Lightroom 3 doesn't recognise Nikon Lenses, until you tell it Nikon is Manufacturer

Question

Does anyone know why / if there is a fix for this problem. I shoot a Nikon D3S/D3X. Lightroom won't recognise my lenses in the Lens Correction area of Develop. It only recognises them after I put in Nikon as the manufacturer.
Surely the Lightroom software is clever enough to recognise Nikon cameras?
For info am running the 64bit version of Lightroom on a Windows 7 64 bit system.

Answer 1

thorpearch1 wrote:
Does anyone know why / if there is a fix for this problem. I shoot a Nikon D3S/D3X. Lightroom won't recognise my lenses in the Lens Correction area of Develop. It only recognises them after I put in Nikon as the manufacturer.
Surely the Lightroom software is clever enough to recognise Nikon cameras?
Oh, it's plenty clever. The problem is that Nikon is also very clever, and cleverness sometimes ends up creating problems.
The fundamental problem is that not all vendors place metadata like the make in the expected places in the image file, so Lr has to resort to many tricks for getting this information reliably. If it cannot reliably get the info, it opts to not guess, as this would be much worse behaviour.
I suspect the "maker notes" metadata in the files made by this camera body aren't quite expected, so once you confirm it is a Nikon, then it can figure out the rest. You can confirm this by supplying an example image by yousendit and others can inspect the metadata to see how it is being stored.
One workaround is to massage these files with a metadata tool to edit the make information into the expected locations prior to importing.
You may also want to raise this with Adobe support, as they might be able to tweak the cleverness to take into consideration Nikon's cleverness.