- Joined
- May 1, 2021
- Messages
- 16
- Location
- New Zealand
- Lightroom Experience
- Intermediate
- Lightroom Version
- Classic
- Lightroom Version Number
- LR 5.6
- Operating System
- Windows 8
I am a keen and serious amateur photographer with a particular interest in nature, landscape, wildlife especially birds, and also candid shots of friends. For the past 12 years I have archived images as full-res DNG. Recently, partly reflecting the size of DNG from my newly acquired Sony A6600 (previously NEX 5N), I have been considering alternatives.
My workflow has been import files to LR as DNG (recently via DNG converter since LR 5 can't recognize the a6600 raw files) then do a multi stage series of delete rejects / develop selected runs. At a minimum develop means working with the histogram to get overall exposure balance where I want it. In most cases it means getting colors how I want them too and for the majority of images it means taking them right to the point of being ready for web upload and ready for a final print oriented develop tweak. I almost never print my images however I do like to leave them in a state where this is possible and the quality has not been ruined. I aim not to need to significantly re-develop my images in future.
I realize that many photographers would consider archiving anything less than fuil-res raw files to be a contradiction however I am not convinced this is necessarily true for my requirements.
I initially thought converting full-res DNG to Lossy DNG was the answer. This was based on a mis-conception as to what a lossy "Convert to DNG" would do. I was hoping it would look at the post developed pixels (rather than undeveloped raw original pixels) and apply lossy DNG compression to that. On further reading I now believe it applies Lossy compression based on original pixels in the raw image and then passes those back to LR along with the history of development actions.
I am not all that comfortable with this option since in situations where I have, for example, a dark image which requires lots of boosting of deep shadows, the lossy compression might well seriously reduce the quality of the aggressively boosted dark pixels. Similar problems could arise with overly light images or images with a particular color close to fully saturated.
This led me to considering using exported post development HQ (90%) jpg for archiving. Based on my workflow assumption that I do not re-work images again some time in the future, it seems to me this might actually do a better job of preserving the pixels that matter while managing to achieve a decent amount of compression. Of course I lose the history of development stages but again that does not necessarily matter if I have done a reasonable job of the initial development
I know there is another alternative which is more HDD space but for various reasons I would prefer not to go that path.
Thanks for your patience. I hope I have managed to make the question / concern comprehensible. I would be interested in your insights and opinions.
Cheers Andrew
My workflow has been import files to LR as DNG (recently via DNG converter since LR 5 can't recognize the a6600 raw files) then do a multi stage series of delete rejects / develop selected runs. At a minimum develop means working with the histogram to get overall exposure balance where I want it. In most cases it means getting colors how I want them too and for the majority of images it means taking them right to the point of being ready for web upload and ready for a final print oriented develop tweak. I almost never print my images however I do like to leave them in a state where this is possible and the quality has not been ruined. I aim not to need to significantly re-develop my images in future.
I realize that many photographers would consider archiving anything less than fuil-res raw files to be a contradiction however I am not convinced this is necessarily true for my requirements.
I initially thought converting full-res DNG to Lossy DNG was the answer. This was based on a mis-conception as to what a lossy "Convert to DNG" would do. I was hoping it would look at the post developed pixels (rather than undeveloped raw original pixels) and apply lossy DNG compression to that. On further reading I now believe it applies Lossy compression based on original pixels in the raw image and then passes those back to LR along with the history of development actions.
I am not all that comfortable with this option since in situations where I have, for example, a dark image which requires lots of boosting of deep shadows, the lossy compression might well seriously reduce the quality of the aggressively boosted dark pixels. Similar problems could arise with overly light images or images with a particular color close to fully saturated.
This led me to considering using exported post development HQ (90%) jpg for archiving. Based on my workflow assumption that I do not re-work images again some time in the future, it seems to me this might actually do a better job of preserving the pixels that matter while managing to achieve a decent amount of compression. Of course I lose the history of development stages but again that does not necessarily matter if I have done a reasonable job of the initial development
I know there is another alternative which is more HDD space but for various reasons I would prefer not to go that path.
Thanks for your patience. I hope I have managed to make the question / concern comprehensible. I would be interested in your insights and opinions.
Cheers Andrew