Hey Lightroom Users: Raw or DNG?

[Jason Dunn]

<p>Using Lightroom? I started playing with the 3.0 beta tonight - I'm still using 2.x day to day - and I noticed that in the 3.0 beta they've defaulted to converting to DNG upon import. You can change the default so the raw files are imported, but I found it interesting they've defaulted to DNG. I have virtually no experience with DNG - I always import raw, export to JPEG, then archive my catalog with the files staying in raw format. So I wanted to put this out to any Digital Home Thoughts readers who are using Lightroom. Do you use DNG? If so, why? What are the advantages over keeping your images in raw format?</p>

[rlobrecht]

Adobe has committed to keeping the DNG format around (can't find a link offhand.) Nikon and Canon tweak their RAW format every new body or two.

How long will software continue to import D80 NEF files?

[NeilE]

There's no real advantage and it's increases your import time dramatically. It's not like Adobe is going to stop supporting NEF or CR2. That'd be like stopping support for JPEG.

Neil

[Jason Dunn]

Adobe has committed to keeping the DNG format around (can't find a link offhand.) Nikon and Canon tweak their RAW format every new body or two. How long will software continue to import D80 NEF files?

Right - future compatibility is the thing I knew about...but I was wondering if there were any other advantages. Also, Nikon isn't changing the D80 NEF format, so if Lightroom supports it today, it would support it five years from now, right? Unless they dropped support for it from the product...which I guess is the potential danger.

[ptyork]

Jason, thanks as always for making me take a closer look at things I generally ignore. You have a wonderful way of making me waste time. ;) I found this really informative site:

http://www.barrypearson.co.uk/articles/dng/index.htm

'Course, since it was first in my Google search results, I'm sure you found it too. :) Looks like the biggest deals for me would be application compatibility and compression.

Compatibility seems a little spurious. I'm not sure about your workflow, but my ever changing one seems now to be simply to use Lightroom (yes, I'm going to break down and buy it when 3 leaves beta) to "develop" the photos and then "publish" them to JPEG for easy consumption. Most everything after publishing will be done using the JPEG's, I think. Are there additional tools out there that work only with (or even better with) RAW images?

Compression, while seemingly minimal, does seem worth something. 10-20% savings is decent. Sure, storage is cheap, but at around 25MB a piece, my 7D's RAW images are going to chew up drive space alarmingly fast. My informal testing on a folder showed that DNG (with medium JPEG preview and of course no embedded original RAW) reduced this by about 20% to 20MB a piece, which is nothing to turn your nose up at.

But, on my Core 2 Duo E8400, this took about 2 seconds per shot to complete. So, Neil's assessment is quite correct, it would add significantly to the import time. And since if you're like me, you're probably going to delete (err, "refine") at least half of the photos from the catalog, this is quite wasteful.

SOOO, I'm thinking that perhaps the workflow should be:

1) Import as Native RAW to Temp Folder
2) Refine and Develop
3) Publish as DNG to Archive Folder
4) Publish as JPEG to My Pictures Folder
5) Remove Temp Folder from drive and library

Note that the DNG format has another very nice side benefit. Your explorer thumbnails and previews all show the image AS DEVELOPED since it displays the JPEG preview. It also remembers all of your edits in Lightroom even when "published," so I don't really see a downside here as you can always revert to the original and re-develop.

I may just break down and import using DNG, but I like the above workflow, at least for the next five minutes. :)