Sony A700 - RAW in Photoshop

[michstan]

My husband has just resently bought the Sony A700, and we have just downloaded his first RAW images. When I open them in Adobe Bridge they do not open very large, and when I try open them in Photoshop CS2 it will not open the file. Can anyone help me with how I can open the images in Photoshop in a RAW state, and not by converting them to jpeg first?

Thanks
Michelle

[michaelb104]

Hi Michelle, I'm not an expert in Photoshop (not even close) but I think you have to download a RAW converter for the different type of RAW files from the different manufactures and then plug this into Photoshop.

Have a look here at the Adobe website.

Cheers

[chris-p]

Hi Michelle, welcome to the forum

Mike has already sort of explained it, but I'll fill in the blanks...

Originally Posted by michstan

When I open them in Adobe Bridge they do not open very large, and when I try open them in Photoshop CS2 it will not open the file.

OK. Photoshop CS2 is quite old now and Adobe (in their infinite wisdom) stop producing updates for older software. All Adobe programs use a plugin called Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) to view RAW files and it get's updated a lot. It's currently on version 6 for CS5 programs.
Unfortunately, the latest version of ACR you can run in CS2 is v3.7 which is too old to support the raw files from the a700.

The reason you can see a small version of the image is that there is a jpeg thumbnail built into the raw file. That is what Bridge is showing you...

Originally Posted by michstan

Can anyone help me with how I can open the images in Photoshop in a RAW state, and not by converting them to jpeg first?

Yes! All is not lost!

Adobe themselves have their own raw format which is called DNG (digital negative). It's not perfect (although I won't go into the benefits of open RAW formats etc now!) but you can convert any Sony RAW files (I think they're ARW files?) into DNG.

DNG files are still RAW format, so they're not compressed or toned/curved, interpolated or anything else. You can view them in Bridge and when you open one up, you will get Photoshop open, and the the image will pop up in ACR allowing you to perform RAW adjustments before opening it into Photoshop proper... just like if you had CS3, CS4 or CS5 and were using the Sony ARW files.

I don't know what sort of computer you have so just in case here are the download links for the free DNG converter, firstly if you use a Windows PC and secondly if you use a Mac