Slashdot Mirror
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.
Are we supposed to hate Adobe?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Don't be silly, Adobe doesn't own PNG.
The kicker is, IF the camera companies decide to use it. Standards are only standard is they are used. My questions is, can existing cameras be updated to the new format, or will the manufacturers just want to sell the new ones.
--
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
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
PNG is not very good for photographic data. The compression phase also requires significant processing (zlib), so it would be impractical for a digital camera to PNG compress a multi-megabyte image on the field.
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.
People are comfortable with the idea of 'negatives'. If Adobe can make a market for this format, it will tie people into using thier tools (or thier tools will have an additional 'incentive')
I have read up on how using the raw format of the camera, and using the software on the PC you can use the additional information the camera would have thrown away, to do things such as save areas that would have been captured to dark otherwise.
Of course, each cameras format for RAW is basically that, RAW format, and this proposed file format should be nothing more than making sure each software can access it seamlessly.
So in fact, reading the article, it woudl seem like a good idea...
until you look at PDF. I just hope they don't try and put some tagging / watermarking / superflous junk into it.
*cough*
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Does this format offer anything that couldn't be done with PNG?
They key to this format is that it's in a format that's given off by the CCD and CMOS sensors, not in a processed colorspace of any kind (like RGB)
What really concerns me, however, is this:
which Adobe is making available for free
Is this a free-to-all? Or just free-to-camera-developers so we can force user to use photoshop or license from Adobe?
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
What about using the new version of JPEG, for 'digital negatives'?
There are no royalties, no licencing, it has 2x to 5x the compression efficiency, and it's inherently multiresolutional. One file, all resolutions, no reprocessing.. It supports hundreds of component layers, data embedding, lossless encoding..
So.. why would you use some new proprietary Adobe format?
this makes dealing with RAW files less of PITA. However, has anyone other that Adobe been involved in the spec's creation, or is this just another case of the brilliant minds a [insert company/organization name] coming up with the "ultimate" solution to their corner of the world's problems, without really considering the broader context.
I await more information and a working open-source library...wake me when it's ready.
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.
Here's another article.
Yet it will be up to camera makers to support the specification, which Adobe is making available for free.
So it looks like they aren't charging for it. And if everyone can standardize on a single format, that'd make EVERYONE'S life a lot easier.
A few remain behind and write about why they don't use the new "standard". They get branded "communists". Historical revisionism takes over, and the creators of the useless file format standard get lauded as "innovators". Anyone who complains is tagged as "just jealous".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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.
I dont know why they mentioned JPEG because it is not a raw dcamera format.
They mention JPEG because that's usually the options you have on a digital camera; proprietary RAW format, which Adobe is trying to standardize, or standardized JPEG, which professionals don't want to use because it's lossy.
It's a good idea, as long as the standard isn't "owned" by Adobe.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
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.
Is this a free-to-all? Or just free-to-camera-developers so we can force user to use photoshop or license from Adobe?
Looking at Adobe's history on postscript & pdf format I guess we should reasonably expect this new format's spec to be free (as beer) and usable by everyone
The connotations of 'Negative' are purely historical and bear no relevance to modern (i.e. digital ) photography.
The images stored in ths format will not be negatives (i.e. inverted) anyway, contrary to what the name means and suggests.
I'm going to vomit. That's liks asking "what's wrong with the mini cooper" in an aritcle about jumbo jets. PNG is not what this format is designed to work with, RAW data from the camera is. RTFA before jumping on the open source bandwagon and screaming that everything should be PNG because you saw a blurb about it on ESR's website. Fuck, I like open source and masturbate every time I see a linux login prompt, and you zealots are starting to piss me off.
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.
The idea for this spec is not to replace JPEG or PNG. Higher-end digital cameras have a mechanism by which to save images in a lossless format. It used to be this was generally TIFF, but when you're looking at six megapixel images, TIFF nets you pretty monstrous file sizes.
Most digital camera manufacturers came up with their own lossless compression. And, of course, they're all incompatible.
Now, why Adobe? If you're shooting high-end digital photography where you care about it being lossless, and you're doing post-production on your images, what are you using? Adobe Photoshop. So instead of having to have input routines for Photoshop for seventeen different specs, Adobe would much rather the manufacturers have one standard-- can't say as I blame them. Standards are good.
Now, most of us will still keep our cameras set to shoot JPEG, but the folks who do this stuff for a living, this will benefit them. This isn't a case of trying to create a new standard to replace one that already exists to try to get market dominance, a-la Microsoft (or, heck, Acrobat/pdf for the most part...), this is a new standard to make up for the fact that there simply isn't one in this segment and there desperately needs to be.
Now, this doesn't mean Adobe won't leverage the spec and make piles of cash off of it, but at least in this case they're actually inventing something that people need instead of trying to push something on them that they don't.
And, in PNG, the G stands for Graphics; Portable Network Graphics. I know it's a stretch, but possibly Adobe meant the G in DNG to also stand for Graphics. I know it seems to have nothing to do with the file format at hand, but it's possible. I mean, they made PDF, which has nothing to do with Firearms even though the ATF's F stands for that. It's just an Adobe thing, I guess.
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.
Except that they don't control DNG either. It was released "for free" (legally & royalty-wise). So it's either NIH, stupidity, or something we don't get.
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.
Because my DSLR produces ~10MB RAW files with 12bit/hue colour resolution which convert into ~36MB 16bit/hue colour resolution TIFFs? Or how about that those TIFFs only have a fraction of the flexibility offered by the RAW versions in post processing. It should be obvious that you need 3x the storage space, but if you've got used to rattling off shots at a rate of several a second, expect that to get slashed too.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
> 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
All your JPEGS are belong to Adobe?
Something about Soviet Russia, im not sure how it goes, but your mother was a whore.
How about you don't tell us photographers what we do/don't need?
We DO need a standard raw file format. Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Sigma, etc all have their own raw formats. This makes developing good raw-file handling software difficult, because you either have to dump lots of time into supporting several file formats, or settle for a small piece of the market and only support certain brands. It's also a royal pain in the ass for media companies who, to maintain some order in their workflow, "standardize" (fancy word for "get locked into") on one camera system maker.
Adobe is the defacto tool for processing digital images; nothing comes close. Knoll and his team have, after several years, picked up quite a bit of experience with what works and what doesn't; what customers need and what they don't, etc. Adobe's status puts them in the position to push a common raw format, and it's likely many of the companies that make decoders will add it in; it will be a case of software support before hardware support no doubt- but eventually camera makers will grumble a little and add it in. They've long since given up trying to make money off their raw format decoders.
Most media companies will no doubt be thrilled, because now they can handle Joe Shmoe's D4X raw file just like they handle Bob Smith's 1Ds Mark 3 raw file, save maybe for some image size differences.
By the way- RAW = Canon, NRF(I think?) = Nikon. Confusing that the style of file is called "raw" but Canon has a format called RAW. Please use capitalization to distinguish between the Canon format and the general style of compressed image.
Please help metamoderate.
Since many people here are not photographers and don't deal with RAW formats, let me but it in simple terms.
.NEF files. Canon uses .CRW and .CR2.
.CR2 format. However, none of my existing programs could work with it, even though it is similar to the .CR2 format found in the Canon 1D Mark II. There was a hack for Photoshop CS that worked, but the "As Shot" white balance was wrong. Adobe released the new Camera Raw plug-in today and it works good.
Each camera has there own RAW format. Read each Manufacturer has their own proprietary format. Some even have multiple formats. For example, Nikon uses
Photographers work with RAW because it is lossless and can be recorded with 16 or 12 bits of data per pixel, where JPEG and TIFFS tend to be 8 bits per pixel. Also, as mentioned already, settings such as white balance, tone, sharpness, color, and even exposure compensation can be applied after the shot was taken.
BTW: Post-Processing is a HUGE part of Digital SLR photography for those that are only used to the Point and Shoot cameras.
Now for why it is a good thing to have a unified RAW format. I recently purchased the Canon 20D. It included a new
With each new camera release, all software writers will have to update their program if they want to support the new cameras. At the rate at which DSLR's seem to be announced this could be a huge pain. If a company like Adobe could convince the market the their DNG file is the way to go, your software would only have to work with that format.
Hell yes. Unlike with a raster image such as JPEG or PNG, the data from a camera sensor is most likely a Bayer array - alternating lines of Red/Green and Blue/Green sensors, rather than RGB triplets, so it's not so much RGB, as RGBG. (There are some varients/exceptions in the in sensors from Foveon, Fuji and Sony). There is also a lot of data specific to the exposure; duration, ISO, lens details, etc. which would need to be applied in camera before a raster image could be produced. With RAW, you can apply these settings after the event in Photoshop or whatever. Exposed the sky correctly, but got the ground off by a stop? No problem; "develop" the RAW twice and use the sky from one shot and the ground from the other for a much better result than "enhancing" the ground in an image editor.
Yes, you could have most of this with a tweaked version of PNG and a bunch of ID3 type tags (and maybe that's exactly what Adobe has done, I haven't looked at the file format yet). The main benefit though is to make it very easy for data exchange and solve the nightmare situation whereby each new sensor has it's own RAW format. The state of play at the moment is a nightmare for vendors like Adobe who need to update their software for almost every new high-end camera release. Likewise for the makers of those "digital photo stations" that are cropping up like Starbucks, or their little brethren; the printers you can plug a camera into directly. With a standard like DNG to support you gain the much larger colour gamut of the RAW format and more flexibility in tweaking the image for a better print.
Anyway, you can read the actual Adobe press release, or download a free (beer) DNG converter here to find out a little more.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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
I see a lot of posts asking why bother. What I'm more concerned about is how this could work ?
Ignoring the differences in the various RAW formats between manufacturers, what about differences between two cameras from the same manufacturer ? What causes that and would DNG cater for it ?
As an example, look at the Nikon D70 and the D100. Adobe had full support for the D100 with their ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) plugin. But when the D70 came out, we waited months for true compatibility with Photoshop (yeah, yeah, you could use the nikon supplied plugin, but that was worthless really).
I'm guessing Adobe want this because in order to keep selling Photoshop to photographers, they have to keep amending ACR everytime a new camera comes out. But can a fixed standard cater for everything that Canon and Nikon will be putting in their cameras, and want to store in the RAW files 2 years from now ?
So they're gonna be pronounced as "Ding" I'm assuming, consider the possibilities:
.. Dude, is that a ding of my dong? HTF DID YOU GET THAT?"
... I shall stop here
Dude2: "Hey Dude, I have a funny picture to send you"
Dude1: "Dude, wait, I have dialup and it's gonna take forever"
Dude2: "No way dude, it's a ding, it'll only take a moment, here it comes"
Dude1: "Okay, got it
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
When you shoot in JPEG and even in TIFF with any current camera the internal processor applies white balance, color, contrast, sharpening and other algorithms to the data and saves it in the chosen format, typically JPEG at anywhere from a 1:2 to 1:8 loss compression ratio.
This is great for point, click, print. But for hobbyist and professional photographers this eliminates a lot of the post-shot production that can be done to the image later, even if it's a TIFF file. With a RAW image format you can apply those effects afterward, unapply them and generally tweak the output. My Nikon came with some software that allows me to set the white balance using the same algorithm the camera would do internally if I shot JPEG. But with the in-camera option if I don't like the results, tough. Sure, I can tweak it later in Photoshop but I can't fundamentally alter the effect. This is particularly frustrating for effects like white balance and sharpening. Having the RAW format, also known as the "digital negative", gives the photographer much more flexibility.
Why do we need a universal file format? Because every camera manufacturer out there has a different one that programmers have to figure out and photographers have to put up with (not that professionals change kit all that often). With Photoshop CS Adobe helped photographers out by putting in an excellent RAW reader but someone at a Adobe has to keep up with all these specifications. If all the camera manufacturers would adopt ONE format then Adobe AND open source developers could focus their time on the important business of digital photography -- producing excellent final photos.
Another benefit of the RAW format hinted above is that for programs like the GIMP developers waste a lot of time trying to reverse engineer these formats. As you can imagine a lot of the camera manufacturers aren't out there sharing the love with their specifications. The one format that's been best reverse engineered is the Canon RAW format with varying levels of success going down from there for Nikon, Minolta et al.
Lastly, let's not forget the benefit of having a common format for long-term archival and retrieval. Anybody out there have any binary files they can't get into any more? A common RAW format will reduce the chances of being orphaned with files you can't read.
In summary, then, this is a huge benefit for everyone as we can all focus on digital image production using a shared format and libraries and less on figuring all these formats out. The only question the article doesn't address is whether Adobe are releasing the format into the wild, as it were, or plan to setup a "toll" on it via patents.
In my opinion, working with the bare bones of their technology, ALL of it is well thought out, comprehensive and well explained.
They consider all of the difficulties of the problem domain. For instance, see how easy it is in PDF to create changes to an existing document, great for low powered CPUs. Just append the changed object and add on a new footer to the file. 95% of the file retained, which is a lot less expensive than re-generation of the whole file.
I think Adobe will do a good job here and post the specifications ala PDF and Postscript.
Not mentioned in the other comments is the run time hardware cost of saving this Digital Negative. I think Adobe will put effort into making this as friendly to integrated hardware capture as possible. A large portion of this has to be very little re-ordering of data as it comes from the CCD, as these usually require an in memory buffer. This fundamentally changes the nature of the format.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
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.
We really shouldn't even call it an image format. Most people think of image formats as a way to compress and store image data for viewing or printing; things like JPEG or GIF or PNG.
DNG is a format for storing the data recorded by the CCD's in a digital camera. This data can of course be processed and displayed as an image, but DNG really isn't an image format exactly.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
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.
Amen to that. At the risk of sounding like an elitist asshole, it's obvious that a good many folks on Slashdot don't know much about photography, and think that just because they bought Sony's newest fucking Cybershot that they're the next Helmut Newton.
As for myself, I've been eagerly waiting for an influential company to propose something like this; I work in a pro lab, and having to master and keep up to date on a dozen different raw converters is very stressful. A single standardized open format that I can use right inside Photoshop (at work) or the Gimp (at home) is like the holy grail to me!
It would be interesting if this could somehow be adapted to 35mm or medium format negative scanners, too. Being able to do big corrections after the scan would save me a hell of a lot of time.
They are using TIFF-EP as a base - a thing they didn't even develop. So how would they have a submarine patent on anything here? If there were a submarine patent related to TIFF we would have seen that long ago. Since it's really TIFF and metadata, there simply is nothing to torpedo with the submarine.
This is just a graphic file format like any other, using bog-standard compression and metadata standards. It's just a more standard bag for raw camera data than what we've seen before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In astronomical work, there are usually two calibration images you use: the dark frame and the flat. The dark frame is an image captured with the shutter closed. It lets you identify the hot (i.e. broken) pixels. The flat is an image of a uniform field exposed just long enough not to saturate any pixels. This lets you measure the relative light sensitivity of the pixels (which is a function of both the lens and the CCD).
To get a corrected image, use this formula for each pixel:
newimage = (image - dark) / (flat - dark)
Better yet, take a bunch of darks and flats and median-filter them to get rid of cosmic rays which can introduce spurious glitches in the images.
Well, a raw file is a lot more compact, and it does not do anything to change the artifacts and or "lossyness" of the sensor itself.
For instance the Canon cameras use a Bayer sensor. Imagine a checkerboard where half the sensors, are green , arranged in a checkerboard pattern, and the other half the sensors alternate between red and blue. The 12 bit value of each sensor site is encoded as the eight bit difference between it and the nearest same color site to its left. ( Amiga developers will find this vaguely familiar) The theoretical case of there being a full 12 bit difference between 2 sites never happens due to the optical properties of the camera and lens.