Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Adobe Releases Lightroom 2.3 RC, Camera RAW 5.3 RC – Free Download

Photographers using a Nikon D3X or the Olympus E-30 rejoice

Adobe has just released new versions of its Photoshop add-ons, bringing Lightroom to version 2.3 and Camera RAW to 5.3. The ‘release candidate’ (RC) label indicates that the plug-in is well tested but still needs community testing before it is distributed automatically to all customers, the company behind the Flash player reveals.

Adobe Lightroom 2.3 RC / 2.2
Adobe Lightroom works efficiently to aid professional photographers in importing, selecting, showcasing and developing large volumes of digital images. The “goal” of Lightroom 2.3 RC, as Adobe puts it, is to address several bugs and provide additional camera raw support. Issues fixed in this release include: slideshows could return to the first image randomly during playback; a memory leak could cause Lightroom to crash while attempting to process files with local adjustments; Canon EOS 5D Mk II sRAW files could process with artifacts in Lightroom 2.2.

Windows specific issues include: Lightroom 2.2 could cause disc burning to fail for Windows customers; in the Windows 64-bit version of Lightroom an sFTP upload process could cause Lightroom to crash.

As far as camera support goes, newly supported camera models include the Nikon D3X and the Olympus E-30. Additional language support has been included as well. Lightroom 2.3 now provides language support for Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, Italian, Korean, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish.

Camera RAW 5.3 RC
Adobe Camera RAW 5.3 RC also adds support for the Nikon D3X and Olympus E-30. The Camera Raw plug-in provides easy access within Photoshop to the raw image formats produced by numerous professional and midrange digital cameras.

“The Camera Raw team would like the community to help verify the quality of the plug-in through normal usage as this will ensure that the plug-in is tested on a diversity of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe,” reads a company post.

Users should also note that this release is not currently compatible with After Effects. Rest assured, though, Adobe promises to address this compatibility issue before the final release. Also, this release addresses possible artifacts that could appear in Canon EOS 5D Mk II sRAW files, Adobe points out.

Download Adobe Lightroom 2.3 RC / 2.2 (Update / Trial / Buy)

Download Adobe Camera RAW 5.3 RC / 5.2 (Free)