Adobe dng or not

[Bill, 70's military B&W]

Everyone was so helpful with the colorspace question, I came up with another. Reading Scott Kelby's books, he really seems to promote dng.
What is the reality? IS it taking over? If I have it right, Adobe came up with JPEG, and it became a standard. IS dng going to follow and become a standard?
'In short is everybody using it?' Should I be...???

Thanks, Bill

[Leonard Metcalf]

I started using DNG a few months ago. It takes me a lot longer to import and convert my images over. I do this because the DNG files are more robust as there is only one file per photograph and I have lost quiet a few images due to corrupt files. Once they are DNG I don't notice any differences. I don't bother co erring my tif's though as I thing they are a solid file.

[welly]

I don't believe Adobe came up with JPEG. It was created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group, who Adobe may be apart of but I'm not sure. As for DNG, it doesn't appear to have taken off like Adobe would have hoped and I believe only Leica and a few others use it in-camera. I don't think it really offers anything above any other RAW format or even over TIF. I've experimented with it in the past and never found it improved my workflow at all.

[Shootar401]

I use TIFF, its more of less the industry standard when it comes to images.

[Darren H]

Have not tried DNG or really seen a reason to either. Anything I scan becomes TIFF. My DSLR files are the Canon CR2 RAW format and I leave them that way.

From a business perspective I cannot see Canon or Nikon ever going DNG as they probably prefer a proprietary format. Maybe it makes sense for smaller players to go DNG. Anyway, I am not sure Adobe has really sold the benefits of DNG (and what they might be) to the public.

[paulr]

DNG offers an interesting set of advantages and disadvantages over native raw formats. On the upside, it uses a better compression scheme than Nikon and Canon do, so your files will be smaller. It's also an open standard, so it's less likely that if you want to return to your raw files 20 years from now, you'll have trouble doing so. And Lightroom, which in its latest versions has gotten slow, handles DNG a lot faster than it does native files.

On the downside, you lose some of the proprietary information that the camera companies code into the raw file. With Nikon, this includes all the minor camera settings, picture modes, and white balance information. They encrypt this stuff just because they want to lock you in. This information only gets retained in the native format, and can only be read by their proprietary raw processing software. If you stay locked into their world, it will generally be faster to get decent color than if you stray and use lightroom or capture one or something else, with or without DNG. Although like a lot of people, I don't care for Nikon's software. And I haven't heard anything good about Canon's.

The final choice is to convert to the DNG format that includes the entire native raw file. As you might guess, the downside here is huge files.

I've thought about these choices for a while. The reasons I'm tempted to convert to DNG are for file size and lightroom performance. But I'm hesitant because I don't like the idea of throwing out information, or adding another processing step.

For now I'm working with native NEF files ... but I don't lean very hard in that direction. Someone I asked about this said he'd never heard of anyone regretting their choice one way or the other. It's probably a minor decision.

[jvuokko]

I found lossy dng most interesting as it's like jpg but allows storage of metadata including all LR tools and adjustments.

Is there quality difference between lossy dng and jpg, I don't know.