The 5D mark 3 will be the first time I’ve ever pre-ordered a camera, and along with that I’m finding a number of somewhat amusing and frustrating teething issues that come with the territory. Among the nagging issues is the lack of a simultaneously released battery grip (supposedly won’t be available until the end of next month), and the lack of a Really Right Stuff L-plate for said grip (which wouldn’t be useful even if it was available now). However, the single most frustrating bit is the lack of native import support in Lightroom 4, which was just released, and supports the yet unreleased EOS 1D X.

Fortunately there is a annoying all be it workable workaround, the Adobe Camera RAW/DNG Converter 6.7 release-candidate. I have no idea why, but LR4 will load and render 5D mark III images just fine, if you’ve already converted them to DNG with a DNG converter that supports them.

What you’ll need is:

1. Download the Adobe DNG converter for Camera RAW 6.7 from the Adobe Labs site.
2. Install it.
3. Use the Adobe DNG converter to download your cards to a temporary folder
4. Import the DNGs from the temp folder to your library in Lightroom.

I’d suggest keeping the original RAWs, if DNGs aren’t what you normally use, though you’ll have to import and sync them manually.

Hopefully, Adobe will have a point release for Lightroom 4 that supports the 5D mark 3 sooner rather than later, and this won’t be anything more than a slight inconvenience for a couple of days or a week or two.