Are you converting your RAW images to DNG?

Reading the DAM book (chapter 1, online), it suggests that RAW images
be converted to DNG. Googling on DNG I find that it's a format
created by Adobe in September 2004, over 2 years ago. This is the
first I've heard of this format, so apparently it's not getting widely
adopted and discussed. I'm curious if anyone here is using DNG, and
if so why you made that choice.

Thanks!

jc

--

"The nice thing about a mare is you get to ride a lot
of different horses without having to own that many."
~ Eileen Morgan of The Mare's Nest, PA

>JC Dill wrote:
>
> Reading the DAM book (chapter 1, online), it suggests that RAW images
> be converted to DNG. ... I'm curious if anyone here is using DNG, and
> if so why you made that choice.


I'm not converting (and no one I know or photograph with converts
either) for a couple of reasons ... first, the RAW converter I prefer
doesn't read DNG format, so it's primarily a Photoshop thing right now.
Second, the early versions of the Adobe converter deleted some of the
EXIF info so if you just converted without keeping a copy of the
original RAW files you would have lost potentially valuable
information. Supposedly this has been fixed in later versions but
there's no way to be sure since the programs I sometimes use to get
EXIF info don't accept DNG and Photoshop doesn't make use of a lot of
the EXIF info that's available in my camera files.

You can convert a few and play with them in Photoshop, it's simple to
do this ...what you'll quickly learn is that to Photoshop a DNG file
looks identical to a RAW file. So as long as you have native RAW
support it's hard for me to find an argument for converting.

DNG came about because people were worried that their proprietary RAW
format files might not be supported in the future. This is a good
long-term reason to have a universal format like DNG but it's not an
immediate concern to most of us, especially if you have a mainstream
camera like a Nikon or Canon.

It seems to me there are three advantages to DNG ... one is the "in 20
years you may not be able to convert .cr2 or .crw files" ... if this
comes to pass it won't take long to batch convert copies to DNG though.

Second the DNG files are a bit smaller than RAW files so if storage
space is an issue this is a bonus. I think the DNGs I converted were
about 80-85% the size of my Canon files for example, but with external
HDs available for well under $1 a GB this isn't important to me.

Finally when a new camera comes out and you have no converter for it
except the camera maker's software you can convert to DNG (if Adobe has
a converter for it) and then use your current DNG-supported converter
with it. For example if you have Photoshop CS and buy a Canon 400d or
Nikon D2xs or D80 you will find there will be no native RAW conversion
support for these from Adobe, but once Adobe brings out a RAW -> DNG
plug in for these you can convert to DNG and then use the earlier
version of Photoshop.

I don't use it myself but I can see the advantages in some situations.
But I can get useful EXIF info like a grid of the auto-focus points
with the one(s) active in red, or the total number of shutter
actuations from programs that read only the RAW files so it would make
no sense to me to convert to DNG.

Bill