Don’t let Adobe fool you

When my wife got her Nikon D200, I was looking forward to using it. One glitch that I hadn’t thought about initially, though: since the D200 uses a different algorithm to encode its RAW files, my version of Photoshop CS2 couldn’t open them. There was a supposed Adobe Camera Raw update, but it was just a beta and didn’t work. Not a big deal – I could wait.

When the final version of ACR 3.3 was released I went out and grabbed it to be able to play with the pictures I took using the D200 – and it didn’t work. I used the directions that Adobe provided to the letter, but no dice. I deleted the plug-in, and tried it again. Still, no luck. I redownloaded the file, unzipped it again – and again could not open the files.

Finally, in frustration, I downloaded Bibble which supposedly already had D200 support. Good news – it did. Bad news – I hated the program. With a passion. I even hated the plug-in for Photoshop. A memory-hogging program with a horrid interface, it was everything I dislike in second-tier image processing software. I hated it so much that I deleted it before I got ACR 3.3 to work because it was just too damn annoying.

So, I did some searching and could find nothing to say that I was doing anything wrong. Then I saw another download – a slightly larger download (3.3MB vs. 1.4MB) that included Adobe DNG converter as well. Well, what the hell, I thought – it can’t go backwards at this point. So I downloaded it and installed it – and it works. All better. Turns out that the Camera Raw.8bi file is about 12k bigger – and it made the difference. If you’ve downloaded ACR 3.3 and can’t get it to work, try the combo download instead.

Oh, and this is the picture I wanted so badly to work on: