A more affordable option is to get a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 for under $100. You might even find it serves you better than CS2!

Try updating your camera raw plugin in Photoshop. The latest is 4.4.1. I'm not sure it works with older versions of Photoshop, but it's worth a try:
Camera RAW plugin

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I recently added a new canon 40D to my camera bag, figuring I would be able to convert its raw files the same way I converted raw files from my 20D and 5D- with photoshop CS2. No dice. Apparently canon has changed the firmware on this camera to version 1.0.8 and now the 40D's raw files are unreadable by older applications, like my version of CS2. Adobe says upgrade to CS3 and all is good, but I find it interesting that canon's $200 rebate on the camera will just cover the adobe upgrade. I'm currently using canon's image browser and it works fine.... But buyer beware. Anyone else run into this problem?

According to the Adobe website, Adobe Camera Raw versions 4.0 and later will not work with PS versions earlier than CS3. I think ACR version 3.7 was the latest update for CS2.

One solution would be to use Canon's EOS Viewer Utility to open the RAW files and convert them to TIFF. Other than that, if you don't want to upgrade to CS3 then David's Elements 6.0 suggestion is probably the only one that will give you access to ACR.

Then I'd spend the $150 to upgrade Photoshop, providing the original poster has a Photoshop serial number and not the suite. If only the suite, you can't upgrade an individual program without having a number for that particular program.

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According to the Adobe website, Adobe Camera Raw versions 4.0 and later will not work with PS versions earlier than CS3. I think ACR version 3.7 was the latest update for CS2.

An upgrade to CS3 certainly would be (was, actually) my choice. Even though my camera wasn't an issue, it was a worthwhile move. CS3 is a major improvement over CS2, especially in ACR. Definitely worth the price.

(Still with us, Elvisdog?)

Thanks for the response. As mentioned in the original post, canon's image browser seems to be all right at this time, though a little clumsy. Still, it is the canon raw format that I'm dealing with so maybe canon software will give a better conversion than a 3rd party's. You can always spend the money... Maybe it's best to use what I already have.
If you're interested, I'll keep you posted.

Bill,

I really hate to see people feel they have to buckle to the pressure by big corporations to upgrade when that same corporation actually has other products that serves just as well. Other than some esoteric and overly sophisticated adjustment tools I don't see any less quality produced by the Elements 6.0 version of Adobe Camera Raw than the CS3 version. And for photographers there are few tools in CS3 really needed that are missing in Elements, in fact there are some things that get the same result that function more efficiently in Elements 6.0. But there is not as much advantage in Elements 6.0 for Windows users compared to the Apple Mac version which offers the same Bridge version as CS3 instead or Organizer.

Just my humble opinion based on having the opportunity to use all of the latest Adobe Photoshop options on both the Mac and Windows.

David,

I suppose it's a matter of habit, now. I started out about eight years ago with Photoshop 5.0LE, which I think was the forerunner of the Elements series. It was great for a digital darkroom beginner like me, but as I became more experienced I began to see it's limitations. So, when the opportunity came to upgrade to 6.0, I jumped at it. Of course, it didn't hurt that I got a substantial price reduction with a student discount (NYIP); but mainly I found that most of my gripes about 5.0LE were resolved. I've gone for every upgrade since then, and the only one that I was disappointed with was the one from 6.0 to 7.0, where I saw very little difference. But, I never looked "back" toward Elements, which I automatically considered to be inferior somehow to the full PS versions. I'm not familiar with Elements 6.0, so I could be wrong about that.....

On the plus side, I'm not one of those who leaps on every upgrade the second it appears. I usually wait for a few months until the dust settles and all the comments, both positive and negative, have been posted here and elsewhere. (That caution also kept me away from Windows Vista, thakfully!)

I think CS3 is by far the best PS version I've worked with. Sure, there are a lot of tools I don't use on a routine basis, but every now and then I play with one or two and learn something from that - mostly, to stay away from them.

But, hey, at least I didn't get sucked into buying CS3 Extended.

Will I go for CS4 when it comes out? Frankly, I don't know. I certainly haven't exhausted all of CS3's capabilities, so any new versions would have to be pretty spectacular to get my attention. Maybe I'm finally getting smart?

Bill,

Because I write about this stuff I have all of it on my systems, and the latest versions (CS3, Elements, LightRoom and Aperture and SiverFast DC Pro Studio). So, I use what I find works best and most efficiently for me. I don't find even shooting Raw a lot of editing color correction adjustment is required, and really none of the advanced production capabilities of CS3 which are actually not needed unless you are doing pre-press to CMYK output.

The engines under the hood for all three Adobe applications CS3, LightRoom and Elements 6.0 in terms of affecting color quality seem to be essentially the same - in other words take a Raw camera file and adjust it to be exported as a TIFF file for printing and I can see no difference in the results.

The interesting thing is that a somewhat simpler single-screen adjustment capability with slider controls in one window at the side of the workspace very much like LightRoom in Elements makes it easier and faster by far to do any color adjustment to files after they have been output by Adobe Camera Raw, or to scan files.

So I seldom use CS3 anymore for the tasks that used to take opening several different dialogue windows with CS3 like Levels, Curves, Hue-Saturation - in Elements 6.0 all of those adjustments can be done from one dialogue window at the side of the workspace, and that saves a lot of time and effort.

I found a program that is open source called Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) try that program which is free to use.

Does it support converting .Raw format digital camera files, and does it have support of color management - I don't think so. You get what you pay for and when you pay nothing you often get nothing worth having.

It may be something for Linux users, which I understand little in the way of photo editing applications have been written to run under Linux other than Gimp.