Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Adobe has released an update to its Camera Raw Plug-in for Photoshop CS4. Camera Raw 5.2, which replaces v5.1, extends support to seven more cameras, including Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Panasonic DMC-G1. The update includes enhanced color profiles, output sharpening and a new Targeted Adjustment tool. In addition, users can save all image adjustments and settings as a single snapshot for future reference."

The latest release of Adobe Camera Raw adds more than just the usual new cameras. It also adds some great new features. The targeted adjustment tool is especially useful in developing your raw images as you can adjust parts of the photo differently. Kudos to Adobe for continuing to add features to their raw processor. The only downsides I see is that you have to manually remove the beta camera profiles (the only change was to remove the words Beta 2). Some devotees still think the Nikon and Canon software does a better job of raw conversion, but, each new version from Adobe reduces the gap. ACR 5.2 is available for Photoshop Elements 6 & 7, Premiere Elements 4 & 7 and Photoshop CS4.

Jason was pretty excited about this update, but unfortunately, he's unable to post about its availability due to becoming available prior to his return from Japan. So, in his place I shall announce the news. Fabrizio, being a left hander, was getting pretty frustrated with the design of all of the Thoughts Media sites. He spent a fair amount of time over the last month working on a new design that significantly improves the experience for lefties on our sites.

To enable the left-handed template you need to login and click on the "User Profile" link. Under the "Settings & Options" section, you need to click on "Edit Options" and then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page under the Miscellaneous Options heading you will see a section for Forum Skin. Simply change this value to “Lefties - Thoughts Media” and then click the “Save Changes” button on the page. I have helped test the new design over the last weekend, but since I’m not a left hander, I didn’t really see what all the fuss was about. I invite all lefties to login, change the template and post your feedback on the new site design and I would like to thank Fabrizio for making the Thoughts Media network a better place for both left and right hander’s.