Hi Bart,
I find it boring that there is so much Japan bashing in the world. It is often said that Japanese don't know how to develop software/firmware and so on. I have much respekt for Japanese innovation.
Hi Erik,
I agree, and that's why I occasionally feel the need to also give a voice to the other side of the situation, for a more balanced view of what we're actually dealing with. Neither the anti Japanese companies attitude, nor Adobe idolization will lead to progress.
On the other hand Adobe has created much of standard tools in the photographic industry. If we mention TIFF it is a set of formats originating from Aldus/Adobe, so when you refer to TIFF/EP as an open standards predating DNG you also refer to Adobe technology.
Indeed, Aldus was bought by Adobe, but not much progress has been made since:
Adobe Systems, which acquired Aldus, now holds the copyright to the TIFF specification. TIFF has not had a major update since 1992, though several Aldus/Adobe technical notes have been published with minor extensions to the format, and several specifications, ...
One could ask oneself, what image quality improvement do we get from converting a Proprietary Raw format to DNG? If one is honest, the answer is none. It is just another container for the same data. It may benefit those who choose to work with Adobe programs in convenience because of some features that were added for that purpose.
Personally, I object to the state of the industry, where not only has each vendor an own format but that format is nut compatible between different products from the same firm. A company like Adobe or Phase One or anyone else needs to support not just CR2 or NEF but different versions of those programs. The differences are trivial.
I understand, but without getting too philosophical, one could also ask what are the benefits of patents or copyrights? There are those who say that patents slow down progress, and there are also those who claim that without patents there would not be enough incentive to do these investments in costly research without such a mechanism to recover the cost. I believe that issues around intellectual property are what is actually holding back the standardization of Raw formats. To be clear, DNG is not a Raw format, it is a container and as such not a solution.
I also agree that the differences between subsequent versions of Raw files from the same company may be small (when observed casually), and the differences between different manufacturers also appear to be not always that huge. However, that also means that there has to be no backwards compatibility to other Raw formats, maybe even technologies once used but by now surpassed by something superior. It allows to drop certain pieces of irrelevant information, and add new (even before they are unlocked by firmware for specific models). Maintaining backwards compatibility is very expensive, and leads to mistakes.
Another question, if your raw vendor goes out of business, who will keep your raw format alive? Yes, Nikon and Canon may live forever, but there is a lot of speculation that other companies may go belly up.
If any vendor goes out of business, and there is enough financial benefit, there will be others to step in. In fact, I think most Raw formats are readable by some converter, even if they may not provide better conversion quality than was available at the time. Sometimes there are even improvements, like for the Photo CD format where some official libraries produced issues that were later (after Kodak stopped supporting the format) solved by enthousiasts.
Let's also be clear that DNG does not solve this, because it is just a container. It does not provide decoding, it is the application that uses the container that adds that functionality.
It is very hard to demonstrate what benefit proprietary formats offer for either vendors or customers. What is raw data really? An array binary data, supposedly representing the sampled sensor signal. A couple of matrices describing the conversion from sensor RGB to CIE XYZ. A few numbers describing white balance. A list of bad pixels. What is secret about it, once Nikon even encrypted WB information.
Indeed, but as I've said earlier, it almost certainly has to do with Intellectual Property and Patents. Nikon probably thought that they could make/recuperate more money by selling royalties, and leave their competition guessing a bit longer about their secret developments and plans for future innovations.
Who owns my images, I the photographer or my camera vendor?
The photographer owns his images, but nobody is locked out because a converter will be supplied with the camera (and a little while later a reasonable alternative will be available for those who prefer to use other software).
A standard format, intelligently used, would help us to use any camera data we wish. A program can use well known and well defined tags and ignore vendor specific tags, which are possible in DNG as well in proprietary format.
Again, and Damon Lynch asked the right question, what is it that the DNG format intends to do or offer? Clearly converting from one format to another will not improve the quality, and there is a 'free' converter available for those who prefer DNGs for smoother interaction with/between Adobe applications.
DNG currently is nothing else than a container that mostly offers users of Adobe software some benefits. It does not decode anything, because that is the task of the image processing done by the software. I also know that e.g. Capture One V7 is able to extract higher quality conversions out of my legacy Raw files than it could before, so I'm glad that nothing was pre-cooked yet, and the original data was available. Converting my Canon Raws to DNG would not have made any difference, it might have even made it more risky had I done that with one of the earlier DNG versions.
The future proofing argument so far is pretty theoretical. New technologies will continue to replace old technologies, but we can usually convert from one to the next before that window of opportunity passes (think video to DVD, or grammophone record to one of the many alternative digital versions, or film images to scanned versions).
So the question remains, since we do not gain image quality gain by converting, or what else would be
a general benefit (also for the Camera makers) from such an activity.
Cheers,
Bart
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