Lightroom and CS3

I recently upgraded my camera from an ageing Canon EOS 30D to the newly-released EOS 7D. Jumping from 8 megapixels to 18, and adding HD video recording, as well as niceties such as Auto ISO, are real plusses for me.

However, I soon found an annoying problem: I use Adobe Lightroom 2 to manage my rapidly-growing photo collection (just a handful shy of 10000 now) and Adobe Photoshop CS3 to do clever stuff like panorama stitching. However, CS3 doesn’t recognise the RAW format that Canon uses in the 7D, although Lightroom 2 does, so I can’t load photos taken with the 7D in Photoshop. Bummer.

Adobe’s ideal solution is that I upgrade to Photoshop CS4, which will be several hundred dollars. However, the solution I came across was to use Adobe’s own tools to work around the limitation. Lightroom can convert RAW images to its preferred DNG format, and that format can be opened in CS3. Usually I convert my RAW images to DNG as the last step in my development process, but this is a neat little workaround, saving me a big chunk of cash at the same time.