ACR4 Fill light not carrying over to iView

[danaltick]

I noticed today that ACR4 Fill light doesn't appear to be getting used by iView to update its thumbnails from the DNG's after making the DNG's using Adobe DNG Converter 3.6.  However, if I edit the DNG using ACR4, make a change to the adjustments and resave, iView then picks up the Fill Light adjustment after rebuilding the thumbnails.  It just isn't able to pick up the Fill Light adjustment from a newly created DNG.  Has anybody else encountered this?  I'm running under Windows.  It could be that iView 3.0 is not interpreting some of these new metadata adjustments, but it is strange that it works after re-editing the DNG.

Dan

[johnbeardy]

Dan

It should update and does here, at least in CS3 beta.

John

[danaltick]

John,

Thanks for taking a look.  Must be a problem with my installation.  I'll try running some isolated tests.

Dan

[danaltick]

Ok, I ran some more tests and I beiieve I found the problem.  It appears as though the latest version of the Adobe DNG Converter (version 3.6) does not yet support the new ACR4 tonal sliders (i.e Fill Light, Highlight Recovery, and Vibrance).  It also probably doesn't support the other new sliders on some of the other tabs as well.  I've only verified the new tonal silders on the Basic tab.  This actually makes sense because 3.6 came out before CS3 Beta.  What this means is the full resolution JPEG embedded preview will not reflect these sliders and therefore iView will not show the thumbnails or previews correctly when these sliders are used.  However, the good news is, the DNG converter built into ACR4 does support these sliders.  As long as you use the built-in DNG converter, the previews will be created fine.  I don't really like this workaround though.  It can take quite a while to load all the files into ACR4 just to do the conversion on larger shoots.  I would assume this problem would also exist with the Mac version of the Converter.  Peter, have you encountered this?  I haven't seen any posts about it.  Assuming my observations are correct, I'm surprised Adobe didn't offer an external Converter given that the internal one supports this already.  Maybe they just haven't gotten around to it.

Also, be sure to update your old ACR3 presets using ACR4.  The old ACR3 presets do not take into account the new sliders.  ACR4 will work with them, but those new sliders will be set to the ACR4 defaults unless you change them to known values and resave your presets under ACR4.  Fortunately your camera calibration presets carry over.

Dan

[BobSmith]

I'm Mac based and have switched to using ACR4 to save out DNGs mostly because of speed issues on Intel Macs.  it's considerably faster.  I've learned to like the workflow better as well.  I'm not a high volume shooter.  It's unusual for me to have a folder of raws to convert that contains more than maybe 200 files.  Most are much smaller than that.  Those numberrs are not a problem at all.  With the DNG convertor you have to wait until one batch finishes before you can load in another.  By using ACR you can keep adding files to the process while its working in the background.  I open a folder of say 75 files in ACR and save 'em out as DNGs.  While those are saving I go to another folder of 100 files... open them in ACR and save out DNGs.  They're added to the pile of files ACR is still working on from the the first batch.  You can keep on doing this with numerous folders scattered around the hard drive even if each folders contents are being saved out to a different folder from the previous batch.  They just get added to the list of files that ACR is working on and it chugs away.  Seems more convenient to me than the stand alone DNG convertor.

Bob Smith

[danaltick]

Bob,

Thanks for that info.  I will use that method for now.  I'm just one of those people who likes to "Set it and Forget it" ;-).  However, I wasn't aware you could add more files to ACR.  That may come in handy.  Thanks again.

Dan

[peterkrogh]

Dan,
You're right that the 3.6 converter does not support ACR 4 settings.  The workaround is to use ACR to make the DNGs.
Eventually, we will see a DNG converter that does honor the ACR 4 settings.  I think it should even see these settings in DNGs created by the 3.6 converter, since that one should be passing on the ACR4 settings, even if it does not know what to do with them.
Peter

[danaltick]

Peter,

Thanks for the info.  Hopefully we won't have to wait for CS3 to get the new converter.  I noticed the CS3 Beta has the converter packaged with it in the 'Adobe Bridge CS3' directory, but it's version 3.5.

Dan