As hard as Adobe works to keep up, when you buy a newly released camera, it may be quite a while before there is a new Lightroom release to support it.  In the meantime, Lightroom will not recognize your camera raw files.   And if you haven’t upgraded from Lightroom 1 or 2, you will never get direct support for newer cameras.  The same issues occur with Camera Raw and Photoshop.

So what do you do if you have a new camera, or an older version of Lightroom or Photoshop?  Fortunately there is a free solution — it involves converting your raw files to Adobe’s DNG format first.

Jeff Tranberry from Adobe has written a post on converting to DNG for these purposes.  He includes a link to a Julianne Kost video on the advantages of DNG and how to incorporate DNG into your workflow. 

Read Jeff’s article, and then come back and read more here!