How to manually identify a lens used on a camera known to PL4

Ouch. I don’t know what to say. I suppose I’m just feeling overwhelmed by all this. I was just looking for a program where I could do “save as” and select TIFF.

I may have found my answer. I’ll try this tomorrow, not tonight. Check the video:

Seriously, thank you for all the advice, and what is most likely a far better solution than what I’m looking for. I’m stubborn. I have lots of old stuff, and enjoy using it. I’ve abandoned all my editing software except PL4. I can now use my Nikon gear, my Canon gear, my Leica gear (other than the M8), and the only camera left out in the cold is my Fuji X100 with the dreaded X-Trans Sensor. I would have already bought the new one with the rotating back, if it was compatible with PL4. I would like to get all this sorted out before October, when I may be going back to India if it’s safe to do so.

I’ve got all these cameras in my personal Camera Graveyard, and I’m trying to extract my M3 and M8.2 Leica. I’m unlikely to take my Leica M10 to India, as if anything happened to it, I couldn’t afford to replace it.

…OK, back to earth. I’m familiar with Terminal, but I haven’t worked with that kind of utility in ages. I ought to re-learn it. I never heard of DCRAW until just now. Yes, if you provide a copy for an Intel Mac, I’ll give it a try.

You wrote: "*After installation, open Terminal type dcraw and then enter. This will show available options. Check out -4, -T and -h for starters… Use -h to get a half (linear) size image in almost no time and absolutely no demosaicing artifacts. Converting my 60 test images takes 33 seconds on my MacBook Air. Command used: dcraw -h -4 -T .cr2 "

I’d rather not know about available options - I’d rather have one option, to extract a high quality TIFF image from one or more Leica M8.2 DNG file (s). Almost certainly, I will first try this on a single image, and see if it works.

Another option is to throw in the towel, and do my M8 images in Affinity or Lightroom. After an evening with Affinity, I did get it to work, but I wasn’t very excited about it. I tried with Lightroom, which worked perfectly, as expected. I doubt DxO will ever create a file for my Leica M8 - why should they? It’s already ten years out of date, it’s not full frame, lots of people (not me!!!) hated it, and there weren’t that many sold. DxO wants perfection. I don’t need perfection. I just want the DNG image to open in PL4 regardless of any calibration errors, vignetting, and so on. Once it opens, I can do those things manually, I think.

Yes, Preview can convert many raw formats, give it a try and you’ll quickly see if it supports files made by a Leica 8.2. If it does, you’ve got the simplest way to convert. No frills though, you get what Apple has prepared.

As long as you have Lr and Affinity, why not use them? They can do anything, except for the fancy lens and noise corrections of DPL. No need to get involved in DCRAW.

I took one of my DNG photos from my M8.2, opened it in Preview, and Exported it as a TIFF file. Worked effortlessly. Then I accessed the file using PL4, and it opened. I think I can do this from now on, and edit in PL4 after converting my DNG images to TIFF.

I’ve got lots of editors, including LR and Affinity. If possible, I’d like standardize on one editor for the majority of what I create - PL4.

Thanks - very simple. Now I’ve got to pass this on to others, if they’re using macOS and Finder.

I too am a great believer in KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and I think I have said before that, if macOS supplies a solution out of the box, why bother acquiring another app to do the same thing?