@Andrius, while I generally appreciate the article, I don’t go with the thesis to not archive in manufacturer raw format but convert to dng. Experience has shown (and was documented here several times) that it is better practice to archive your raw data in the raw format of the camera (not the results of processing of course) for several reasons:
- There are several FLOSS libraries to read most of the raw formats out there, and in most cases it has not proven too difficult to analyze a new raw format and add it to these libraries (THAT SHOULD NOT DISCOUNT THE EFFORT AND SKILL OF THE PEOPLE THAT ACTUALLY DO THE WORK, YOU ARE DOING A GREAT JOB; BUT FOR THE PURPOSE HERE THE RAW COMPREHENSIVENESS OF THE RAW LIBRARY LANDSCAPE TELLS A STORY AS WELL). And these FLOSS libraries don’t go away suddenly, they are FLOSS, so you will be able to use the source code or at least the knowledge from the source code in 10, 100, or 1000 years from now. Probably it’s a good idea to archive the source code of rawspeed and/or dcraw and/or … – if you apply “and” or “or” depends on the strength of your believe in doomsday scenarios
. - The format support of the libraries mentioned before is excellent, and a lot of special features of particular raw formats are covered. But, from time to time, new features of the formats are discovered that people were not aware before. If I convert to dng, the converter will only save the features that he knows in an accessible format, others may be lost or extremely hard to access later. The libraries mentioned before may get the access to the extra features in the original raw format after it is discovered, and the benefit cab then be used even with the archived original raw files.
- dng allows for too many options that are only partially coverd by dng reading libraries. At least, dng files have caused a lot of issues and AFAIK there are still some dng specialities that are not covered by FLOSS software and probably not even commercial software.
- There is AFAIK no FLOSS raw to dng converter. That causes a vendor lock-in that I observe people using FLOSS software seem to circumvent.
- dng converters may introduce data loss, e.g. by application of lossy compression. If the converter is not open source, it is extremely difficult to prove that it really converts all the data for all input files that may come, even if it does it for the last files you tried.
There may be more …