Adobe Camera Raw - The camera raw functionality in Adobe Photoshop software provides fast and easy access within Photoshop to the "raw" image formats produced by many leading professional and midrange digital cameras. By working with these "digital negatives," you can achieve the results you want with greater artistic control and flexibility while still maintaining the original "raw" files.
The Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in became the latest must-have tool for professional photographers when it was released in February 2003. This powerful plug-in has been updated to support more cameras and include more features, and is available as part of Adobe Photoshop CS3. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is also available and is built upon the same powerful raw processing technology that is available in the camera raw plug-in.
The Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in (2.3 or higher) now also supports raw files in the DNG format. Find out more about the benefits of the Digital Negative, a publicly documented raw file format recently announced by Adobe.