can select the folder for the image preview cache. ACR 4 exports or saves images with calibrated color spaces so you can match your active Photoshop working color space. ACR 4 allows individual file naming without changing the original RAW file name when you use the save to folder option.

ACR 4 comes in second in the speed race at just under 10 (20D) and 20 (1Ds Mark II) seconds to convert and save a RAW file to a 16 bit TIFF file.

In the image comparison sections of this article, ACR 4 did extremely well. ACR 4 always produced good color balance and correct exposure with its default RAW image processing parameters. Photoshop CS3, Lightroom and ACR 4 have been stable and bug free on my PC platform.

Click here to see some screen shots of ACR 4 as implemented in Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom. ACR is more fully integrated into Lightroom. However ACR 4's RAW conversion tools are available in the 'Develop' module of Lightroom.

It has been Adobe's policy to discontinue support for older versions of ACR when a new version of Photoshop is released. So, I suspect that ACR 3 in Photoshop CS2 will no longer be updated to include new camera models.

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