The first half of this week's column discusses Raw as a full-fledged format; the second half examines Mac screen rotation in more detail than last week.

In my review of the Adobe CS2 Raw Converter, I missed the forest for the trees. I listed the features—and didn't notice how amazing Adobe Camera Raw's auto-everything is and what the consequences might be.

As indicated in my review, ACR 3.0 displays the Raw files as "Auto" settings, with exposure compensation, white balance and contrast automatically dialed in.

The settings that ACR 3.0 chooses aren't necessarily perfect; however, I've put more than 400 Raw images through ACR 3.0 so far, and the initial settings would certainly give prints that were quite usable. In fact, the default results often look much better than my in-camera JPEGs.

The fact that ACR is better than my camera at guessing white balance is amazing, considering that I am using a high-end Canon 1DsII. Even more surprising is how good it is at effecting an exposure compensation reasonably similar to the one I'd make.

My exposure and white balance shouldn't be off, but still, it's ACR 3 that's saving the shots, automatically!

So, I must say that Adobe has done something astounding with ACR 3.0: It has transformed the Raw format into something that you could conceivably give to your local minilab to print automatically—today!

Now, this is a pretty convincing demonstration that DNG (Digital Negative)—Adobe's unified Raw—can be as much a useful imaging format as JPEG or TIFF. It's literally a digital replacement of the negative you give the lab to print.

Click here to read more about Adobe's DNG specification.

Indeed, having seen firsthand how effective an automated conversion can be, I can think of only two objections to Raw or DNG as a general file format from the technical point of view.

First, it's slow to decode. However, camera CPUs are already powerful enough to handle this task, as they generate JPEGs. A fast computer handles the task in a few seconds today—probably already fast enough for a minilab's production line. I don't think that raw CPU power will hold up the adoption of Raw as a full-fledged format for very long.

Second, it needs "judgmental" automatic processing. This is more of a problem for Adobe: Competitors might arise who use their own color skills in interpreting the images in ways consumers prefer. It is likely that Kodak and Fuji still know a thing or two about providing consumers with pleasing imagery.

Clearly, if I could get decent prints by punching "Print" in PS with few adjustments, and my local Frontier minilab could use Photoshop CS2 today to print Raw files from their PCs with minimal human intervention, then Adobe could also create a future embedded version—call it RawScript—to drive desktop printers.

As I just learned from my own shoots, Adobe's automated Raw adjustment technology is already better than printing from a camera via JPEG. There's more data in the Raw, and ACR 3.0 gets the adjustments right.

Of course, there are manifold political considerations: Camera manufacturers may be leery of losing control of their file formats. We can see how Nikon feels about openness by the encrypted white balance in the D2X NEF files.

At the time of this writing, the encryption of the information in the Nikon NEFs has been broken, but Adobe is still afraid of coming near it—understandably, for Adobe is the company that invoked the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) itself for the first time since it was passed as law, and thereby treated Russian programmer Dimitry Sklyarov to a long Californian holiday at U.S. taxpayers' expense.

Now, cynics in Europe or Japan may unkindly say that Adobe can expect better treatment from U.S. law than a Russian nobody, not least because it has access to a better class of lawyer. At the very least, Adobe employees are not going to get carted off to jail after a demo of CS2 reading Nikon files.

Still, we might see a lot of encrypted Raw files soon, as camera manufacturers realize that the DCMA could be one of the only obstacles standing between them and a future in which Adobe makes the code inside every "prosumer" photo-printing device.

A future in which Japanese corporations sell all the hardware and Adobe makes all the software and all the profit.

There's already one company that's pulled that trick; somehow I don't think a second one managing it is likely.

Next Page: Pivoting monitor support will arrive with Tiger.