ACR 4.1 update

[mdavis]

As most everyone who surfs photography and digital image editing forums knows, there is a new Adobe Camera Raw version 4.1 out.  You can find it at the Adobe website, or use the "check updates" in your Elements 5 or CS3.  I just wanted to make a comment or two about it.

First, ACR4 and it's upgrade version 4.1 only work with CS3 and E5, not earlier versions.  This is partly to encourage customers to upgrade, I'm sure, but it is also due to the fact that ACR (and Lightroom which uses the same engine) contains editing capabilities that apparently cannot be read by E4 or CS2 and earlier.  Adobe, understandably, prefers to work on improving current products rather than spending time and money up-dating older products to work with new features.  I'm not defending Adobe here, just explaining.

There are some very interesting new features in ACR4.1 from ACR4:
  Noise reduction - improvements to existing controls for luminance and color noise

  New defringe controls - handles sensor over-flooding from specular highlights

  Clarity slider - based on the idea of high resolution / low amount contrast enhancement (also called HIRALOAM).

  New sharpening sliders - this is based on the book on sharpening by the late Bruce Fraser who was an advocate of multiple sharpening, once for the capture source/resolution, once for the image type, once for output device.  ACR4.1 provides the sliders and a masking function to get the capture sharpening done in ACR4.1 before moving to Photoshop (Amount, Detail, Radius, Masking).

Here is a link to a nice, detailed article with screenshots by Jeff Schewe of the Adobe engineering team on the new enhancements.

http://photoshopnews.com/2007/05/31/about-camera-raw-41/

Despite the new toys, Photoshop or Elements is still needed if you do individual image work to provide more detailed color control, additional sharpening, channel blending, layer and masking work, and any kind of cleanup details other than simple spotting.  I do some initial editing in ACR4.1 but never just print it without running it through cleanup in Photoshop and Curvemeister.
 

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Thanks for the update, Mike.  I think ACR 4.1 is going to be very interesting indeed.  Among its new features is the ability to open TIFF images as if they were raw, which will be of great interest to me from an experimental standpoint.