jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

How is it that Irfanview can open any raw files when Lightroom can't?

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Infranview has all the image drivers, Lightroom does not?

Rich1939 Loc: Pike County Penna.

Now you got my curiosity working for the new year. Which raw files does LR shun?

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

It looks like there is only a Windows version; but it sounds like neat software. I did not know that Lightroom could not open all RAW files. What files are you referring to? Thanks!

johneccles Loc: Leyland UK

Adobe is very tight-fisted with its products and is not prepared or bothered to include useful add-ons without charging for them, Adobe already overcharges for their software so wouldn't dare to increase their prices any more. Irfan View, on the other hand, is free open source software invented by Irfan Škiljan, from Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, living in Vienna and is prepared to share his knowledge with the entire world which is a far superior business ethic compared with Adobe.

Rich1939 Loc: Pike County Penna.

Feel better?

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

IrfanView does not open raw files. It extracts the jpg image included in raw files and uses that.

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

The question posted is about how Irfanview works, not about Adobe's marketing and sales plans. FWIW, business journals suggest about 15 million are subscribers to the Adobe Creative Cloud!

Rongnongno Loc: FL

As DirtFarmer Said. You should know better than that, Jerry.

Rongnongno Loc: FL

And as usual someone has to gripe about something that is not an issue. Today it is you. Tomorrow?

blackest Loc: Ireland

Theres an old programmers joke about writing a program to make a cup of tea.

Start by taking the cup down from the hook and place it on the counter, fill the kettle ... big long list of instructions ...

Any way so what if the cup is already on the counter? Easy place on the hook and proceed as before. :)

Basically the way many programs work is by using a library that performs a function and gives a specific result and then proceeds from there.

one such library is known as dcraw and that has been used by many programs and i think it takes a raw file and produces a tiff file that is passed to the main program. Raw file formats are reinvented on a regular basis and dcraw has been rewritten many times to deal with new raw file formats. Specific programs have been developed at a much slower rate but essentially as long as the cup starts on the hook they can proceed as before.

Adobe camera raw is fairly similar but the output is changed between major releases, so there has been acr releases for version 1.x of lightroom 2.x 3.x .. 7.x ACR has changed over the years to give new program features. e.g 7 introduced layer effects which previous versions didn't have.

The model is a little different but it likely has its own "dcraw type library" built in. An interesting variation was lightroom 6 standalone and the CC version.
Haze adjustment was introduced into the cc version but not into the standalone. However since Lightroom builds an xmp file with a list of parameters and values, it was possible to create a set of presets with different haze adjustment values which worked with the standalone version, you just didn't have a haze adjustment slider in the ui (user interface).

If you think about it plugins work similarly e.g if you use nik silverefx then lightroom will make a jpeg or tiff file with lightroom adjustments send that to silverefx, silverefx will process that file and at the end overwrite the file it was sent which you can then continue editing in Lightroom.

Anyway simple answer is that infranview has a raw preprocessor that can be updated as new formats of RAW come out, Lightroom does similar with ACR but moves the hook between major versions.

In theory at least if you could create a valid xmp file then you could use the latest version of ACR as part of bridge for free :) i'm not sure how bridge handles virtual copies.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Old mathematician joke:
A mathematician is interviewing for a prestigious job. To make sure he has the right morals, the interviewer gives him the following situation:

"You're late for a meeting, when you come across a burning house, a fire hydrant, and a fire hose lying across the street. What do you do?"

The mathematician responds:

"People's lives are more important than the meeting. I screw the fire hose into the hydrant and put out the fire before coming to the office."

The interviewer is impressed, but asks him a followup question just to make sure:

"You're late for a meeting when you pass a fire hose connected to a hydrant, next to a perfectly safe house. What do you do?"

The mathematician thinks for a moment, then replies:

"I unscrew the fire hose, carry it across the street, and set the house on fire. Then I've reduced it to a problem I've already solved."

R.G. Loc: Scotland

My understanding is that Lightroom needs to have the camera profile of the specific model that generated the raw file. If it doesn't have that profile it won't open the raw file. That's why it won't open raw files generated by very recent models (until it receives the camera profile from Adobe).

blackest Loc: Ireland

It's useful to have the camera and lens profiles but they are not that hard to move to an older version of ACR, I've done it.

most of the download of ACR is profiles ACR is only about 50MB of an 850MB download.

http://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/2014/05/where-does-lightroom-install-camera-and-lens-profiles.html this might help

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

I'm not going to defend Adobe on all their products, but there is a reason for the pricing of Photoshop. I have an acquaintance who works for Adobe. One of the reasons Adobe Photoshop is as expensive as it is is that some of the built-in aspects are licensed from the companies who designed them, color profiles for one. Some of those color profiles are the property of others and Adobe has to license them so the user can use them. If memory serves, Pantone is one of these companies. There are other licensed aspects to the software, as well.
--Bob