To DNG or not to DNG, that is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind. I have no idea. You may or may not know what DNG is. A DNG is if we go into these files. Let me just open these picture folders here. And show you the actual files And let's go to raw images. I'm going into raw images and this right here, this is a file name for one of my files but I'm only looking at those last three things The .NEF. So .NEF is Nikon Electronic File. That's Nikon's suffix for their electronic, their raw file. Canon I think it's CRD or CR2. I don't know which one it is these days. Sony, I'm not sure what it is but it's a very different ending. And so, every camera manufacturer has their own secret sauce built into their raw file. Its color, all these different specification for that file type. And what happened is, back in the day, let me keep advancing the slides here. Early digital days, there were cameras and they started seeing like, well Kodak went out of business but they made them digi...

tal cameras. Will software in 10 or 20 or 50 years be able to read their raw files from those digital cameras? Ah, that's a good question. So those images shot with those cameras might be lost to the dustbin of history if we can't even open them anymore in software and nobody has a computer that can go back and open them. And that's already happened. The first Canon 1DS, there's only one or two things of software can open those raw files anymore. The Kodak 14n, from 15 years ago. I'm not sure there's any software that can open those raw files anymore. So this is an issue that you may not have thought about but it's happening. You know, whether or not we knew about it. So what they did is, Adobe came up with an open source standard file type called the DNG, the Digital Negative file. If we look at these DNGs here, you'll notice there have a DNG file ending at the end. They are also... Well, there's the file. They are also, O single file with the XMP file embedded into the wrapper of the DNG. Where's if we go back to these other ones, you'll notice there's the .NEF file and there's the same exact file name with the .XMP files so that's what happens if you stick with Nikon or Canon or your camera's raw file type. You'll have these two files and the .XMP describing any adjustments you've made in Lightroom or Photoshop Adobe Camera Raw to that file or any meta data you added in Bridge or Lightroom. So DNG kinda simplifies the whole thing, it creates one file type. There's upsides and downsides to DNG so its up to you to decide whether this is something you want to convert your files to. You know there's only a few cameras I think there's Leica and there might be one other camera that actually outputs DNG files from the camera directly. I think Adobe was hoping the camera makers will convert to this open source thing but not all of them have because they have their special sauce and their own raw file type. Which makes a lot of sense. It's more archival, obviously. But also... It is more archival for the future so you'll be able to open these files forever. Hopefully. Even if Adobe goes out of business, the thought process is that this file type is open source so its in known quantity so even some of the company could create software to open these files. That's the thinking. It's a more efficient work flow because you don't have these .XMP files running all over the place. It's all in one single wrapper and it's also 10 to 40% smaller than then the original raw file from the camera manufacturer because it has pre-advanced compression ratios. So let's say you have 10 terabytes of images and you converted everything to DNGs. Now you have six terabytes of images. So that's a pretty significant savings. That's pretty good. So we've said that... You can actually embed the Nikon original raw file whatever, Canon, your original raw file inside the DNG file that actually doubles the file size so that if someday you want to extract the original Nikon file out of the DNG, that's a little bit more of the advanced way to do it but that doubles your file size. So, I don't know that many people are doing that. The downside of DNG though, is that not all software will read or open these files. Like, if you're in Lightroom and you decide you want to move to Capture One at some point and you converted everything to DNG well, I don't know if Capture One now reads DNG. It might. but in the old days, Capture One didn't read DNG so you're just Sorry, you can't do it. You know? So not every software will open these DNG files. There's also a penalty when you import into Lightroom. You can convert them to DNGs as you import or you can export them as DNGs but you still, There's an extra step you have to do that may take a significant amount of time. So it might slow you down in the import, export process. So and the other thing is you know, like I said, if you convert to DNG and you decided you want to use Nikon software to work on your images down the road but you converted to DNG, you just can't do it. So a few decisions. There's good and bad here. For me, I do a little bit of both. I keep everything in the Nikon files or houseable files and then for one of my backups, I convert them into DNGs so I have both files. We'll talk about my backups tomorrow. I have several backups of stuff. If I'm sending a raw file to a client, which does happen occasionally, I definitely send them a DNG file because my adjustments to the file are within that file type and it'll look the way I adjusted it. If they want to readjust, they can but at least they're seeing it the way I intended them to see it and not just a plain raw file with nothing done to it.

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Michael Clark

Michael Clark is an internationally published outdoor photographer specializing in adventure sports, travel, and landscape photography. He produces intense, raw images of athletes pushing their sports to the limit and has risked life and limb on a variety of assignments to bring back stunning images of rock climbers, mountaineers, kayakers, big-wave surfers and mountain bikers in remote locations around the world.

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topics covered in this class

Business Adobe Lightroom Adobe Photoshop Photo Editing

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student

Michael is a true professional and readily explains all of the nitty gritty issues of a photographer's digital workflow, including important things like Color Management, Lightroom workflows, Printing, and more. He is eager to answer your questions and has a thorough knowledge (after all, he worked with the original engineers at Adobe and wrote a book on it) and passion that he loves to share. He can get way deep into the subject, which I found fascinating. You can tell Michael has great experience in teaching and also likes to learn from his students. He is very authentic, honest, and direct. I highly recommend this class, and look forward to another one of Michael's courses in the future!

a Creativelive Student

This is an excellent course. It reinforced what I already knew and enhanced my spotty skills with new knowledge. I really like Michael's explanation of saving the document for print and web and the importance of doing these differently. Using the histogram to show this was terrific. Each session there is some valuable gem.

Elizabeth Bishop

This class is fantastic and is just what I was looking for! The teacher knows the subject WELL and he makes it understandable and easy to follow along. In each segment, he gets right to the point explaining just enough content to make it understandable. He doesn't waste your time. I highly recommend this class. It's the best tech class I have watched on Creative Live.

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To DNG or Not to DNG?

To DNG or Not to DNG?

Lesson Info

14. To DNG or Not to DNG?

Lessons

Class Introduction

Shooting Workflow: Set-up The Camera

Shooting Workflow: Histograms and Exposure

Shooting Workflow: Sensor Cleaning

Overview of Color Management

Color Management: Monitor

Color Management: Workspace

Color Management: Monitor Calibration

Color Management: Do I Need This?

Introduction to Lightroom®

Download & Import Images With Lightroom®

Lightroom® Preferences

Six Ways to Speed-up Lightroom®