Let’s see if that changes anything.
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I read the article. But it seems to me that not all DNGs are the same, e.g., there are complaints in this forum about the ability to open some DNGs, but not others.
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Of course they are not. DNG is only a container format, and as such, it can carry a variety of payloads. So while it’s nice that the format is open (you can easily access the container and look around, find out “what” is inside), the actual payload might sometimes be new/unknown/difficult to process (the “how”).
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That’s either due to some cameras/software saving DNGs not compliant with the standard, or image processing software not supporting the standard fully. A common problem recently has been support for DNG 1.7 which standardized JXL compression.
In the case of this ISO standard - it doesn’t specify which version of Adobe DNG they standardized in the summary. I’m not willing to pay for the standard to see what it matches.
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Exactly. That article is speaking of it as if it were a raw image format.
And it can be used as such. There are camera’s (like recent Leica’s) that just produce DNG as raw file, and these files are true raw files.
The problem is that DNG also support has support for demosaiced images. And I think that is the real problem. Rather than a true raw format standaard, the standaard bowed for the included that types images so that companies can hide their ‘proprietary saus making the images’.
And that is causing a mess.
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It still is.
Btw, there is no official/agreed upon definition of “raw” AFAIK. It just means minimally processed (which can mean different things to different people) so you can play with it some more (hence the “digital negative”).
I know, and this is the underlying problem. IMHO, the definition of “raw” (hence I used to word ‘true raw’), I would not considered an image RAW if it is demosaiced. Looking at darktable, white balance and the raw white/black point are done before the demosaicing step.
RAW, for me is straight unprocessed from the camera sensor.
So DNG, the name is flawed. If you do processing… It is not a Digital Negative all the time… pity pity pity
dt has no problem applying those to LinearRaw (i.e. demosiaced) DNGs as appropriate, as those are linear light operators. These are not necessarily “baked in”, which is a common misconception.
A lot of camera vendors only give the compressed option. Some even used to subtract black level when saving (thankfully less frequent these days). So… not raw either then by this definition?
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If the compression is lossless, then it is no processing on image data itself, that is a change of representation of the data.
Lossless is not always/universally available, and, as a more worrying trend, lossy seems to be the default OOTB for many vendors and models…
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Sony, Canon and Pentax (and others, I’m sure) are known to apply noise reduction on the raw data, with no way to turn it off. Nikon often does white balance pre-conditioning, which appears to be a way to correct for variations in CFA dyes. And I’m sure there are other shenanigans happening (in addition to the black-level subtraction @kmilos mentioned). In other words, these days raw is probably not truly raw, almost no matter which camera you buy.
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That’s always been free.
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ISO seems to want ~$248US for their copy.
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I could not find the update 2026 version on the Adobe website yet. But this is 1.7.2 version:
https://helpx.adobe.com/content/dam/help/en/photoshop/pdf/DNG_Spec_1_7_1_0.pdf
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That XKCD comic isn’t really relevant here. In this case we went from no actual and one de-facto standard, to an ISO standard that replaces the de-facto one.
I do think it is. As so far (up to now and I kind of doubt it will change) DNG is the n+1th standard.
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Reference [1] in the standard points to DNG Specification 1.7.1.0
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@mino: can you point to the previous 1…n standards for raw files?
Like @Donatzsky said, there were no standards before. All manufacturers have their proprietary raw formats, the details of which are not public (for most). Implementations come from reverse-engineering efforts. Updates regularly break these. These are not “standards”, any more than the length of my index finger is a unit of length.
I have little hope that DNG becoming and ISO standard will change anything directly. What could change stuff is the EU mandating that cameras sold in the EU offer DNG as an option, at no significant loss of speed or image quality.
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