Canon CR@ RAW conversion to jpeg or tiff

[duwayne]

jasz has been kind enough to make many large photos available in Canon CR2 RAW format from his collection for retouching practice. I am using Photoshop CS and have a Nikon D80 camera and therefore do not have the Canon RAW software. The Adobe RAW plug-in is not compatible with CS.

Does anyone know of a freeware file conversion program for Windows XP to convert CR2 to jpeg or Tiff?

[Ziaphra]

Rawshooter...?

http://www.photo-freeware.net/raw-sh...essentials.php

[Michel B]

I think you could use the latest version of the Adobe DNG converter, which is downloadable with the ACR plug-ins. It is a free standalone software which can convert your CR2 files to DNG, which you can open in your version of CS.

[duwayne]

Thank you both for the quick response. I'll give them a try sometime today.

[AdamZx3]

I find the free stand alone DNG converter to be the best option. They seem to always have camera updates first (unlike aperture which is dependent of OS patches), and ACR needs to be the most up to date, and newer camera's like the D300 need to be opened in CS3's ACR.

I find it particularly offensive that I can not open up D300 raw files in CS2 because they choose to not update the camera raw....I am dropping ACR in my workflow all together and converting all my raw's (D80) into DNG's and storing in Aperture, and if further editing is needed open up in Photoshop. However DNG's that arn't supported in OSX yet will not work with aperture until they make an update,Apple is fueling the fire for me to switch to Lightroom next time I have to choose between the two.

Also I find it refreshing to know that there in a format that will (hopefully) always have support in 20 years, unlike the current raw converter updates.

[duwayne]

Thanks for your response. I downloaded RawShooter from the link provided by Ziaphra above. I solved by immediate problem of being able to view the jasz images. You raise an interesting issue I have not thought about. Should I be storing masters in DNG? I don't know a great deal about DNG but am going to look into it. Thasnk again for your input.

[AdamZx3]

Well it's all speculation, and I have yet to read deeper into this problem but from what i've read....

The fear is that in 10-15 years when the D50 is an obsolete paperweight programs will assume no one has that model anymore and there's no use putting on all those drivers that most won't use....and Aperture or lightroom won't run on OS-XII so you need a 15 year old machine and OS-X with Aperture to view your files.

Now some camera's are getting on the DNG (Digital Negative) bandwagon and making there camera's native raw a DNG, Hopefully all will take this route soon.

Some of DNG's benefits over a propretary raw include:
Lossless Compression
Integrated jpg preview (raw's might already have that though)
better compatibility for sharing ( like what your experiencing)
The raw adjustments are stored inside a single file
No problems waiting for software to support a new camera model.

here's what i've dug up so far...sounds great on paper at least.
http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/


Also Aperture 2 was released today and they seemed to have fixed the unsupported DNG problem...so the DNG's should work even if OS-X or aperture doesn't support the native raw.