When I started using Lightroom, I thought it would be very handy to be able to import all my Camera Raw presets into the developing room. Afterall, I’ve spent the past couple of years developing them and they’re the same options as far as I could see. Wrong.

I thought it would be a matter of copy and pasting the files from the Camera Raw folder into the Lightroom one. Which is what I initially tried. It didn’t work. So I saved a setting from Lightroom, had a look back in the folder and it has some strange .LRTEMPLATE file to store the settings.

Not sure who thought that was a good idea. It’s probably just the same Camera Raw .XMP file but with some changes to make .XMP unreadable.

As far as I can tell, the following is the only way to import the Camera Raw settings into Lightroom (at the time of writing).

Essentially, we need to get a bunch of photos, apply one preset to each photo, click done to save the XMP sidecar file, then open those files with Lightroom, go to Develop on each one (it will read the sidecar files with your Camera Raw settings) and click the plus sign to save as a Lightroom preset.

It shouldn’t take very long, depending on the number of presets you have. Personally, I had about 25 Camera Raw presets that I use and tweak further for my photos. I’m not sure if that’s a lot or not. Took me about 10 minutes to go through them all and make the Lightroom files.

Step by step

Open Photoshop and import a Raw photo, then go and check to see how many preset files you have. You’ll need to open the same number of files to apply one preset to each.

Cancel Camera Raw and go and select the number of raw files you need. In my case it was about 25. Import them into Camera Raw (don’t worry – we’re not going to be opening them all with Photoshop)

Now select the first photo, then go to the presets tab and select the first preset. Then select the second photo, apply second preset and so on, until you have one preset for each photo. Shouldn’t take too long.

When you’re done, press the Done button – not the okay button which will open all the photos in Photoshop (which, if you have a fairly slow computer like mine, could take ages). Pressing the Done button simply writes the sidecar file with the settings.

Close Photoshop and open Lightroom. Go to the folder where those Raw files and sidecar files are saved. Select the first photo and Press D to go to the develop section.

The photo should look pretty much the same as in Camera Raw (if it doesn’t, wait a few seconds for Lightroom to read the sidecar file and apply the settings).

Now click on the little plus sign to save a preset. It’s not really well labeled. I thought the plus sign would grow and shrink that palette when i first saw it.

Give it a name or a number – done. Your first preset has been created. Now, press the right arrow key to move to the next photo. Again, click the plus sign, name it, and so on through the folder.

Before too long you should have all the presets saved into Lightroom’s own strange little .LRTEMPLATE preset files.

As you can see in the image above, I can now get RAW photos from my Canon IXUS 70! Actually that’s not clear at all from the image above, but that’s what it is – RAW DNG photos produced by my little IXUS.

How? By using the latest version open source firmware, Canon Hacker’s Development Kit, or CHDK. As the name implies, it’s only for Canon cameras and only for those with DIGIC II or DIGIC III firmware.

I remember hearing about this last year when I had my IXUS 55. Back then the IXUS line of cameras wasn’t supported, so I didn’t pay much attention and soon forgot about it. But the other day it was posted on Lifehacker so I had another look.

Turns out they’ve developed the firmware a lot and it’s (pretty much) completely safe to use and doesn’t modify the camera at all. You just load it on to an SD card then when it starts up, tell the camera to use the firmware on the card and it re-boots with a bunch of new features.

From the Wired How-To Wiki:

Digital cameras have powers beyond what is immediately available to the user. On a standard Canon, for example, the fastest shutter speed option offered is 1/1,600 second, but the hardware can handle much more than that — up to 1/60,000 of a second… It unleashes new features including RAW file format, live histogram display, a battery readout, and the ability to run scripted actions on a camera.

When I was looking for a replacement for my IXUS 55, having the ability to shoot RAW was one of the functions I would have liked. All the point a shoot cameras with that ability were quite expensive though, so I just went with the IXUS 70 (mostly for it’s looks and time-lapse movie function, and the IXUS 55 had been good to me).

Shooting RAW is the main feature that I like. Having a decent battery read out is good too, as well as an always-on clock, a built in calendar, text reader and this CHDK firmware also adds a couple of games (Sokoban and Reversi).

I don’t particularly care about the faster/slower shutter speeds and higher ISO (anything above 200 ISO is already too noisy!) and some of the other features, but it’s nice to know they’re there.

If your model is on the list of supported cameras, I’d highly recommend giving this custom firmware a try.