[Leica] Photoshop Altamont -- some questions for the wisdom of the LUG.

[passaro.vince at gmail.com (Vince Passaro)]

Well.

I fooled around until far far too late an hour last night and learned some
things, one of which is CS4 can't open G1 raw files. Further, when I opened
a few G1 jpegs in CS4 Camera Raw and messed around with them -- I even
taught myself how to use lasso tool, how to smooth out my terrible efforts
with lasso tool, and reduce the glare on a particular portion of my photo
that had light bouncing off some glass -- these files saved as anywhere from
25MB to 60 (!!!) MB in size. To mount them on the lug gallery I had to save
for web, which made them into 5MB tiff files but also stripped away some
layers of the work I'd done and rendered what had been clear and deep now
noisy and fake looking.

But I posted them anyway for your helpful comments and instructions.
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/toast+eatin_+bog+man/Photoshop+Altamont/.
Two 'Photoshopped" files and one prior for comparison.

Meanwhile, I went looking for why CS4 could nae open me wee G1 raw files,
and so found an Adobe update/patch to download (Camera Raw 5.2, equiv to
whats in the LR 2.2 beta I believe), downloaded it, but also read the
following asterisk which I wonder if one of you might take a stab at
explaining to me. It appears to indicate that the D-Lux-4 and various
Panasonic models (two of which I own, happy me) have a proprietary raw
program which Adobe cannot really deal with yet so they advise one not, for
now. If one does, files will be three times the size of other converted raw
files... because of a tripling of the mosaicing or demosaicing or however it
works. Any comments on this wil be MOST helpful. Here's the text:

**With the release of Camera Raw 5.2 (and upcoming release of Adobe
Photoshop? Lightroom? 2.2), there is an important exception in DNG file
handling for the Panasonic DMC-LX3, Panasonic DMC-FX150, Panasonic DMC-FZ28,
Panasonic DMC-G1, and Leica D-LUX 4. For those who choose to convert these
native, proprietary files to the DNG file format, a linear DNG format is the
only conversion option available at this time. A linear DNG file has gone
through a demosaic process that converts a single mosaic layer of red,
green, and blue channel information into three distinct layers, one for each
channel. The resulting linear DNG file is approximately three times the size
of a mosaic DNG file or the original proprietary file format.

This exception is a temporary solution to help ensure that Panasonic's and
Leica's intended image rendering from their proprietary raw file format is
applied to an image when converted DNG files are viewed in third-party
software titles. The same image-rendering process is applied automatically
in Camera Raw 5.2 and Photoshop Lightroom 2.2 when viewing the original
proprietary raw file format.

In a future release, Adobe plans to update the DNG specification to include
an option to embed metadata-based representations of the lens compensations
in the DNG file, allowing a mosaic DNG conversion. In the interim, Adobe
recommends only converting these files to DNG to allow compatibility with
third-party raw converters, previous versions of the Camera Raw plug-in, or
previous versions of Photoshop Lightroom.*
.