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Author Topic: Understanding DNG adoption  (Read 12785 times)

sandymc

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Re: Understanding DNG adoption
« Reply #20 on: August 12, 2012, 09:48:49 am »

I keep getting back to the point, if it's good enough for Leica, why not Nikon, Canon, etc?

Leica is many times too small to be able to afford their own raw development software, and, at the time the DMR and M8 were introduced, probably even too small and insignificant a producer to have any certainty that Adobe would have supported a Leica prop format. That's probably changed now that the M8 and M9 have been successful, but remember where Leica were when they adopted DNG.

Sandy
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ErikKaffehr

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Re: Understanding DNG adoption
« Reply #21 on: August 13, 2012, 01:14:21 am »

Hi,

As usual, Wayne makes a very good point.

I sort of presumed that a majority of advanced shooters would use raw, but it seems it's the other way around.

Best regards
Erik

As the owner of a small camera store that sells quite a few systems I can tell you raw has a long way to go.  This may not be true on the very high end (D4 or D1x) where the expense of the camera is somewhat limited to very serious shooters, but even those are often sports shooters who try to nail it with jpeg just to speed their workflow/time to publish.  Understand I"m sort of a specialty shop, and the majority of these cameras are being sold at Best Buy or Costco ...

And it's not middle age dentists with a mid life crises ... they may buy the camera but their wife ends up using it.  And most women don't want to be bothered with anything technical.  Give them P mode, jpeg and they are good to go.  Certainly there are exceptions, and over the last year there is some movement towards raw by them.

but then to the next level, Lightroom hasn't penetrated that demographic nearly as strongly as one might think.  I teach a basic LR class, and normally I get 3 or 4 out of the 8 that fit this category that are trying to figure out whether to use LR or not.  I'm guessing less than 15 or 20% prosumer and top end dslr's we sell are to someone that uses LR.  Most use iPhoto or a Windows equivalent or just use the included software.

This means boycotting camera makers won't do it, and they're not feeling any pressure at all to look at a standard.

Probably the only thing that might change it is a political mandate by some significant governing body such as the European Union or US (or even better both) that requires all digital cameras to save their raw data in a standard format.  Unfortunately I don't see enough users wanting that to bring any pressure to those governing bodies either.

At some point you would think they would do it as a matter of economics ... just like Leica no longer has any one on staff developing raw software, all of the camera makers could do the same.

Another issue might be the camera makers don't want to be come dependent on a 3rd party company that may choose not to help them as quickly as they would like so they could release a new camera which needs some additions/tweaking to DNG, and they probably also don't like the idea that pushing DNG could be a huge financial windfall for Adobe with no compensation to them.  I may be totally out to lunch of those two (sort of thinking out loud)  ... and this would be more about their perception, not the reality of the situation.
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Erik Kaffehr
 

Bryan Conner

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Re: Understanding DNG adoption
« Reply #22 on: August 13, 2012, 02:06:05 am »

My wife and I have a good friend that is the type of photographer that Wayne is talking about.  He has a Nikon D700, several pieces of older Nikon glass, lots of gadgets, etc.  He travels several times per year, for weeks at a time, to places all over the world and takes thousands of travel photos of very beautiful and exotic places.  He only shoots jpegs.  He only shoots in program mode.  He knows that raw processing offers more control, but he is satisfied with his camera's jpeg files.  He does not print any images, he shows them on his high end HUGE flat screen TV.  Before digital, he shot only slides.  He has continued his photography in the same way.  He shoots digital "slides" now.
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deejjjaaaa

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Re: Understanding DNG adoption
« Reply #23 on: August 13, 2012, 11:21:22 am »

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Wayne Fox

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Re: Understanding DNG adoption
« Reply #24 on: August 14, 2012, 02:32:52 am »

Hi,

As usual, Wayne makes a very good point.

I sort of presumed that a majority of advanced shooters would use raw, but it seems it's the other way around.

Best regards
Erik

well I think a lot of "advanced" shooters do shoot raw.  But "advanced" shooters are a minority of the overall camera buyers.
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Alan Goldhammer

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Re: Understanding DNG adoption
« Reply #25 on: August 14, 2012, 08:23:17 am »

well I think a lot of "advanced" shooters do shoot raw.  But "advanced" shooters are a minority of the overall camera buyers.
Perhaps the only way to get this type of number is from the Adobe Lightroom sales which would give a fair approximation (one would assume that JPEG shooters would not need Lightroom).  As I look at their annual and quarterly financials they don't break this number out.
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ednazarko

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Re: Understanding DNG adoption
« Reply #26 on: August 14, 2012, 09:33:16 am »

I feel antsy about proprietary formats about once every three years, when I buy a camera with a raw format or new body that's not yet supported by Adobe raw processors. (Sony RX-100 today.)  I'm grumpy and complain about proprietary formats that add no value, wonder why everyone doesn't just get on the bandwagon for SOME common raw format.  Then the update comes out for Adobe raw, suddenly I'm back to working with the multiple raw formats with no more thought about the file format than I would have if they were all jpg files... and the issue fades away.

I understand the concerns that some camera manufacturers may have about the current DNG being "Adobe DNG" having watched the period of jpg litigation.  I understand the manufacturers wanting to have a proprietary format because somewhere deep inside they believe that some day, they're going to come up with something really brilliant where they need complete control over the raw file's capabilities.  (Struggling to remember when that's last actually happened, but it's a possibility.) But as someone who, in his day job, works with applications that run under Unix, several forms of Linux, AIX, Solaris, Xenix (ok, I haven't seen Xenix in 20 years, but it used to be in the mix), I know it's possible to have a standard, with theoretically brilliant unique variations, and still provide superior interoperability and file consistency.  So a real digital negative would not necessarily impede innovation even at the digital level.

Even more...  My day job employer has donated some of its most interesting software application discoveries and patents to open source foundations, something that caused huge amounts of shock when it was first done, and continues today to confound peoples' thinking about intellectual property. (Trying to stay within the bounds of my day job's restrictions on what I say in public here...) Most of today's exciting massive data analytics and unstructured information processing use discoveries that were handed over to the public domain for free. Every competitor now has their own tweaks on those OS capabilities, and swears theirs are the best, but underneath the veneer code, there are common formats and processes - there have to be, or your tweak version will fall behind the progressive OS builds that add enormous stability and new functionality.  Much of the world's infrastructure now is built on massive heaps of open source frameworks, file formats, and message formats of all sorts.

Give DNG to the Apache Foundation, or to someone who's got no tie or stake in Adobe's (or any other corporate entity's) success.  Let people (including corporations with an interest in seeing new capabilities in the format) hack away at it and progress it in the managed form that OS frameworks and software follow. That might make it work.  As my day job employer discovered a very long time ago, sometimes the best way to create positive innovation pressure in the market that is good for their own bottom line requires the whole world to be working on shaping foundational IP.

As long as the name "Adobe" appears within a few words of "DNG" in any discussion, DNG is likely to remain DOA as a common format.

But as of today... that doesn't affect me much, because Adobe has kept pace with the manufacturers' raw formats quite nicely.  I'm almost unaware of how many raw formats populate my drive arrays.  (But get to work on the RX-100...)
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32BT

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Re: Understanding DNG adoption
« Reply #27 on: August 22, 2012, 03:42:26 pm »

Was recently thinking about this:
How about an alternative in the form of DNG export from the manufacturers RAW conversion software? I realize it is not ideal, but could this be a possible approach towards manufacturers and beancounters?
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Schewe

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Re: Understanding DNG adoption
« Reply #28 on: August 22, 2012, 06:24:11 pm »

Was recently thinking about this:
How about an alternative in the form of DNG export from the manufacturers RAW conversion software? I realize it is not ideal, but could this be a possible approach towards manufacturers and beancounters?

Could work....Phase One's Capture One can do this, only problem is they are processing DNG spec 1.2 and are out of date. Capture One also has a hard time reading recent DNGs because of that (depending on what DNG options are used when saved).
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