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.

Comments

Re:JPEG-2000?

[GigsVT]

We don't know that it will be proprietary.

Adobe has traditionally understood the value of releasing full file specifications under a non-restrictive license, as they have done with PDF and PS.

They have no motivation to make this standard proprietary, if they did that, digital camera makers wouldn't use it! All signs point to them making this one completely open.

Re:More info available ... specs too

[Binary Boy]

Adobe can save money with the adoption of DNG - but more money will be saved by smaller developers who cannot do the ongoing reverse engineering that Adobe does to support new RAW formats.

Adobe is leveraging their reverse engineering work in providing the free DNG Converter - this will actually benefit smaller developers more than Adobe, as they will only have to tell their users to download DNG Converter to move their RAW into DNG - the third-parties can focus on supporting DNG and providing excellent processing tools, while Adobe will continue to do the hard work of camera support (until the cameras produce DNG directly - which is of course the long-term goal).

Re:Great idea. Some info.

[rgmoore]

Of course, since the nature of the data will be very different depending on what kind of image sensor you have

Which shouldn't be a worry for the vast majority of cameras that use square pixels in a RGB Bayer array. I'd expect that it would be pretty easy to deal with other square pixel Bayer arrays, like Sony's RGBE and the occasional CMY. Non-square arrays, like the ones used in some Nikon pro-series SLRs, and non-Bayer setups, like Foveon's X3 system, might be harder, but I'd expect that they could be accomodated without great difficulty.