Finding and using ACR 5.x presets

[Mike Arst]

A search here hasn't located what I'm after. If it turns out that similar questions have been asked and answered a gazillion times, my apologies (and I'd be much obliged for a link to one of the threads in question here).

A friend of mine, using CS4 and the almost-latest version of Camera RAW, finds quite a few camera-specific presets in ACR's Presets panel, including those for his camera. I recently updated CS2 to CS4 and have been unable to find any of these presets when I use ACR. Instead, I see only two presets, one of which I created myself a long time ago when I used a much earlier version of ACR, and one created just recently.

So I've been searching high and low on the drive where CS4 is installed, to locate files that might conceivably be ACR presets. So far I've found some buried deep within C:\Documents And Settings -- files with the extension .DCP and with October, 2008 modification dates. Whether or not those are supposed to be usable with Camera Raw 5.6, they aren't showing up in the Presets panel. Only the two referred to above appear in that panel (both of those, which I have located on the hard drive, have the extension .XMP, not .DCP).

If camera-specific presets usable with ACR weren't part of my CS4 upgrade after all, where might I download them, and what is the right location on the hard drive for them so that ACR will "see" them? (I'm interested mainly in Nikon D3/D3s/D700 presets.)

Thanks in advance...

[madmanchan]

Hi Mike,

The files with the .dcp extension are camera color profiles, not presets. When installed appropriately (see below), they show up in the Camera Calibration pane, not the Presets pane.

As for presets themselves, Camera Raw does not ship with presets. Is it possible that your friend downloaded / created a bunch of presets on his own? Or is your friend referring to color profiles, instead of presets?

(I can understand the potential confusion here, because in a way, a color profile is basically a preset ... at least when it comes to color & tonality.)

Eric

(*)  See here for install location: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_P...AQ#WhereInstall

[Mike Arst]

Eric,

Thanks (including for the link to the 'where to install' information).

On reading your message I realized that either my friend was using the wrong term or -- just as likely if not more likely -- I "mis-heard" the term he was using. I was thrown off a bit because the color profiles, though they contain my camera's name in the files' names on disk, don't display that name in the drop-down menu for color profiles.

A perhaps monumentally stupid :) additional question occurred to me. I have been using Lightroom and some other RAW converters for several years and hadn't been paying any attention to ACR until recently So there's a lot about it that I've forgotten -- including: what is ACR? If memory serves (sometimes it doesn't :) at one time it was a Photoshop plug-in (.8BF) file, was it not? I went on a search for filenames such as "*raw*8bf" or even "*raw*exe" -- and nothing turned up. Is ACR a set of libraries -- DLLs or the like? Or code that's now hard-wired into Bridge itself? The reason this occurred to me is that I'm wondering if the thing can be launched directly from the command prompt and "fed" a RAW file's name directly -- without the need to launch CS4 or Bridge first.

Thanks,
Mike

Hi Mike,

The files with the .dcp extension are camera color profiles, not presets. When installed appropriately (see below), they show up in the Camera Calibration pane, not the Presets pane.

As for presets themselves, Camera Raw does not ship with presets. Is it possible that your friend downloaded / created a bunch of presets on his own? Or is your friend referring to color profiles, instead of presets?

(I can understand the potential confusion here, because in a way, a color profile is basically a preset ... at least when it comes to color & tonality.)

Eric

(*)  See here for install location: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/DNG_P...AQ#WhereInstall

[Schewe]

ACR = Adobe Camera Raw...it's a plug-in. The actual installed name of the plug-in should be CameraRaw with the Windows plug-in extension. The exact install location depends on your OS...

[Peter_DL]

[!--quoteo(post=0:date=:name=Mike Arst)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE (Mike Arst)[div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--][/quote]
ACR allows you to open Raw files from PS as well as from Bridge.

On my Windows Vista machine the 8BI ACR plug-in is located here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\CS4\File Formats
or for 64 bit: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\CS4\File Formats

The xmp Presets are found here:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\Settings


Peter

--

[Mike Arst]

ACR = Adobe Camera Raw...it's a plug-in. The actual installed name of the plug-in should be CameraRaw with the Windows plug-in extension. The exact install location depends on your OS...

Yep, and finally found it. Slight variation on the theme: there's a space in the name, and the extension is now .8BI rather than the older .8BF. So I'd been hunting for the wrong extension.

[Mike Arst]

ACR allows you to open Raw files from PS as well as from Bridge.

Yep, and I was just being lazy there, thinking of possibly launching it via the command line and giving it a .NEF file's name to open immediately. I had the feeling that wasn't going to work out. Well, no matter. Opening from Bridge works just fine, as long as it doesn't crash on me. Which it likes to do, sometimes quite catastrophically. Keeps a person young -- well, when it isn't aging him prematurely. :-)