Did you know that 40% of Lightroom users convert their proprietary raw files to the open DNG standard upon import? That finding, plus other interesting news bits (e.g. Noritsu Koki enabling raw printing at retail via DNG) are covered in Lightroom PM Tom Hogarty’s recent blog post. Adobe hasn’t made a lot of noise about the format lately, but it’s great to see it gaining traction and helping to address some real-world problems.
It’s the first thing I do when importing images into Lightroom.
Thanks to this post I converted all my raws to dng, freed about 8 gigs.
Thanks! 🙂
[Awesome! I’m such a geek that at my wedding I had the photog (a friend of ours) dumping her cards straight to my PowerBook and running the images through the DNG Converter (Win, Mac). The simple process knocked about 1.5 gigs off the 7GB total she’d shot. –J.]
For interest, how was that figure of 40% identified?
I don’t dispute it: a year ago, I wrote on my website that Lightroom was important to DNG because “… it makes easy-use of DNG credible and available to a much wider user-base. In future, many photographers will identify Lightroom as their introduction to a DNG-based workflow”.
http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/dng/history.htm
But, while I have seen various figures quoted for the take-up of DNG, I have never managed to get hold of the original reports from which the figures have been taken. (It is then hard to argue with people who claim that there will never be serious take-up of DNG).
ps: Any news of the next version of the specification?
[Let me ping Tom in case he can address these questions. –J.]
Barry, the figure is based on an August 2007 survey of registered North American Lightroom customers. The survey is designed and sponsored by Adobe to obtain quantitative and qualitative information about customer satisfaction and feature usage.
We are working on an updated version of the DNG specification but I don’t have any details to share quite yet. -TH
[Thanks for the info, Tom. –J.]
That’s great news but unfortunately for Nikon RAW shooters who use custom white balance, that information is lost upon the conversion to DNG.
This is because Nikon decided to encrypt the white balance data inside the NEF file. It’s a way for Nikon to force you to use Capture NX.
For anybody who is interested regarding this, check out the link below on what Thomas Knoll has to say about it:
http://photoshopnews.com/?p=226
DNG saved my life!
Ok, not directly, but about 6 months ago I was in the process of re-jigging my backup process (which was loooong overdue as the previous 5+ years of wildlife & nature photography, all RAW, were only being backed up to a single, on-site external drive) and low&behold, late that night, instead of formatting one of the new backup drives, I formatted my storage drive. 5+ years of RAW images were gone. Luckily I was able to recover all but 20 shots (and of those, only 3 were “keepers”, but nothing I couldn’t re-shoot if I really needed to) via a recovery program. The problem though was that once recovered, all the RAW images were re-named a generic recovery name and my digital asset library application couldn’t pull the EXIF data from these recovered files. So, ALL OF MY PHOTOS came into the application with a “shoot date” = “creation date” which = the date I recovered the images. This was terrible. It would take forever to sort them all out again, etc.
But, I gave the DNG converter my first try, dropped the resulting DNG file into my digital asset library application, and voila, all my EXIF data was available to me!
So, DNG saved my life!
k.
[Right on! I’ve let the team know. Thanks for the happy feedback. –J.]
Adobe DNG RAW on Google Android (gPhone)
http://teavuihuang.com/dng
Tea Vui Huang’s “DNGwriter” is a Google Android library that allows gPhone (Google Android Handset) camera images to be saved straight to the Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) Raw image format. This product includes DNG technology under license by Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Sample gPhone DNG image is available on the above website.
Tea Vui Huang’s DNG Phone Camera
http://teavuihuang.com/dngphonecamera
With the “DNG Phone Camera” mobile software, you can now capture photos directly to the Adobe DNG (Digital Negative) RAW image format from your Nokia camera phone. Previously, DNG is available only on high-end cameras like Hasselblad & Leica.
I prefer to concert camera raw images to DNG via Lightroom; however, I recently had trouble with my DAM software. It seems that Lightroom and Bridge parse keywords differently. Does anyone know anything about this–specifically the use of “|” vs. “:” .