Adobe Update Silliness Keeps On Keeping On

Early this week, Adobe caused a stir by announcing an update to its Camera Raw plugin, version 4.1, for Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop Elements 4.01. The press release was widely reproduced on various Internet news sites. (For those not infected with the "digital hub" bug, the Camera Raw plugin is what allows these applications to open files in the digital camera-native RAW format, which contains the most information and is thus best for semi-serious photography.) The stir wasn't the content of the announcement, but that the announcement itself quickly proved to be a lie: there was no such update. Adobe had gotten a little ahead of itself.

A couple of days later, the update did finally appear at Adobe's site. The requirements for the update are clearly stated: it "is not compatible with versions of Photoshop earlier than Photoshop CS3 or versions of Photoshop Elements earlier than Photoshop Elements 4.0 for Macintosh". "No problem," thinks the foolish customer who has paid for Photoshop Elements 4.0; "I've got Photoshop Elements 4.0, so that update is for me." And so, our foolish customer proceeds to download and install the update. The installation procedure is rather touchy - the plugin has to be put, manually, into /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-Ins/CS2/File Formats. (Doing this is not made any easier by the fact that Adobe, on the Web page cited above, misstates this location by omitting the initial slash.) But the foolish customer does it anyway.

The F.C. then starts up Photoshop Elements 4.0, attempts to open a RAW file from his camera, and... Nothing. The program has no idea what kind of file this is. No Camera Raw listing appears in the File Type popup menu in the Open dialog. When the user tries to open the file, a dialog appears asking for a description of the file, including information about its size. "But that," thinks the F.C., "is exactly what you're supposed to know!"

But wait - there's more. It turns out that there was a kerfuffle over this very same issue earlier this year, when Adobe released version 4.0 of the same Camera Raw plugin. On the Web page for that version, the print, though fine, was rather startling: "Note," it says: "The Camera Raw 4.0 plug-in requires Photoshop Elements 4.01 on Mac in order to load successfully." There's just one problem. There is no Photoshop Elements 4.01. The current and only version of Photoshop Elements is 4.0.

However, Adobe is quite insistent on this point, and indeed, subsequently promulgated a Knowledge Base article apparently admitting that the entire thing had just been a mistake: "Photoshop Camera Raw 4.0," the title of the article announces, "does not work [with] Photoshop Elements 4.0 on Mac OS." Oh, really? No indeed, continues the article: "The Photoshop Elements 4.0.1 update will be available for download in May 2007. This update will allow you to use Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 4.0."

Adobe? Hello?? May is over. You've now put out a second update to the Camera Raw plugin that doesn't work with Photoshop Elements 4.0, even though your Web pages claim that it does. One can only guess that perhaps this is because the plugin requires the mythical Photoshop Elements 4.01 update. What in blue-eyed tunket is going on here? Is this just more Adobe bungling, or are they deliberately trying to shortchange Photoshop Elements customers, preventing them from opening RAW files from the newest cameras, cutting them off from the new features of the latest version of the Camera Raw plugin, forcing them to pay the big bucks to upgrade to Photoshop CS3?

Oh, and I forgot to mention: A second version version of the Camera Raw update, together with the update to Adobe's DNG Converter, supposedly available from this Web page, refuses to let itself be downloaded at all.

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