RAW or DNG

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achrysos

achrysos

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I'm new to this forum (and aren't I glad I found it!) so apologies if this has come up in another post - I tried a search but couldn't find anything (which surprised me really).

I have a few questions if I may: what is the real difference between RAW and DNG? what are the advantages of one over the other? Should I switch.

I am shooting exclusively in RAW but have been wondering for sometime whether I should be converting to DNG. I am about to migrate from WinXP to a new iMac (yipee!!) and thought it would be a good time to think about these things before my catalogue gets too big (currently just short of 4''' images).

My thoughts were to archive the original RAW images to DVD (say) and to then import those as DNGs into LR - so the RAW gets archived but never touched. But this would double up the effective storage space that I need so my final question is - do I really need to do this?
 
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achrysos;142'3 said:
My thoughts were to archive the original RAW images to DVD (say) and to then import those as DNGs into LR - so the RAW gets archived but never touched. But this would double up the effective storage space that I need so my final question is - do I really need to do this?
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Antonio, welcome!

Many folks do exactly as you describe. You won't go too wrong that way. The question though, is it the "most right"? That's a subject of much debate and personal preference takes a big role. There doesn't seem to be a universal yes/no answer to your question. Lots of good reading in the links Braders listed.


Personally, I shoot RAW, backup to removable optical. Convert to DNG on import, and back-up the DNGs to external attached hard-drive(s). LR can help you do this almost automatically. There are other tools, which will do it all for you.
 
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Thanks guys - really helpful! I'll make sure to look at those links braders.

I think I'm convinced to do this, so the next question is (...sorry!) how can I do this to my existing collection without losing all my edits and metadata (assuming, that is, that I survive the migration from PC to Mac)?
 
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I'm going to let someone else answer that one. In fact, I'm partially in the same boat and will be interested in seeing some input too.

I simply drew a line on the calendar, and changed my processing after that date. I have several 1's of thousands of RAWs to back-convert, but I'm trying to not be compulsive about it :D. Currently, I'm just working thru old RAW based work, verifying/fixing keywording, picks, ratings, killing dupes, etc. The key thing I'm doing is making sure everything has XMP sidecars. In spite of all my "one-catalog" preaching, I still have a lot of legacy work spread across several catalogs. Plus, I'm kind of stalling 'til LR2 ships.

My intent is to use the standalone DNG converter, to process the RAW/XMP combinations into DNGs outside of LR, and then do an import into my master catalog. And finally delete the old mixed-up multiple catalogs. My testing shows the DNG converter will 'read' the XMP sidecars, so that's why I'm making sure I have them for everything.

There may be a better way, if your catalog is organized just the way you want. I believe LR2 will do a combination export/reimport in one pass. So you could export DNGs, and then reimport them. Then just 'remove' the RAWs from the catalog. You'd still have to deal with the RAW files on disk, tho'.
However, LR2's not quite ready for primetime yet.

Victoria works with many catalogs, I'm hopeful she'll have a suggestion.
 
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Brad Snyder said:
Victoria works with many catalogs, I'm hopeful she'll have a suggestion.
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I do work with many catalogs (well, just 4 main ones for different uses!!), but I'm afraid I have nothing useful to add here.

I've considered DNG, but personally I'm rather fond of xmp sidecar files. They're very easy to archive and transfer between machines, and if I ever need to see what settings I applied to a file, I can just open the xmp in a text editor without having to go find the raw file (for weddings, I keep a copy of the xmp's on my local drive, whereas the raws are off on networked storage and just sent to me as needed)

So I'm at the other extreme - I'd like to see sidecars for jpegs too.
 
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achrysos said:
Thanks guys - really helpful! I'll make sure to look at those links braders.

I think I'm convinced to do this, so the next question is (...sorry!) how can I do this to my existing collection without losing all my edits and metadata (assuming, that is, that I survive the migration from PC to Mac)?
Click to expand...


I used the DNG converter from Adobe to achieve this. Assuming you have sufficient space on a disk (you need double the size of your image collection), copy your RAW files in their folders/sub-folders/etc. Run the DNG converter on this copy, using the 'save in the same folder' and 'preserve sub-folders' options. Go and enjoy life for a while whilst this all happens (it takes some time depending on the size of your collection).

When finished, go through each sub-folder, click 'order by type' and then select everything but the DNG files and delete them. You will end up with a set of DNGs all in a folder structure identical to the RAW one you started with.

Does this help?

Anthony.
 
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This is great! Thanks for all the advice and, as soon as my new baby ... erm, computer, arrives I will give it a go.

Apart from Victoria, who I'm sure has perfectly sound reasons of her own for sticking with the RAW - who am I to question her - what I'm hearing seems to be positive for converting to DNG at the start of the workflow. Am I right?
 
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achrysos said:
This is great! Thanks for all the advice and, as soon as my new baby ... erm, computer, arrives I will give it a go.

Apart from Victoria, who I'm sure has perfectly sound reasons of her own for sticking with the RAW - who am I to question her - what I'm hearing seems to be positive for converting to DNG at the start of the workflow. Am I right?
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My originals are untouched and I create DNG as the working file. I feel I get the best of both worlds this way.

I twittered on in this thread about my workflow. you may find it interesting...

http://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/showthread.php?t=2'26&page=2



Anthony.
 
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achrysos said:
This is great! Thanks for all the advice and, as soon as my new baby ... erm, computer, arrives I will give it a go.

Apart from Victoria, who I'm sure has perfectly sound reasons of her own for sticking with the RAW - who am I to question her - what I'm hearing seems to be positive for converting to DNG at the start of the workflow. Am I right?
Click to expand...

Just to stick another $.'2 in here, I'm definitely w/ Victoria on this topic. Love xmp files and wish LR used them for ALL images. Why? Does anyone recall the bit of trouble that was caused by the 1.4 release? If I remember correctly, LR 1.4 was screwing up some part of the metadata in DNG files from some camera's raw files. OK, that got fixed by pulling the update, but I seem to recall a number of early adopters who wished they hadn't been so quick to upgrade. That was just an example. It can happen anytime w/ any software in this highly complex environment we work in. I'd be happier if LR (and all other photo manipulation SW) never wrote anything into my original files, no matter what format they are in. Cheers,
 
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Bruce,

Why I've stayed away from this option is that writing the xmp files seriously affects the performance of LR - or do you do your edits, keep them in the catalogue and then write out the xmp manually?

But then, my thinking was, if all of my edits are in the LR catalogue why do I need to write them out to separate xmp files? Unless you're going to import your images to some other 3rd party software that's not PS (or Elements in my case).
 
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achrysos said:
Bruce,

Why I've stayed away from this option is that writing the xmp files seriously affects the performance of LR - or do you do your edits, keep them in the catalogue and then write out the xmp manually?
Click to expand...

Yes, the later. I've never used the auto-write xmp function in LR. My workflow is set up so that I always manually write the xmp files out when I've finished working on a set of images. In fact, it's the last thing I do even if I'm only working on a single image. A quick ctrl-a, ctrl-s, and it's done. LR only writes the xmp files for images that have been changed, so it's very quick.

achrysos said:
But then, my thinking was, if all of my edits are in the LR catalogue why do I need to write them out to separate xmp files? Unless you're going to import your images to some other 3rd party software that's not PS (or Elements in my case).
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Belt & suspenders! I can't read the LR catalogue, at least not easily. Not being very good at predicting the future, I'm a bit leery of having all my editing work tied up in LR. I might decide to use something else in the future. Xmp files are simple text files. I can read them with a text editor and, if necessary, I can process them with a bit of simple programming.

But, the primary reason I like xmp technology is, as I indicated earlier, it means that the processing software (LR or whatever) never has to write to the original image file. IMHO, that's true non-destructive editing. I'd really like to make my original image files read-only as soon as they're copied to the hard disk; that's how software paranoid I am. Could have something to do with having spent nearly 5' years programming!

I really liked the idea of DNG format when it was first proposed. If Adobe had kept it as an alternative RAW format, I'd probably be using it now. But, the powers that be had a better idea and decided to store all of the metadata in the DNG file. Not safe, in my opinion. If I used DNG format, I'd have to back-up both the original RAW files and the DNG files. I don't see the advantage of that. If Adobe ever decides to drop RAW support for the cameras that I've used, then I might be forced to convert those images to DNG. Until they do, I continue to take RAW images and manage my metadata, as much as possible, in xmp files. I also keep multiple backups in two locations.

To give you a sense of where I'm coming from, I have 3','''+ digital images, about 1/4 are currently in a single LR catalogue. I'm slowly chewing my way through the rest, which are primarily scans from slides and negatives. I have a lot of time invested in editing, keywording, etc., and I'm trying very hard not to lose any of it as I hate do-overs. Not trying to knock anyone else's workflow, but this is what works for me. Cheers,
 
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achrysos said:
Why I've stayed away from this option is that writing the xmp files seriously affects the performance of LR - or do you do your edits, keep them in the catalogue and then write out the xmp manually?
Click to expand...

I'm with Bruce on this one - although autowrite is a comparatively minor performance hit on the latest releases, I prefer to be in control, so every session is ended with a cmd-s.

But then, my thinking was, if all of my edits are in the LR catalogue why do I need to write them out to separate xmp files? Unless you're going to import your images to some other 3rd party software that's not PS (or Elements in my case).
Click to expand...
You don't.... except catalogs have been known to become corrupted, and xmp files are a useful secondary backup plan.
 
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