Importing DNG and Importing Light
See what I did there? No… well read on. You will…
Firstly, there’s a great write up over on the X= blog about why you should import and convert your photos to Adobe’s DNG format. Definitely worth a read.
Secondly, apologies for it being a little quite round here of late. I’ve been working on a new site that I will be moving all my travel photography over to in due course and it took slightly longer than anticipated. Although its not 100% complete yet it is now open to visitors and you can check it out at www.importedlight.com. Be sure to check out the galleries option which displays a world map showing where each of the photo sets were taken.
If you’ve got any comments on either using DNG (are you a fan or not?) or feedback on the new site, add them below!
Thanks for the plug Nick!
|Brandon Oelling
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New site looking good Nick. I still have to say that I don’t ‘get’ DNG. So many programs support the cameras native RAW format (may I hazard a guess at more than support DNG?) and since when did Adobe ever drop support to a camera once it had been added to Camera Raw? Just playing the Devils advocate!
Gary – It’s not Adobe dropping support, but the Camera manufacturer or other software you use. The other advantage is that the DNG format includes a header that enables programs such as Lightroom or ACR to store information and develop presets in the header rather than in a separate XMP sidecar file.
Lots of things happened that made me adopt DNG. I bought a Ricoh camera that used DNG as it’s default RAW file output. Some geotagging software I had worked with DNG files and not any of the multitude of camera specific RAW files. The fact that the Lightroom metadata gets stored with the main image data inside a DNG file was a significant factor too – it makes the files more manageable. I ended up importing images from my other cameras as DNG as well – so they all look the same and I don’t have to treat them any differently later.
One bonus was that my modified infrared camera produced RAW files in a format that wasn’t compressed so they were huge – when importing and converying to DNG, they shrank (the other two cameras files ended up about the same size due to already being in compressed formats).
Now I just think of DNG as THE raw format for me.
Well.. Each to their own
Maybe it’s something that I will look at again in the future.
I can certainly see the advantage of the tidiness aspect (not having side-car files).