Using the Canon T1i/500D with Photoshop Elements

If you have a Canon T1i/500D you have a lovely camera, but it gets less lovely if you want to import the raw image files it produces into your copy of Photoshop Elements. The problem is that the camera has a new sensor design, which means that the CR2 files that it produces are not compatible with the Raw importer that Adobe supply.

They have recently released a Release Candidate for version 5.4 of the filter, but rather annoyingly they’ve only supplied the installer for the big, expensive, versions of Photoshop. Which I don’t have.

Turns out though, that you can extract the required filter from the distribution that they do send out, and it works a treat.

• Go to http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Camera_Raw_5.4 and download the plug-in from the link.
• Open the zip file and find your way to:

cameraraw_5-4_rc_win_052109.zip\extensions\AdobeCameraRaw5.0All-190509032617\Assets

• Copy the file 1003 onto your desktop from this directory in the archive, and then rename it to camera.raw.8bi. This is the new version of the filter.
• On your computer, find your way to:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0\Plug-Ins\File Formats

• If you are using Photoshop Elements 6.0 there is a directory in an analogous place for that.
• Move your new file into this directory, overwriting the existing camera.raw file (you might want to make a copy of this file first, in case there are any problems later)
• Now you can open the raw files.

Updating your raw importer is actually a good idea whatever kind of camera you have. Adobe keep adding new features to this tool.

Comments

[TedR]

Thanks for the tip, I'll try it out tonight. I rented a T1i this week and was quite puzzled and alarmed, at first, that Elements told it could not import my RAW files and/or they were corrupted. Glad to know it is a relatively simple fix, thanks for posting it.

[Rob]

The new drivers are now out on the Adobe site, if you follow the link in my post you will get to the download site for them from Adobe. They seem to work fine (in fact they have some really useful new sliders that do lovely things to your images - I particularly like the Vibraance and Clarity ones).