To DNG or not to DNG?

Awhile ago digital photographers were presented with the solution to the tyranny of vendor specific file formats.
That answer was/is DNG.

Having recently changed my workflow I figured it was time to look again at DNG at what it has to offer and more importantly does it fit into my new world.


DNG is non hardware manufacturer
specific file format. If you are not fully aware of the options available for your DNG files then check out the site, as I won't be covering it in details here.

As anyone who has owned more than 1 DSLR knows, every time a manufacturer releases a new camera they subtly change the internals of their RAW files.

This causes a little fear in the heart of the digital photographer as who is to say you will be able to get any software in 10-15 years time to interpret these files.

To alleviate this Adobe came to the party with an open format file and a very nice tool for generating the files from your RAWs.

My (and many others) concerns of this is why is Adobe to be trusted any more than Canon or Nikon?

The answer to that in a nutshell, is they cannot.
BUT, since they have made the internal structure of the format freely available, 3rd party software developers can write their own "editors" which can read the format.

This suggests that as long as there is an interest there is bound to be software to interpret the files.

If the openness of the format doesn't do anything for you then is there any benefit to you?

I struggled with this for along time, specially when virtually none of the major RAW editing suites would work with DNG.

Well thankfully things have changed and the latest round of offerings is more compatible with DNG, so it starts to look a little more attractive.

At the end of the day though its still just another form of RAW so why bother?

My original workflow used Tiff files as the absolute master file.
Tiff has been around forever and is a given standard but the files are huge.

In a nutshell, it use to be: edit RAW then convert to Tiff for Photoshop work.

Now do first cull on the RAW files and then convert rest to DNG.

The DNG becomes the master which is then imported into LightRoom. Now I have broken the emotional attachment to the RAW's I can continue the culling.

For me the fact of still have my original RAWs safely backed up and away from an editor frees me to cull harder.
This reduces the amount of clutter in my catalogs, which has to be a good thing.

From Lightroom I can export to whatever output format I need (jpg, tiff etc) so there is no need to keep a master Tiff. Admittedly the export to Photoshop for decent noise reduction/sharpening and a touch of velvia vision
does water down the master DNG concept.

So what have I gained:

• Smaller master files, which means less physical space requirements.
• Easier culling, which means less overall to process

The Bad:

• The time it takes to convert to DNG. Yes its fully automated but it still takes time.

Could I have just made a copy of my originals RAW's and only work on those to help culling.
Yes.

I am just looking for a reason to use DNG?
The answer there is probably still: yes and the change to LightRoom made it easy to do.

At the moment this is working nicely for me but as with all things workflow, its a work in progress.

So why the warthog??

Other than a burning desire to post a shot from the recent Kenya trip; DNG is a little like the warthog, a little rough around the edges but you cannot help but like it.