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Road Test: Camera Raw 12.3 in a Summer Fog
22 June 2020
Adobe's summer update to Photoshop and Lightroom (not to mention the rest of the Creative Suite) beat the summer fog here by a few days. But the fog has set in.
Summer Fog. Nikon D300 with 18-200mm Nikkor at 70mm (105mm equivalent) f8, 1/1000 second and ISO 400..
We survive it by pressing our nose against the screen to admire in detail the candy of the new updates. Fridays slide show was done in the new version of Lightroom and today's Summer Fog image is our first Raw file conversion using the new Camera Raw 12.3.
Opening a Raw file in Photoshop opens it in Camera Raw. And we could see the Crop tool was indeed available.
Camera Raw 12.3. Opening our DNG file, the Crop tool is available. It's not available when running Camera Raw as a filter but then it never has been.
Our preset for this particular camera was applied to our file as usual, we were glad to see.
Preset Applied. Our preset provides a better starting place for this camera's images than the Camera Raw default.
For the most part, our edit went smoothly. We appreciated the cleaner, more modern look of the dialog and even went through the Preferences.
Many of the issues we've read in the Adobe online forums can be traced back to Preference settings. It's worth reviewing the options.
The Preferences include two new options worth pointing out:
- The ability to keep a Camera Raw panel open until you close it, providing multiple open panels (General).
- An option to save Raw edits in XMP sidecar files, which can make backups of large file edits more efficient by only requiring the small sidecar changes to require updating (File Handling).
We did run into one big problem, though.
We have no idea why GPU acceleration would degrade non-GPU performance when straightening and crop a Raw file.
The Crop tool inside Camera Raw was simply unusable. This may be attributable to Camera Raw's lack of support for our older Nvidia GeForce GT 330M 512 MB and Intel HD Graphics 288 MB GPUs.
FFull GPU acceleration was added to Camera RAw in the August 2019 (version 11.4) release. And we didn't have a problem with it until this release.
We tried leveling our image and cropping it to a 16:9 aspect ratio. Both operations were unresponsive. And by that we don't mean slow. We mean we dragged the pointer and nothing happened.
In the case of the leveling tool, a line was eventually drawn but getting it to the right angle was painful as we waited to see if our movement went too far or not.
But once Crop tool displayed the new aspect ratio on the screen, we were simply unable to reposition the image within it in real time. After a considerable delay, it was sometimes repositioned but not always.
Photoshop's Crop tool does not have this problem, so we're disappointed Camera Raw's does. At least there's a workaround with no penalty.
We've asked Adobe for more information and will update this story when he get a response. Meanwhile we'll linger a bit in the summer fog.
