Help required opening CR2 RAW files

[200bhp]

A few months ago my brother-in-law took a number of family photographs on his Canon DSLR, shot in RAW. However, since then, for one reason or another he's been unable to convert them to JPEG for everyone else to see.

I have a copy of them on my hard drive, and Have Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Bridge installed (both genuine copies). I can browse the folders in Windows Vista and see the thumbnails but I cant open the files in either Bridge or PS.

Is there a free utility (or at least one with a 30 day free trial) which I can use to convert the files into JPEG?

Its a fairly new Canon DSLR, which cost him about £600 including the kit lens - No idea what the model number is.

Sadly, if we wait for my brother-in-law to do it, we'll be here for years!

[DibblyDobbler]

You should be able to do it with a trial of the latest version of Photoshop Elements (v10) I think. The more recent cameras have slightly different RAW format files so you need to keep your software up to date or you can't convert them

[Simpo Two]

I'd have thought all new Canon DSLRs would come with some free basic software to allow this. Any disks in the box?

[crmcatee]

Wasn't there a Photoshop update that allowed CR2 files to be loaded directly - have you tried doing the update ?

[binliner]

You probably need the latest version of Adobe Camera Raw if it's a new camera... CS3 isn't upgradeable to the latest but the camera would have come with Canon DPP software on a CD that will open it

[Crafty_]

I think gimp (have fun googling that ) will do what you want or d/l a trial copy of lightroom.

[MartinP]

There is piece of free software you can download from Adobe that will convert RAW files to dng format (Adobe's RAW equivalent). You can batch convert all of the images using that and then you'll be able to open them with your CS3 software.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp...

[Killwilly]

Faststone is also a free programme which will open and process CR2 RAW files. It's also very underrated, I use it a lot.


http://faststone.org/

[200bhp]

MartinP said:

There is piece of free software you can download from Adobe that will convert RAW files to dng format (Adobe's RAW equivalent). You can batch convert all of the images using that and then you'll be able to open them with your CS3 software.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp...

Thanks for all the replies and help on this one guys. I used the method above to convert them to DNG and then did a batch conversion to JPG in CS3