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Adobe Releasing New Photo Format
salmonz writes "Toronto Star just posted a story that Adobe is releasing a new digital picture format; the Digital Negative Specification,or DNG.
" Supposed to be use in raw photo formats; without the lossyness of JPEG.
This is to provide a unified RAW format for digital cameras. Right now all the manufacturers have their own formats and you cannot process them unless you have special software on your machine. I dont know why they mentioned JPEG because it is not a raw dcamera format.
love is just extroverted narcissism
A raw image is what directly comes out of the CCD. In fact it uses less storage than the bitmap that can be produced from it. But it's even better, as with it you can customize white balance and such after the picture has been taken. I use the raw images exclusively on my Canon S45 (it's a difficult feature to find). The problem appears to be in standardization.
-I am an elective eunuch.
A conventional 24-bit image file will have eight bits for red, green and blue for each pixel. But very often digital cameras don't have separate sensors for each pixel; they have alternating R G B sensors in a kind of chessboard arrangement, and then interpolate the missing values. This interpolation happens when you go from raw format to the final output, and it can be done by the camera itself or by a photo manipulation program on a PC.
A raw format file, while still storing all the data that has come off the image sensor, can be one third the size of a PNG because it knows that the first pixel has only red channel information, the second only green and so on.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
This format is not about replacing PNG, and no PNG does not provide the capabilities to do what DNG is about.
DNG is about unifying the mess of "RAW" formats - camera-specific proprietary file formats containing raw dumps of unprocessed sensor information and shot metadata.
Furthermore, DNG is not immediately about getting camera manufacturers to use it themselves - though that would be the ideal. DNG is a bridge format - something you can convert all of your RAW files to for the purposes of long-term preservation/storage. It is open and documented, and based on TIFF so there are existing reader libraries that can handle the basic format (they will need extensions to do anything with it of course).
Adobe has provided DNG Converter which will enable anyone - even non-Adobe users - to benefit from the ongoing R&D Adobe does to support the variety of RAW formats out there. This will simplify the task of building quality RAW converters by allowing small developers to focus on excellent RAW processing and not have to exert to support the many camera RAW formats out there.
Sorry, I just woke up so I'm not going to touch on everything - but this is a major announcement whose importance will become more clear in time.
Adobe Systems has today announced a new unified public format for raw digital camera files and a free software tool, Adobe DNG Converter, for translating raw photo formats into the new .DNG format, which is
compliant with the Digital Negative Specification. There is no standard
format for raw files, which vary between manufacturers and cameras.
Digital Negative Specification will introduce a single format that can
store information from a diverse range of cameras. An updated Adobe RAW
File Converter adds support for DNG as well as several other cameras.
Click here for more information on Adobe DNG
Press Release:
Adobe Unifies Raw Photo Formats with Introduction of Digital Negative Specification Free Converter Tool Kick Starts New Digital Negative File Format by Translating Raw Formats into Easy-to-Use, Archive-Ready Files
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Sept. 27, 2004 -- Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today introduced the Digital Negative Specification, a new unified public format for raw digital camera files. The company also launched a free software tool, Adobe DNG Converter, which translates many of today's popular raw photo formats into the new .DNG file format, compliant with the Digital Negative
Specification.
Raw files, which contain the original information captured by a camera sensor prior to any in-camera processing, have become popular due to their promise of greater flexibility and image quality. Until today there has been no standard format for these files, which vary between manufacturers and individual cameras. The Digital Negative Specification solves this problem by introducing a single format that can store information from a diverse range of cameras. Technology leaders, major customers, and professional photographers today also endorsed the new specification (see separate quote sheet).
"Professional photographers and other creative professionals are moving to raw camera workflows because of the outstanding creative control they get over digital images," said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of Digital Imaging and Digital Video products at Adobe. "However, clients and publishers have difficulty working with disparate raw file formats and nobody can be sure that today's raw formats will be supported ten years from now. Adobe customers asked us to work on a unified, public format for raw files and that's what we've delivered with the new Digital Negative Specification."
Serious photographers want to store raw files in long-term image archives, because -- unlike standard JPEG's and TIFF's -- these files represent the pure, unaltered capture. Current raw formats are unsuitable for archiving because they are generally undocumented and tied to specific camera models, introducing the risk that the format will not be supported over time. The unified and publicly documented Digital Negative Specification ensures that digital photographs can be preserved in original form for future generations. The new .DNG file format also simplifies digital imaging workflows for
creative professionals who today have to juggle multiple file formats
as they bring raw images, from different cameras, into print and
cross-media publishing projects.
New Specification Built on Existing Standards
The Digital Negative Specification is based on the TIFF EP format, an accepted standard, and already the basis of many proprietary raw formats. The power of .DNG format lies in a set of metadata that must
be included in the file to describe key details about the camera and
settings. .DNG-compliant software and hardware can adapt on the fly to
handle new cameras as they are in
It's very simple: People who deal with content creation (that is, content created for commercial consumption), especially print, don't like JPGs or other lossy formats. PNG, being an indexed-color format, is not the end-all of graphics formats, slashdot ranting aside. Most designers want TIFF files (and PCD wil do, in a pinch). JPGs, no matter the quality, tend to have a nasty habit of exhibiting some noise in their output. That's totally unacceptable for print.
And, again, PNG is totally the wrong format for this. You'd be taking a huge hit upfront in terms of indexing -- or your images would be outrageously huge.
How DNG differs from TIFF, I don't know. I would have thought TIFF would be the obvious answer. (TIFF, for those who don't know, aren't compressed but can be losslessly compressed)
I am not Herbert.
Actually no it's not useless, this would be very useful, especially if the format is open. Remember Adobe also cerated PDF - they know about making money from open standards.
You see proper digital cameras - especially the ones that cost $10,000 and are used by photojournalists and the like all let you save the image in raw format - that's a copy of the actual data that was captured before any processing. By doing so, you can take the image home and adjust it - white balance, satuaration and everything else - with photoshop et al. Rather than letting the camera make the adjustment and possibly messing things up, you know you still have the raw data so you can undo your changes. Trouble is, all the camera manufacturers ahev their own standard for raw data, so to get it into photoshop, the gimp or whatever you want to use, you must first run the raw image through software provided by your camera manufacturer - and you can bet that software won't run on Linux.
So this is good, 1 because it encourages interoperability and 2 because it further opens up proper image processing to Linux users.
Yes. Currently, CCDs and CMOSs support 12-16bits/channel. That can be encompassed in PNG's 48bits/pixel. However, newer generation gear already samples at 18-24bits/channel of RGB, which superscedes what PNG can do.
Plus, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't PNG assume all pixels have RGB information? Oftentimes this isn't the case in digital cameras (unless you're using a Foveon sensor). Google "Bayer Pattern" if you're interested.
The article is light on details, but I don't think Adobe is aiming this solely towards digital cameras (even expensive digital backs for medium-format cameras), but also towards medical imaging and what not. There is a reason why ImageMagick can be built with 24bits/channel and up.
My questions is, can existing cameras be updated to the new format, or will the manufacturers just want to sell the new ones.
I'm not horribly concerned if Nikon doesn't release an update for my particular camera since Adobe will be providing an image conversion utility that supports many of the proprietary raw formats.
Adobe has put up a page regarding the new format on their site. But for those who couldn't be bothered to read the original article and are posting questions like, "Why bother..."
There are currently two image formats in wide use for high-end cameras. RAW is the format of choice for people who demand high-quality shots with no compression artifacts. Unfortunately, different camera manufacturers have implemented their RAW encoding differently, which means that two cameras that can save to RAW don't necessarily use the same format. As a result, professionals often have to convert between their vendor's RAW format, and that used by their software.
The other format is good old JPEG, but as you probably know, JPEG is a lossy compression algorithim, making it unsuitable for those who demand a certain level of quality in the shots as captured.
The new format is designed to provide the same advantages of RAW, without the cross-vendor incompatibilities. Adobe is calling it "a publicly documented and readily available specification," although I didn't see any kind of license data around the download of the spec (which is on the Adobe page listed above).
DNG *is* TIFF.
First, PNG is not always indexed. However, it would have required massive extensions to PNG to turn it into something capable of being DNG, and TIFF is already well placed for extension (TIFF is a container format - most people think of it as a simple image format, but it is very flexible and capable of adaptation).
TIFF supports a huge variety of compression modes, including uncompressed, JPEG, LZW, and ZIP, and a variety of color modes.
DNG is an extension to TIFF, to allow the additional properties of a RAW to be expressed without losing the efficiencies of RAW (linear data, typically one color channel per pixel until processing). Just as a for instance - you can take your DNG into most any TIFF reader today and it will at the very least be able to read the preview embedded in the DNG without any mods to your TIFF library.
Did you even RTFA? Oh, I forgot.. this is slashdot.
.DNG file format into digital cameras, printers, and software products.
For more details about this announcement, go to dpreview.com
Adobe announces new format for raw files
The Digital Negative Specification is being posted to the Adobe Web site free of any legal restrictions or royalties, enabling integration of the
The JPEG standard includes a lossless option too; professionals don't want to use JPEG because lossless JPEG is inefficient, not because it doesn't exist.
It's an extension to TIFF to support, in a standardized way, the many unique variables that go into a RAW file. No existing specification could capture this range of unique data encoding and metadata without extension - DNG as TIFF was the logical choice for many reasons.
This is not processing RAW into a TIFF - you can do that now with many tools. This is repackaging a RAW file into a new, universal RAW - this should open the RAW processor world to a new level of competition (as the greatest amount of R&D time was always wasted on reverse engineering RAW formats - something Adobe is now doing for you with DNG Converter).
Adobe already has a page on DNG. Its is a free format and the specs are right there on the page, so GIMP won't lose out.
I believe the format is a) to save Adobe money long term (they don't have to support yet another specific sensor) and b) reduce headaches and complaints from the user. We'll just see how the camera companies and digital photography professionals react.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Because TIFF doesn't do the job. This isn't another direct display format. It's a raw format. For example, the raw files from my Nikon equipment require processing before they can be displayed (FWIW, Photoshop CS already supports the nikon raw format - .NEF). Raw format files are nothing more than the the CCD saw....it doesn't take into account the dot screen or any filtering that is integral to the CCD...your processing software (whether it's in the camera or 3rd party like Nikon View, Bibble, or something else) needs to apply color correction and actually interpolate the sensors on the CCD into the correct colors.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
> But very often digital cameras don't have separate sensors for each pixel; they have alternating R G B sensors in a kind of chessboard arrangement, and then interpolate the missing values.
Couple of notes...
That chessboard layout is called a Color Filter Array, usually arranged in a Bayer Pattern.
Digital cameras these days are 10 bit in RAW mode.
And some even have 4 color sensors.
dpreview is THE site for camera buffs, much the same way avsforum is for us audio & vidio philes. Now if only I could find sites for other categories....
--
"Geometry is frozen music"
- Pythagoras
I would say that upwards of 90% of the magazines, books, and other printed materials use JPEG images in their books for ALL non-photographic images.
photographs are usually TIFF documents, but we've ran accross many customers who supply all of their graphics and photos as high-res JPEGs
Adobe lockin v.s. Quark? you obviously don't work in a printing house. Quark is basicly the only tool used in creating anything for print. Quark can create Adobe PDF Files without issues from any other software we use.
Now that i think about it, most of the software we use is based on Open standards from Adobe (Postscript, DSC(Document Structuring Convention), PDF, PJTF, JDF)
YIDIWIP (Yes I Do Work In Prepress)
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
Adobe has posted a DNG Primer online, describing some slightly technical details. Here are the key points from the document that helps to understand what makes the format useful:
Image format: DNG is based on the TIFF-EP format, but DNG specifies the inclusion of a number of additional tags that let the converter properly interpret the raw file.
Metadata: DNG enables inclusion of metadata in EXIF, IPTC, and XMP formats.
Compression: Files can be stored as uncompressed (either bit-packed or padded to 16-bits per pixel) or with lossless JPEG compression.
Color space: DNG fles are stored in a linear, nonwhite-balanced color space (usually the native color space of the camera).
Interpolation: DNG enables file storage either in mosaic (CFA) form or in demosaiced form. Generally, a mosaiced file is preferred because it represents the original data the sensor captured and enables maximum conversion fexibility. It is also smaller than a demosaiced file. In some instances, however, saving a demosaiced file can improve compatibility, particularly if the camera sensor contains an unusual mosaic pattern that all converters do not support.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is a major boon. For those too lazy to read. It is 100% free and open for anyone to implement. Adobe is also providing a free converter.
This provides a common RAW format for cameras. This is not a png or jpg replacement, but a RAW replacement.
There are a number of third party RAW converters on the market right now. Many have limited camera support. You can bet they will quickly moving to support DNG. Which will instantly open up their usage to almost all current cameras.
With DNG support and Adobes converter you will soon be able to open just about any RAW image with any converter.
Even without camera output this is a benefit. As you can get one converter to support all your cameras.
You can archive all your RAWs as DNG and not have to worry that you kept all the software that came with the camera that generated the original RAW.
Camera support would be even better, but that may be slow as the manufactures may suffer "Not Invented Here" syndrome, or see value adds to their own format quirks.
Who modded this up?
This format is about putting all RAW files under one (DNG) format.
Eg. Nikon has NEF, Canon has CRW, Olympus has xxx, adsf has yyy....
Isn't it better to have one open/standard format which all manufacturers support/endorse?
If you are skeptical read this.
Trolls are like broken clocks. They show the truth two times a day. The rest of the day they talk nonsense.
Because the raw format is the data straight off the CCD plus the camera settings.
Those two together let you play with the image composition before its set into any format. Don't like the exposure? Check what the exposure setting was, then recalculate the pixels based on the original source data. Bad aliasing effect? Try again from the raw data at a different resolution or different interpolation between the CCD sensors and pixels and see if you can save the picture.
A DNG-format file is fully compliant with the TIFF 6.0 Specification Standard and the ISO TIFF-EP codification of that spec, which was designed from day one as a fully extensible raw, processed, or whatever image / metadata annotation spec.
BTW, TIFF was originally designed for offset printing folks, and in the 6.0 standard already supports a huge number of colorspace models besides RGB, and has an extensible mechanism for specifying color-data encoding and compression schemes (you can even store JPEG encoding in TIFF).
When I worked at the ground-data processing section of the Jet Propulsion labs, TIFF was occasionally used to store and transmit raw multispectral satellite data, which consisted of over 256 separate color-spectra bands from far infrared to ultraviolet, stored spatially in separate tiles.
Working together with Spot Image and other satellite providers, NASA also helped develop the GeoTIFF extension to TIFF, which annotates an image with exact georeferencing information.
It looks like Adobe went the route of using SubIFD's to define the extended data. A little bit unfortunate, since that data will not show up in a "tiffdump" listing of the file, but in any case I have no doubt that folks are already taking the spec and writing "libtiff" extensions to parse the stuff.
For more information on TIFF, see my old, clunky website that is chock full of invalid links,but still has a few useful things to say:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ritter/tiff
--Niles (original GeoTIFF and TIFF webpage author)
Adobe does not have the support of any major camera vendor yet, that's where this really counts
Maybe that's because it's brand new and it's just been released.
Adobe in it's traditional greedyness did not release this as Open Source, they released a spec but not code. They just don;t get how to work with the open source community.
The way to work with the Open Source community to to release non-proprietary specifications for which we can write code ourselves. SO FAR they've done a pretty good job with PDF and DNG. What? Do you think no one is going to write an Open Source library for it?
Sheesh, talk about greedy; they could've colluded with camera manufacturers to monopolize on a closed, proprietary format, and you complain because they didn't give you the frickin' code? Get off your rear-end and write it yourself. That's the Open Source way.
PS: Adobe sucks for entirely different reasons (e.g. Dmitry Skylarov). This, however, is not one of those reasons. Adobe did right this time.