[pentax_amateur]

My Lightroom 4 displays "Unknown" for the lens, but does display focal distance and f-value correctly. This only happens with DA16-85 and DA55-300. The older FA lenses are displayed correctly. I know I have an older Lightroom, but maybe someone knows the fix. Updating Lightroom says "Lightroom is up to date".

[Adam]

Lens identification depends entirely on the software, so in this case LR 4 is just too old to recognize the newer lenses. If you upgrade to CC, all should be well.

Alternatively, you can use an external program such as exiftool to identify the lens and then write that metadata back into the file as a text comment.

[boriscleto]

LensTagger – Exiftool Lightroom Plugin

[pentax_amateur]

Thank you for the plugin!
I went through my shots and discovered that some of them are tagged appropriately with the lens name. It looks like this worked fine when I was shooting in PEF (and then converted PEF to DNG with Adobe converter; the converted DNG displays the lens), but once I switched to in-camera DNG the lens model stopped being displayed in Lightroom (older lenses are still recorded in DNG). Ironically, I switched to DNG because my Lightroom was not able to read PEFs from KP (even though it has no problem reading PEFs from older cameras).

[AfterPentax Mark II]

Thank you for the plugin!
I went through my shots and discovered that some of them are tagged appropriately with the lens name. It looks like this worked fine when I was shooting in PEF (and then converted PEF to DNG with Adobe converter; the converted DNG displays the lens), but once I switched to in-camera DNG the lens model stopped being displayed in Lightroom (older lenses are still recorded in DNG). Ironically, I switched to DNG because my Lightroom was not able to read PEFs from KP (even though it has no problem reading PEFs from older cameras).

You could try to download the latest appropriate camera-raw that works with Lightroom 4 and install the plug-in. PEF's include the camera model and as with all non-DNG raws only the latest Lightroom or Photoshop edition includes the newer camera models. When using DNG the newer lenses are not recognized also has to do with the camera-raw plug-in. Adobe just wants you to buy a new version of your PP program.

[stevebrot]

Thank you for the plugin!
I went through my shots and discovered that some of them are tagged appropriately with the lens name. It looks like this worked fine when I was shooting in PEF (and then converted PEF to DNG with Adobe converter; the converted DNG displays the lens), but once I switched to in-camera DNG the lens model stopped being displayed in Lightroom (older lenses are still recorded in DNG). Ironically, I switched to DNG because my Lightroom was not able to read PEFs from KP (even though it has no problem reading PEFs from older cameras).

This all sounds appropriate. Here are some bullet points for the basic rules:

• The camera name is written to standard EXIF by the camera for PEF, DNG, and in-camera JPEG.
• Lightroom's (LR) camera support for proprietary formats like PEF is linked to Lightroom version and version 4.x is too old for the KP.
• The reason why older versions of LR cannot read PEF from newer cameras is because of lack of camera profile(s) to apply on import.
• All Pentax DNG files contain an embedded camera profile supplied by the Pentax such that most (all?) versions of LR can technically support all Pentax DNG to the limit of shared features of camera and LR version. The embedded profile has proven adequate for many users here at Pentax Forums.
• Supported cameras in LR have at least an "Adobe Standard" profile specific to their camera and sometimes other profiles.
• Lens model identification for Pentax cameras is provided by a coded id and is included in the makernotes section of the EXIF. The lens maker and model name are not stored. As a result, tools such as LR rely on a lookup table matching id code to name for display purposes and to automatically match lens to available profile.
• In general, display of lens name is limited to those known by the LR version.
• If the lens is known to LR, it will write the lens name to the EXIF on export to JPEG or TIFF.
• An up-to-date version of the Adobe DNG converter includes the lookup table for lens names as well as cameras and will write the lens name into the standard EXIF as part of the conversion.
• As noted above, there are third-party tools capable of writing lens information into the standard EXIF. I use a combination of ExifTool and Steve Harvey's ExifToolGUI to manage my many unsupported lenses.

Steve