First Sony RX1 RAW Conversions using ACR

Adobe Camera RAW 7.3 and Lightroom 4.3 just arrived today with support for RAW files from the Sony RX-1. Just in the nick of time, really. I’ve been itching to play with the RAW files and Sony’s converter is an exercise in misery. As a quick test, here are three of the photographs I showed in my previous post for which I had the camera save both RAW and JPEG files. The RAW files have been processed through Lightroom with the sort of typical basic white balance, exposure, highlights, and shadows adjustments that I normally do in a half-minute of quick processing.

To my eye, the RAW files show the kind of extra dynamic range and detail that you’d expect there to be between post-processing through a RAW converter like Adobe Camera RAW and using the in-camera JPEG engine. There’s more detail, a lot more range, and of course a lot more latitude for color correction—just as you’d expect. In fact, so far that’s the news. There’s nothing unexpected here. The RAW files, for lack of a better word, feel great in Lightroom and I’m quite pleased with what I see so far.