Adobe ACR 3.3 Official!

[evil4blue]

D200 owners rejoice! Our D200 NEF files are now supported!

ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/photos...raraw/win/3.x/

[srwatters]

You beat me sneaky stevil.... I'm downloading right now!!!

It's a calibration party at my house tonight!!!!

Wooooot

[srwatters]

Oh happy-happy, joy-joy. My colors are back!

I don't care what anyone says. ACR gives me the skin tones and colors sooooo nice.

I opened one image and it was a treat for my eyes. White balance rocks!!!!

Can't be beat!

[CincoJoe]

Sweet!!!!

[snidow]

This Canon owner is happy for you Nikon guys!

[billbunton]

It seems like it's a lot faster than 3.2 was. Just an added little bonus :-)

[srwatters]

Originally Posted by billbunton

It seems like it's a lot faster than 3.2 was. Just an added little bonus :-)

I concur! On 3.2 with my D70 raw files I was getting about 7.1 opens per minute. Now with the D200 files (50% bigger), I'm getting 8.8! Good job Adobe!

[ndsimm]

so for us old ancient D70 users, this will work as well?????

[jeffkohn]

Originally Posted by ndsimm

so for us old ancient D70 users, this will work as well?????

Sure, each release is backwards compatible. 3.3 supposedly improves the demosaicing algorithms so it's worth updating even if you camera was already supported by previous versions.

[srwatters]

Master Jeff, I have once more come to you with a question on the ACR calibration script...

I ran the Rags 4.0 script on what I hopefully believe is a properly exposed image (I actually took the time and read all the calibration pages on rags-int this go around). Question is, how close is close enough using the GMB patch checker script? I am uploading a few files if you care to look.

http://www.polodigital.net/images/GMB

The main image is GMB70-200-006.nef, and there are several pieces like the psd, xmp, jpg, and txt.

This image of Brandi was done with the numbers generated from the run I did. I did minimal adjustments in PS after the RAW conversion. The skin tones look very accurate to me. Since this image is mostly black to gray with skin tone, it's hard to tell if the color errors will effect other images.



Opinion?

[evil4blue]

Scott,

Not being Jeff, I'm not much of a master, but I was looking at your patch checker output text and the one thing I noticed is that your blues seem to be a little low in each of the theoretical vs actual RGB values.

The Rags page suggests running a Sat priority run first, then running a stdev priority run to hone it in on more accurate values. The key to doing this process is to not reset the values on the second pass. In other words, run the sat priority run, when it finishes, reopen the image with the numbers generated, and rerun the cal but in stdev priority without having the script reset the tab values. Doing this will allow the second run to have a much more accurate starting (guessing) point. This process tends to really bring out ones anal side (no pun intended). Personally, I just like to get the colors close and then hand tweak them to my liking. I've had good luck/results with this process.

I will run a full set of cals this weekend and let you know how it turns out.

[jeffkohn]

Scott my take on it is that you can't worry about getting each patch to match perfectly, because it's never gonna happen. I'm at work now so I can only look at the summary script results, but they look pretty good. My experienece is that you should be able to get the R/G/B primaries really close, and get most of the other patches fairly close. But there will always be a few outliers that are off by as much as 10-12% and in my experience there's nothing you can do about it. I don't worry about the saturation numbers because saturation is too exposure-dependent; if you run multiple calibrations on slightly different exposures you'll find that the sat numbers vary but the hue numbers are pretty consistent. The hue numbers are what really matter, because when the hue is off that's when you get color problems like purples shifting to blue, orangish reds, etc. Also, if you notice what the calibration script does to the contrast setting, that has a big impact on saturation of colors. So unless you actually use a Contrast number that low on real-world shots you may find that calibration Sat numbers will cause over saturation on real-world images.

One last thing, I've found that the Rags' script (and the original Fors script) sometimes come up with a Red Hue number that is a bit too far towards the negative, and this can give a pinkish-magenta cast to real word images. If you see that you might want to back off the Red Hue a bit.

[jeffkohn]

BTW to help with the saturation problem I usually tell the Rags script to not to adjust exposure or other settings on the "basic" tab. Also, you may want to try the Calibrator L Script which works a bit differently since it actually attempts to optimize for every patch on the chart (the other scripts only look at R/G/B color calibration, and the neutral patches for WB/exposure/contrast). I usually run the L-script with "ignore brightness errors" option enabled using XMP mode, and then compare the results from both calibration scripts and hand-tune from there, coming up with something in-between the two.

[evil4blue]

Well, after reading what Jeff has said, I belive the correct process in the 2 step approach is to run a hue priority run first, then the Stdev run next. I will try that tonight.

[Silvernic]

Thanks evil. Now that I have the file, how do I install the update?