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Adobe’s DNG is a good thing... too bad more people don’t use it
May 5, 2008
Several years ago, Adobe Systems developed a universal non-proprietary camera Raw format that would make images easier to decode from camera files. Additional benefits include the ability to embed all of the camera data like shutter speed, aperture, focal length, flash (EXIF data) and captioning, keywords, copyright information, contact information and more (IPTC data).
Adobe DNG files are non-proprietary files that can be written by digital cameras, and read by a variety of software rpoducts. They are a good format for archiving systems and digital asset management systems.
Known as DNG (Digital Negative), the file format would be a boon to digital camera users and software developers alike. Adobe (apparently) gets little cooperation on the decoding of camera Raw files from the manufacturers, and as a result must reverse-engineer each camera’s proprietary format in order to read the files. This causes delays in the availability of software, and causes friction between the maker of the most important imaging application – Photoshop – and the makers of the cameras.
That friction became incendiary three years ago when Nikon encrypted the white point calculation in their NEF raw files. Adobe figured out how to read the data, but Nikon said no. In the weeks before the release of Photoshop CS2 Adobe almost shipped without support for Nikon raw files. That would have been disastrous for Nikon camera owners because their application of choice – Photoshop – would not have been able to read their photos. Apparently Adobe has similar difficulties with other manufacturers.
Why do Nikon, Canon and others do this proprietary software dance with Adobe?
If you ask, they will tell you that their images, when opened by their own software, are better than the same images opened by Adobe Photoshop. This may be true, but it requires that a photographer use the manufacturer’s software to open and save images, then switch to Photoshop to do additional image work. Photographers don’t like this because it’s an extra application sitting between them and a deadline.
DNG to the rescue! Adobe created the DNG file format, and has prepared documentation and an
SDK (Software Developer’s Kit) both available for free to anyone who downloads the materials. Their hope was that the manufacturers of cameras would adopt the DNG format for files created in the camera. So far only four cameras make DNG files: Hasselblad, Leica, Ricoh and Samsung. However, 41 software products can read DNG files, making that file format broadly acceptable.
Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Sony... the list is long... all prefer to continue to write files in OMG, NEF and CR2 format (and many others). And, Adobe engineers continue to burn the midnight oil figuring out how to read what the sensors wrote and turn it into meaningful images.
I think that camera manufacturers should make DNG an option on all professional cameras. I shoot everything in Raw, and I convert images to Photoshop format when I open them. Graphic arts pros who are working with images, archiving files, making image libraries, digital asset management systems and similar products and services are smart to investigate DNG as an archival format for images. The benefits are many. Unlike JPEG, which is visibly harmful to images, DNG does no harm, it compresses images to a degree, and it will always be readable because Adobe has made the format a public file type.
If Sony or Olympus or Nikon or Canon stops making cameras and software in the future (not likely), at least we could be confident that the DNG files in our repositories would be legible and not made obsolete by that event.
Posted by Brian Lawler on May 5, 2008 | Comments (0)
