Questions about raw support come up regularly for all FOSS raw developers. This is understandable: new formats come out all the time, existing formats may not have the correct metadata (black/white points, color matrix, etc), and it is difficult to keep up with all developments.
I am just wondering if it would make sense to
convert all raw photos to DNG prior to processing,
focus on supporting DNG instead of the large variety of raw formats.
My understanding is that the conversion in 1. is lossless (barring bugs etc), and even provides better compression than some RAW formats. Various tools exist for the purpose, including the recent dnglab.
Conversion could happen during import, or with an external tool. With 2, developers of raw processing tools would not have to allocate effort on keeping up with raw formats, and could just focus on writing great tools for photography.
Personally, I dontâ convert my NEF raw files (from Nikon gear) because this would take an additional extra step to do in my workflow. Just kidding
Aside from the technical reasons (see previous post by kmilos) and the questionable âideological onesâ (it is an open source format created by Adobe, therefore it is deemed âbadâ because, in the long run, you might be locked up with their products) I suppose (who knows?) the DNG widespread adoption will occur only (but I very doubt it) when Sony, Canon, Nikon etc will adopt natively this format as well.
Right now, if I am not wrong, âonlyâ Leica - Pentax allow you to save your Raw files as DNG
Whatâs really the problem to solve is the increasing propensity of the camera manufacturers to encode parts of their raw files. If you put a DNG conversion in the front of your workflow, youâre still going to have to rely on Adobe DNG Converter; the the DNG format is open, but only theyâll readily have the secret sauce to decode reticent raws into DNG.
Probably owing to my aerospace background, I like having the âcapture of recordâ as the starting point for my workflow. No real reason, DNG encoded correctly would have the same data (?), just my predilectionâŚ
Yes, but FOSS takes a long time to catch up w/ a new proprietary codec (unlike Adobe who can do NDAs or license stuff) - just because a FOSS DNG converter exists, doesnât mean it supports everything under the Sun at any given point in time (especially stuff that doesnât exist yet, or just got âinventedâ). Once it does, might as well add native raw decode support to other apps (and a FOSS DNG converter is just another app needing support for a new codec)⌠As mentioned in the earlier thread - if FOSS reverse engineered the proprietary codec, the DNG conversion is kind of no longer necessary (someone âjustâ needs to either integrate it or port it for the app/library at hand as well⌠this sometimes takes 2 days, sometimes 2 years; developer resources are the bottleneck, not a file format container).
The point of using DNG would be that once the conversion library handles the format, the photo editing program would not need to do anything because it already handles DNG.
For example, as a thought experiment: if Darktable insisted on just accepting DNG and calling an external utility to do the conversion when importing, the user would get the new features once that utility is updated, with (hopefully ) 0 effort on the part of Darktable devs, or even a new release.
Please understand that I am not trying to convince anyone here, I am just curious why this is not happening. FOSS photo editing tools apparently devote a lot of effort to keeping up with new formats, and users are frustrated waiting for changes to trickle down to the programs they use.
Case in point - DNG 1.7 spec was published more than a year ago (the file format spec is open, the JPEG XL codec is open as well), and dnglab doesnât support it currently (and this is in no way to be taken as criticism).
The fundamental problem of reverse engineering a proprietary codec is still there, you just shifted it somewhere else (and maybe saved some days/weeks of implementation delay in other apps).
The hope is that some will step up and start contributing, itâs how open source works.
Getting off-topic, but my preferred alternative to PDF is PDF, but the version that doesnât include Adobeâs proprietary extensions that render the document unreadable in anything other than Acrobat. To be fair, Iâm not sure theyâre proprietary, perhaps itâs just features that no other reader has implemented yet? But we use them a lot at my work, and opening the file in any other reader displays a page informing me that only Acrobat is capable of opening such a file. And since Acrobat is no longer available on Linux that sends me strolling the hall looking for an available Windows machine.
There isnât one and thatâs part of the problem. They open sourced it so others could use it, but then they take on some proprietary stuff that only acrobat can do, and then they repeat that tattic.
Because something has to read the original raw, and once you can do that, why do the extra step of going to dng? It doesnât make sense.
By something that you know works with the software you want to use. Conversely you know the new stuff wonât work right away, so how and why do you have that expectation?
This way you wouldnât need to update your raw developer when using a new camera and it would be usable out of the gate. Not that it matters since the libs that deal with raw files get updated fairly quickly but sometimes it takes a little while.
There is advantages to using a generic file format instead of having to support 500(exaggeration but still) different file formats that all do the same thing slightly different. After all we use the same formats for compressed files so why not for raw as well?
Good point. I can only argue that cameras should have the option to save to a generic format. And release cycles also come into consideration. A dedicated tool to make the conversion could be updated much quicker than a raw developer that works on release cycles.
There are but letâs be real, how many are really used? Jpeg and webp to a lesser degree dominate the web (and offline as well). 3 or 4 compressed formats that are rarely updated are a lot better than 40+ raw formats that sometimes change with each camera iteration.
And some do. My GR III makes DNG files. I also donât understand why they change the raw format or encode parts of the files so they have to be reverse engineered⌠But thatâs the way it is.
) 0 effort on the part of Darktable devs, or even a new release.