Lightroom 2.5 and Camera Raw 5.5 released.

After a short beta, Camera Raw 5.5 has been released, along with Lightroom 2.5. This release is basically a camera update, along with one announced bug fix.

Camera additions are:

Nikon D300s

Nikon D3000

Olympus E-P1

Panasonic DMC-FZ35**

Panasonic DMC-GF1

** This Camera has a different name in Europe and Japan and due to metadata differences will not be supported until the next update.
Release Notes:
Camera Raw 5.5 and Lightroom 2.5 include a correction to the demosaic algorithms for Bayer sensor cameras with unequal green response. Olympus, Panasonic and Sony are among the more popular camera manufacturers affected by this change. But the demosaic correction provides only a subtle visual improvement to the processing of those raw files.

Lightroom 2.5 corrects for the following problem in Lightroom 2.4. Lightroom 2.4 on Windows continued to display the import dialog when a memory card was detected regardless of the preference setting "Show import dialog when a memory card is detected."

Download:

Lightroom 2.5: Macintosh | Windows

Adobe Camera Raw 5.5: Macintosh | Windows

Camera Raw 5.2 and DNG Converter Available

Tom Hogarty has announced Camera Raw 5.2, along with letting us know that Lightroom 2.2 will be along in December.
There's a list of new cameras supported including the new Canon 5D MkII. Panansonic files that need to be converted to DNG have a little caveat whereby they increase to 3 times the normal raw file size. This is because the 3 channels (red, green and blue) need to be added in linear form, allowing lens corrections from Panasonic to be included in the file. A future version of the DNG spec will change this back to normal size, allowing lens compensations to be stored in metadata in the DNG file.

(Via Lightroom Journal.)

Updating Lightroom 2.1 to Camera Raw 5.1

As this is in a comment on the last post, I thought I'd mention this:
Lightroom does not use Camera Raw as a plugin. The two applications share the same codebase and are generally released at the same time.
In the About Lightroom box for 2.1, it states Camera Raw 4.6. This merely indicates that the 2 are compatible for use with Edit in Photoshop.

Where people are getting worried is with the fact that they don't know that Camera Raw 4.6 and 5.1 are actually compatible.
Camera Raw 4.6 is the final Camera Raw release for Photoshop CS3. Camera Raw 5.1 updates Camera Raw 5.0 for Photoshop CS4 to be compatible with 4.6. This means that, for now, users of Lightroom 2.1, Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS4 are in sync for Raw processing.
When Lightroom updates to 2.2 and Camera Raw to 2.2 (I suspect this will happen for historical reasons, if nothing else), then Photoshop CS3 users will be left behind. Of course the DNG convertor will be updated and you can still access changes that way.

So don't worry about updating Lightroom 2.1 to Camera Raw 5.1. It already is.

LIghtroom 2.1 and Camera Raw 5.1 announced

Both Lightroom 2.1 and Camera Raw 5.1 will be available later today. Both are free to existing users of Lightroom 2.0 and Camera Raw 5.0 (5.0 shipped with Photoshop CS4). There are 15 new digital cameras supported in Lightroom 2.1 and Camera Raw 5.1 including the Canon EOS 1000D, Canon EOS 50D, Fuji FinePix IS Pro, Kodak EasyShare Z1015 IS, Leaf AFi II 6, Leaf AFi II 7, Leaf Aptus II 6, Leaf Aptus II 7, Nikon D700, Nikon D90, Nikon Coolpix P6000, Olympus SP-565 UZ, Pentax K2000, Sigma DP1, and Sony A900. For CS3 users feeling left out in the cold, these are already supported in Camera Raw 4.6.

CS4 ships

Photoshop CS4 is now available, along with Camera Raw 5.0, a new generation of the Camera Raw pipeline. Version 5.0 doesn't contain all the new camera updates from 4.6, but 5.1 will be released shortly to being them to par.
For Lightroom users, CS4 will automatically replace CS3 in the Edit in Photoshop menu item. To continue to use CS3 from there, you can select it as an external editor (note that an intermediate file is created with external editors).

For more info see Lightroom Journal