31 Aug
2011
31 Aug
'11
7:08 p.m.
On 8/31/2011 9:00 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 08/31/2011 08:50 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
>> Adobe does have their Digital Negative .DNG, which is publicly
>> documented, the spec. available online and so forth. They push people to
>> convert their raw camera files to .DNG which is fine --- but of course
>> any proprietary extensions that Adobe doesn't reverse engineer or have a
>> corresponding field to is simply not copied and 'lost' in the
>> conversion.
>
<snip>
> If your
> camera spits out data in an indecipherable format, what choice do you
> have? Only to boycott the manufacturer, and that hasn't seemed to work.
<snip>
What you said might be true if the only way these
cameras stored data
was in "RAW" format. Fortunately, this is not the case.
Right. Of course you can also use TIFF, which is somewhere in between.
It's not lossy like jpeg, stores 16-bit (many cameras' sensors output
14), but still permanently bakes the white balance.
Of the crowd who support keeping the RAW images around (some just
post-process immediately to TIFF or JPEG, and discard the .RAW) suggest
converting to .DNG, and keeping both the RAW and DNG. Of course
everything is mostly duplicated, but it's my feeling that original disk
space, backup disk space, and bandwidth is cheap and so I couldn't care
less about sort of doubling my requirements.
Practically speaking, I don't shoot more than a few thousand images per
year, and so it's not enough data to really worry about. If I was a
wedding photog or something, my practice would be a little different.
(Yes, for those quick at math, it's over 100GB per year)
Oh, and to address boycotting a company over the practice, it's just not
really practical. Most (all?) manufacturers do this. They all give you
a utility to convert to more convenient formats. Unfortunately, their
marketing depts try to leverage the format in sales -- saying, "look at
the neat stuff we can do with our RAW files". Usually the benefits are
very minor.
Besides, there's some "vendor lock-in" when you buy Nikon (or
whomever's) lenses --- you would have to sell your stuff second hand and
then rebuy a different manufacturer, just to deal with basically the
same problems. The third party lens manufacturers that produce
compatible lenses are usually sub-standard(but admittedly cheaper) --
the glass from Nikon is better than tamron, sigma, and so on. Not to
mention, there are some real benefits to using Nikon glass on Nikon
body. An example is auto-correction of lens flaws (perhaps, say,
chromatic aberration) inside the body.
Keith