From the course: Photoshop: Tips and Quick Fixes

I can't open a raw file...now what? - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop: Tips and Quick Fixes

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I can't open a raw file...now what?

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- Now, if you try to open up an image and it won't open up into your version of Photoshop, it might be that you're using a camera that's too new for your particular version. Adobe does update each version of Photoshop to support new cameras but at a certain point, they cut that off and roll the updates onto the next version. My suggestion is if you can, update using Adobe Creative Cloud to the latest version of Photoshop and it should help. But if not, you could take advantage of a utility that will convert them to a DNG file. Just do a web search for Adobe Digital Negative Converter. And this will give you a utility that you can download. Pull down the file, and install it on your system. Once you've done so, you'll have a utility called Adobe DNG Converter. Now, place the images into a folder that you want to convert. Just select the folder like so. Then, tell it where to store it. You could put them in the same location or a new location. Tell it if you want to rename the files. This allows you to apply a new name for a client for example. Then take a look at your preferences. If you click this, you'll see some options. This allows you to specify which version of Camera RAW you're using. So if you're using an older version of Photoshop for example, you can roll backwards. You can also decide to embed a preview. This will make it easier when browsing in Bridge or Lightroom to see the image. You can decide if you want to change the size of the image, preserving the pixel count or up-resing or down-resing. And for safety, although it makes a much bigger file, you can embed the original RAW file inside. Since I'm going to save the RAW file, I won't worry about this option. When I click OK, it will analyze those. All we have to do is click Convert and it will go through that folder and turn these each into new DNG files. You'll see here that they go one at a time but they then get caught up pretty quickly and we can click OK. Let's go ahead and quit and if we take a look at that folder, you'll see that DNG files have been created. And they're typically very similar in file size to the ones that were there originally. So in this case now, these files are ready to open. And if we take that into Photoshop, you'll see that the DNG file comes in just fine. Plus as an added benefit, instead of using Sidecar files, all of the settings that you apply are going to be stored inside this DNG file. So when I store this by clicking Done, those settings are ready to use the next time.

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