Ricoh adds free Lightroom tethered capture for Pentax 645Z DSLR
posted Thursday, December 10, 2015 at 6:54 PM EDT
If you're shooting the Pentax 645Z in a studio environment -- something we'd imagine is true of more than a few 645Z owners thanks to the medium-format camera's spectacular resolution -- then we have good news for you today. Pentax brand owner Ricoh has just released a brand-new tethered capture plugin for Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom!
Of course, tethered capture was already possible with the Pentax 645Z courtesy of Ricoh's Image Transmitter 2 application, but there were two provisos in its use. Firstly, Image Transmitter 2 isn't bundled with the camera, but rather sold separately for around US$200. While that's likely relatively affordable for anyone with deep-enough pockets to afford the 645Z and a few medium-format lenses in the first place, using Image Transmitter 2 also required that you learn to use another app and integrate it into your workflow, dropping files in a directory for transfer to another app.
And for the photographers using the 645Z, that app was quite likely Lightroom in the first place, making Image Transmitter 2 a slightly clumsy workaround when compared to the ease of Lightroom's own tethering solution. Now, the Pentax Tethered Capture Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is here, and it resolves those concerns. For one thing, it's provided completely free of charge. Perhaps more importantly, though, it lets you import your raw photos directly from the tethered camera into Lightroom in the standard DNG format.
And that's not all, either. Once photos have been imported, Lightroom Mobile users can immediately view them, offer comment and make adjustments remotely from any internet-connected, Lightroom Mobile-compatible device. For studio photographers, that could be a pretty handy capability, allowing clients to offer feedback straight away as you're shooting.
Available immediately, the Pentax Tethered Capture Plug-in can be downloaded from the company's global website. Windows users will want to nab the platform-specific version here, while Mac users can find a version for their own platform here. Your Pentax 645Z will need to be updated to one of the most recent firmware revisions (version 1.21 or 1.22 as of this writing). Unfortunately, owners of the Pentax 645D or the company's APS-C DSLRs can't use the plug-in, as it's compatible only with the 645Z at this time.