Having shot almost a week’s worth of random shots with the new rig, all is well on the rig side. The computer side… well, that’s another story.

Adobe quickly released Adobe Camera Raw 4.2 to quieten the screaming hordes that had bought a shiny new 40D, only to discover that none of the Adobe suite of products would read anything other than the jpegs coming from the camera. And all was well — jpegs and RAW files were importing just fine — or so I thought.

The problem is that ACR doesn’t work with the new sRAW files the 40D can produce, which means that neither Photoshop nor Lightroom can read ’em. These funny little files are getting a lot of press as being a quick-and-dirty RAW format for folks that don’t need big file sizes, but need some of the advantages of RAW. It’s a nifty idea that may be ideal for some folks. However, neither the Adobe line, nor my Mac’s Preview, will display them at all. Heck, the Mac still can’t display a 40D RAW file in Preview!

These are just growing pains, and this too shall pass, but you’d think that Adobe, Apple and Canon would at least have had a powwow prior to the camera hitting the street!

So, for those of you looking for images shot since I picked up the 40D, you may have to wait a bit. My automation is really tied to ACR, and if it can’t read some of the files that I’ve shot, I’ll just have to re-import ’em again, and I’d really rather not do that. Thanks for your patience!