[Dave]

Just been watching some advanced PS CS2 training I have on DVD, when it started to mention the benefits of converting RAW images to Adobe DNG format. Alledgedly it's a lossless format that also has lossless compression (10MB reduced to 4MB) , so should be better than your original RAW files.

Convertor can be downloaded from Adobe - Digital Negative (DNG)

Must admit the thought of saving 60% disk space, means I can backup more images to a single DVD

Anyone out there use it ?

[Warspite]

Dont use it - primarily because its Adobe, and I dont really want to find my stuff tied to closely to one organizations whims, convert to JPEG & TIFF only.

Besides whats the point of converting from RAW (which is supposed to be a digital negative) to DNG (which is another digital negative)

[orangepeel]

er... to save space?

Us D50 owners don't have to tho. Our RAW's are already compressed - although there is argument about whether or not it's lossless.

[Markulous]

Originally Posted by Warspite

Besides whats the point of converting from RAW (which is supposed to be a digital negative) to DNG (which is another digital negative)

Well, if they do succeed in making it a standard then it won't be tied to Adobe and can be read by other vendors' products. But until then..................

BTW, WIMP promises to be even better - more likely to be universally adopted, even if it is M$

[VinnyP]

I have heard this but never tried it. I convert to 16 bit TIFF or PSD as a working format but I think that it's suggested that converting to DNG means you can save space but still retain the advantages of keeping the raw file.

[deus&machina]

Not so far. Canon Digital Rebel also compress RAW files, so I just keep them in original form on CD backups, leaving smaller JPEGs on HDD.

[danpen]

Originally Posted by Markulous

Well, if they do succeed in making it a standard then it won't be tied to Adobe and can be read by other vendors' products. But until then..................

BTW, WIMP promises to be even better - more likely to be universally adopted, even if it is M$

I didn't think WIMP was any kind of RAW format though, more like a better JPEG?

I take a backup of my RAW files to DVD and convert my working copies to DNG. I primarily use Bridge and Camera Raw to do any tweaking and like the fact that the camera raw settings are written to the DNG rather than to a sidecar file.

The DNG also contains a large JPG preview which cataloguing apps like MediaPro can use so that you can view the catalogued image how you adjusted it. I prefer that to creating tiffs partly because they're so big but mostly because I can do a rough and ready inital conversion and then tweak properly if I'm actually going to edit the image for further use.

Work flow's quite a personal and contentious thing and it's taken me ages to come up with something that really works for me, DNG is core to that. Even so I always have the original raws, just in case.

[erick]

yes I am converting all RAW files into DNG and save them to DVD

[Fangman]

I used to have to do this for my 350D before updating to CS2 as there was no plug-in for CS. It worked fine and as far as I could see no loss in the conversion. The converter worked well in "batch" action on a complete file of images.