Well FINALLY. Let me repeat this. Well FINALLY. Adobe got their heads out of their butts and FINALLY revised their RAW con­ver­sion engine from the ground up to FINALLY provide some decent raw con­ver­sion res­ults, espe­cially for images taken with Sony D-​SLRs.

What’s a RAW? Just quickly, it’s basic­ally just the very raw, unaltered data cap­tured by the camera’s sensor, more or less dir­ectly dumped into a file with (hope­fully) zero pro­cessing done in-​camera. This means that it’s actu­ally not an image, but really just pure data. Just num­bers. These num­bers need to be con­ver­ted later, on the com­puter, into an actual image before you can actu­ally see any­thing. Thus the qual­ity of the final image depends to a large part on the soft­ware used (and less so — to some extend — on the cam­era and its pro­cessing cap­ab­il­it­ies).

Since I shoot 100% of my pic­tures in RAW, it is cru­cial for me to have a soft­ware that does a good job at con­vert­ing them. Unfor­tu­nately, so far Adobe’s Cam­era Raw, which does this job in Light­Room (a beau­ti­ful piece of soft­ware in itself), has done it very badly for Sony RAW files (for a num­ber of reason I won’t get into). In any case, this has rad­ic­ally changed with the Light­Room 3 (beta) that was released a couple of weeks back.

Here’s an excerpt of an image that I had to take at ISO 6400 to get short shut­ter speeds so I could cap­ture the tor­ren­tial rain. Left: Light­Room 2, Right: Light­Room 3 (beta). Check out the dif­fer­ence in how the col­our noise is removed beau­ti­fully, to actu­ally reveal that it was indeed rain­ing quite heav­ily. Also, there’s gen­er­ally much more detail in the image on the right. So I can’t wait for the full ver­sion to come out.