K7 Raw files and Photoshop CS3

I've just been out test driving my K7 for the first time, but imagine my dismay when my 100 raw 5.6 snow pictures would not display in Photoshop CS3, and that no plugin is available. So I downloaded the PEF to DNG converter, converted all the night shots to DNG. But when I viewed the results the snow had a pink tinge that dis not exist when viewed in the Pentax supplied software. Has anybody managed to track down a working plugin for CS3 or found a better method of managing this problem.

I got round it by shooting as raw dng in camera then i dont need to convert them but of course that does not help the ones you have allready taken

hopefully the pink tinge can easily be removed

Thanks for the comment Will, I am going to give this a go tomorrow. But in the meantime I will have to some serious post processing.

Graham

Not an expert but I don't think this is a conversion issue but an attempt somewhere (either by the camera or CS3) to 'correct' the white balance on the image.

Do you have any other software with which you can open the image? Are all the images coming out the same?

I suspect you are right regarding the white balance issue, the pink exists on all shots and is more pronounced on night shots due to the addition of artificial light on the snow. I have now set my K7 to "DNG" and "Adobe RGB colour space" to see what the effect is.

Any other changes I should know about?

Thanks Gareth

The colour space wouldn't do a thing since RAW don't have one

If you don't mind beta software why not use Lightroom 3 beta?
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/
You can use it till April 30

The nice thing is you can easily batch process so the colour shift can be sorted out in matters off seconds in all your photos.

Thanks Stefan, I will have a play around with Lightroom. Upgrading to CS4 will be a little steep for me, so I may have to shop around for a more economical solution.

Regards Graham

You can keep photoshop CS3 if you shoot in DNG, another solution would be is to get a rawconverter like Silkypix, lightroom, phaseone, etc.
Those are cheaper and enables you to do what you need to get a good finished photo and you can keep CS3 for the special/creative imaging stuff.

I myself use Lightroom 2 with CS4 and those two work very well together, with one command you can open the file from lightroom in photoshop and do your thing there, surely if you convert the RAW file to DNG it works splendidly in photoshop, it's like using a PSD file, you don't need to convert your file to PSD or TIFF like you would sometimes with PEF if you do HDR stacking for example.

I just shoot in dng and use cs2 with the colour space set to adobe rgb if i add jpeg as well and get no issues so hopefully you will be fine

I had hoped to stay with the Pentax PEF file format, just for the sake of consistency rather than any other reason. It does worry me that old file formats can become totally obsolete, not a problem in the days of film photography, but a pain if you have to go through the whole back catalogue and convert them to keep up with the times.I remember seeing a program about the national document archive and how they were experiencing problems keeping the integrity of documents, not just the text contend but the look and feel. Even with Microsoft word they had to have each version from 1.0 to the current day and ensure that the original fonts version were available.

Regards Graham

I agree - thats why adobe brought out the pubicly available dng format to try to addresss the problems of long term archival format. Pentax have taken the enlightened route of making it available in camera along with Hasselblad, Leica, Casio, Ricoh, and Samsung

Yep I've found this problem when I upgraded from K10 to the K7. Took some photos on RAW PEF then when I uploaded on the PC, when I first viewed them through Picasa 3 the photos would get a pink tinge to them. Then when I tried to load up the photos through Camera Raw option on Elements 7 a message popped up saying unable to load as file is wrong type. I've now changed my Raw settings from PEF to DNG and it works fine now.

UFRaw should support the K7 natively.

Adobe are a "PAIN".

They will not provide plugins for older software but force you to upgrade.

I had the same problem when moving from *istD to K20D. PEF file format is slightly altered and I was stymied. Either work in DNG or buy a software update.

I believe almost all programs do that or does the earlier versions of silkypix support the K7?