.jpg, ACR, CS3

[robar]

has anyone used cs3's ability to open jpegs and treat them as raw file?? your thoughts??
i've only scratched at it

..

roy

[mtngal]

It sounds like CS3 is using the same raw converter/capabilities as Lightroom does. If so, I use it all the time, because I like the controls for adjustment. For the most part, I don't notice any difference between working with jpgs and working with raw files (which is why I mostly shoot raw).

[robar]

i've been told that if you have ACR and PS it's pointless to have lightroom as you can't do anything more in it that's not available in ACR and bridge.. is that true??? since i shoot 99% raw it's also pointless for me to open jpg images in ACR because that's where they come from..

roy

[mtngal]

I prefer the controls in Lightroom for such things like adjusting tone, contrast and white balance, and rotating/cropping. I think CS3's ACR is the same thing (from the screen shots and articles I've read in Photoshop User). I've recently been playing with the vibrancy control and it does something with the mid-tones that makes a shot look sharper, a very nice effect (no halos). There's also controls to adjust vignetting and CA that take a second to adjust.

What I do now is use Lightroom to copy files from my cards to the hard drive and import them into Lightroom. Then I use the controls to make whatever adjustments I want to make and then save the changed file as tiff while opening them in CS2. I'll then resize them and add any sharpening before saving as jpg.

Lightroom does a number of photo organizing tasks better than I think Bridge does, though that's probably debatable. Since I don't use many of those functions much, I'd probably quit using Lightroom if/when I upgrade to CS3, and use ACR for adjustments in the same way I use Lightroom now.

[Robert Barnett]

Both ACR and Lightroom use the same RAW engine, ACR. Lightroom doesn't use ACR as a plug-in they each stand on their own, but share the sam engine that is why when Adobe updates one they update the other.

As for JPG's in ACR it works. 90% of the RAW editing features are there. But, there are some glaring differences that Adobe neglected to take care of. The big one is the White Balance Presets. You have a lot more Preset options for RAW than you do JPG iamges. Adobe says this is because JPG images don't have white balance information and that is true. However, Adobe could have faked it so that when you selected Flourescent it simulated a RAW image with Flourescent white balance. There is no reason why they couldn't have done this.

The other difference is that JPG and TIF will never have the dynamic range that a RAW image has so don't expect the same miracle level of image adjustments. Blown out areas of a JPG are pretty much gone forever. RAW you can bring a lot back.

Personally, I don't see any real point in using ACR for JPGs and TIFs. Now Lightroom is another matter.

Robert