I have settled on Lightroom Aperture (update) as my photo management software of choice and Adobe’s DNG format as my long term photographic archive of choice.
My Nikon shoots raw NEF files but those waiting for the recent versions of Adobe and Apple camera raw to support the D700 NEF files showed me that not all NEF’s are created equal. Combine this with the fact that my Fujifilm shoots it’s own bizarre propriety RAW format (thankfully still understood by Lightroom) and I reckon there is an impending disaster lurking somewhere down the line.
Enter the Digital Negative (DNG) and it’s groundswell of support by software vendors (Apple, Extensis) and camera manufacturers (Leica, Hasselblad, Ricoh and Samsung) amongst others.
DNG is a RAW container format designed to hold RAW data and, more importantly for me, the file metadata. This eliminates the need for me to have separate sidecar metadata files and it means that all my non-destructive adjustments, keywords and other metadata are available across all the tools I use. The DNG conversion process, either through Lightroom or the free converter, is very user friendly and the original RAW file and the sidecar updates are combined into the one DNG file.
As DNG employs more sophisticated compression algorithms there is invariably a space saving when converting from a RAW format like NEF to DNG. If you’re concerned about being able to open your original RAW image in the future in the proprietary camera software (like the dreadful Capture NX) then you can embed a bit-for-bit copy of your RAW data into the DNG which you can extract later.
I am in the process of converting all my NEF files (and other RAW formats) to DNG; this gives me some level of comfort that in 15 years time the files will still be accessible and relevant to the software of the time.
Read more about DNG on the Adobe website.
When I converted from iView to Lr I also switched from NEF to DNG and I’ve been happy with the results.
I’m less concerned with support being dropped for older RAW formats and more interested in managing only one file. I wrestled with the decision for awhile thinking if Lr is only writing to the sidecar then a failure doesn’t affect the image just the metadata. Converting to DNG opens up the possibility of a failure for the entire file, metadata and image.
So far no problems and I have an extensive backup strategy which should mitigate the worry.
Yeah I agree that having one file containing all the adjustments and metadata is a great thing. I guess that any file format presents the possibility of corruption of the data however I don’t believe that DNG is any more prone to this possibility than any of the other proprietary RAW formats.
I would like to see Aperture provide the ability to export to DNG soon.
DNG isn’t any more prone, but writing metadata to the same file as the image increases the odds for failure. If you made all your NEFs read-only and only wrote to XMP files then it would be the XMP file which would be corrupted, the NEF would not have been touched. In any event, I like DNGs and I’m willing to take the small chance of a write error (not that I’ve ever seen one but I like to worry about these things).
[...] important to me and represent a tangible emotional and dollar investment. These photos are usually converted to DNG as my long term archival file format of choice and a copy of the photo with keywords and [...]