Over on the Lightroom Journal, PM Tom Hogarty reports that the recently posted DNG Converter 6.4 will be the last to support PowerPC Macs.
As Tom explains, although Photoshop CS5 & Lightroom 3, following Apple’s lead with Snow Leopard, no longer support PPC, the team has maintained support in the DNG Converter. That way customers who couldn’t upgrade to CS5/LR3 could convert their files to be backward compatible.
Supporting aging systems comes at the expense of enhancing the apps for the future, and the overlap between people using the very latest, high-res SLRs together with 5+ year-old Macs has gotten small. Thus 6.4 will be the last PPC-compatible release of the converter.
Just to be clear, DNG files themselves are unaffected, so in the future you could use an Intel-based Mac (or a PC) to convert proprietary formats for use with PPC-based Macs.
I understand the general necessity of such decisions, but I support digital photo labs in several schools, colleges, and arts organizations and this decision will hurt the most fragile of these institutions. The schools and colleges will probably be able to buck up and find the money for more recent hardware. The not-for-profit arts organizations may well not be able to find the money or donations to replace their PowerMac G5s with iMacs. The PowerPC to Intel transition helped get some nice G5 hardware into these organizations. Is there any way that we could get another couple of years of DNG Converter support? I mean CS6 isn’t even out yet. Here are two orgs that will be affected: burlingtoncityarts.com and chaffeeartcenter.org
You could try dcraw:
http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/
It’s a command line utility, but there are GUI wrappers to it.
It runs on anything that can compile C, opens almost every raw ever shipped and can output both 16bit linear TIF and JPEG. You can get pretty good demosaicing and highlight recovery results if you learn to master it.