brainstorms

Friday February 03, 2006

nikon d200 and flushing photoshop raw

since getting a nikon d200, it became painfully clear that photoshop is no longer a reasonable environment for my image processing/workflow. not surprisingly d200 support is only found in ps raw 3.3 beta [dpreview blurb] which only works with photoshop cs2. at the cost of another dslr body, ps cs2 is just not an option just to get d200 raw support and minor handful of new features. there are several good ways out of this situation:

• bibble: this is one of the best tools in the industry [eg. review] for raw conversion and image workflow; i now have bibble pro 4.5b, which supports d200 and tethered shooting. it also comes with an excellent plugin that works with photoshop 7 and cs.

• apple aperture: i would really like to work with this, but i need a new imac first. sigh.

• adobe lightroom: i will take a look at this carefully soon. i have noted all the pump and glowing support [eg. first look & primer] found in adobe-friendly places; so far my impressions could be summarized with a brief shrug. how will it be priced, and how many full priced new versions a year? i will be very weary of getting locked with adobe again.

• a new raw plugin: i started working on an alternate plugin to adobe raw. the fun part is that i get to play with beyer interpolation and other details of raw conversion, which will come handy for another, more important project.