1. Some good news from Adobe - in a previous post, I reported that the new Adobe "V4" camera profiles broke the Adobe profile editor, a tool a lot of photographers depend on to get accurate color. Well, Eric Chan, who is on Adobe's Camera Raw team, has gone on record that the profile editor will be updated. See here.
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  2. Adobe Lightroom 3.6 and Adobe Camera Raw 6.6 final is now out, with new fourth generation "V4" camera profiles. Unfortunately, it turns out that the V4 profiles break dcpTool. Here's the story:

    For a while now, the Adobe folks, notably Eric Chan, have been working away at building better camera profiles. Theses profiles are intended to address a problem with some cameras, when used with earlier generation profiles, that could result in highlight banding. This was especially with some of the high-end Nikons e.g., the D3, D700, D300, etc. Back in January, Eric posted a set of beta profiles, called the "V3" profiles that addressed the banding issue. However, they required that exposure be offset by half a stop in Lightroom/ACR. A bit inconvenient, and not really what you want in a production environment.

    With Lightroon 3.6/ACR 6.6 Adobe have introduced a new set of "V4" profiles that sort out the banding issues that older profiles had, but don't require the manual half stop offset. The good news is that most people seem to like the new profiles a lot.

    The bad news is that the new profiles break both dcpTool, and Adobe's Profile Editor. The reason for this that the "V4" profiles include some new tags that neither product understands. This was confirmed by Eric in a thread on the Adobe forums. Also, I took a look at the profiles, and found three new tags:
    Exif 0xc7a4 : 1
    Exif 0xc7a5 : -0.5
    Exif 0xc7a6 : 1
    The middle tag, rather notably, is exactly the half stop manual offset that the old V3 profiles required, so I'd guess that basically this just automates the old offset procedure.

    Digging around, it turns out that the problem with dcpTool and the new profiles was noticed by Vit Novak, but he didn't contact me, and I missed the post in which he mentioned the problem.

    Unhappily, the new tags are not yet documented by Adobe, and are not yet part of the DNG SDK. Eric has said that Adobe are "working on" a new DNG specification (presumably to be 1.4) and a new version of the SDK. But no word on an expected date.

    I'll update dcpTool once the new specs/SDK come out.

    The more interesting question is whether Adobe will update the Profile Editor. Now, a lot a people depend on the Profile Editor, but it's always been a beta release, not production software, and it's not been updated since it was introduced. So I'd not recommend holding your breath for an update.

    UPDATE: The profile editor will be updated - see this post.

    FURTHER UPDATE: dcpTool is now updated - see this post.
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  3. Luminous Landscape have been testing the Sony NEX-7, and found that when using the NEX-7 with non-Sony lenses, it's "CornerFix To The Rescue" .
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Author of AccuRaw, PhotoRaw, CornerFix, pcdMagic, pcdtojpeg, dcpTool, WinDat Opener and occasional photographer....
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