Recently I acquired a new Canon 7D camera from BJ Photo in Waterloo and I’ve used it in two projects just in the last two weeks. Fantastic images, superb auto-focus, substantially improved image quality compared to my (now supposedly ancient) Rebel XT. Here is one example: Canon 7D camera, Canon 24-105mm IS L lens at 73mm, f/8.0 at 1/250 sec.
One problem: the Canon 7D is so new that my recently-purchased copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0 doesn’t recognize the new Canon 7D raw format.
Thankfully, on 19 November Adobe released a beta version of Adobe Camera Raw 5.6, which offers support for the Canon 7D raw files. The new Camera Raw 5.6 is available as a .zip file and is meant to be installed into a copy of Photoshop CS4. Since I have Elements 8.0 the installation is manual. This forum post offered the necessary steps for 64-bit versions of Elements. Since I’m using Windows XP 32-bit, only the first 3 steps outlined in that post are necessary. After restarting Elements 8.0, the software appears to work flawlessly and the results are excellent.