Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: JDClements on January 18, 2009, 09:13:16 pm

Title: Lightroom cannot handle DNG files. Why?
Post by: JDClements on January 18, 2009, 09:13:16 pm
When using external editors, Lightroom can only work with PSD and TIF files. Why is that? It seems odd to me that it can't pass and receive DNG files, or am I missing something?
Title: Lightroom cannot handle DNG files. Why?
Post by: wolfnowl on January 19, 2009, 01:25:34 am
Are you sure it's not your editor that can't work with .dng files?  Photoshop for example doesn't write to raw files.

Mike.
Title: Lightroom cannot handle DNG files. Why?
Post by: JDClements on January 19, 2009, 08:56:59 pm
DxO Optics can work with DNG files, then import the result into Lightroom. You can also pass a DNG from within LR to DxO, but it will return a TIFF. I asked them why, and their response was that it was a limitation of Lightroom: It can only return PSD or TIFF files from external editors.

It seems like a strange limitation to me.
Title: Lightroom cannot handle DNG files. Why?
Post by: NikosR on January 20, 2009, 12:38:02 am
Quote from: JDClements
DxO Optics can work with DNG files, then import the result into Lightroom. You can also pass a DNG from within LR to DxO, but it will return a TIFF. I asked them why, and their response was that it was a limitation of Lightroom: It can only return PSD or TIFF files from external editors.

It seems like a strange limitation to me.

LR can only pass non-raw files to external editors. That was a design decision in LR AFAIK. DxO 'tricks' LR and gets the original raw file from it but this is not an officially supported LR operation.
Title: Lightroom cannot handle DNG files. Why?
Post by: digitaldog on January 20, 2009, 10:00:26 am
Quote from: JDClements
DxO Optics can work with DNG files, then import the result into Lightroom.

Ah but is this rendered data inside the DNG or Raw data? I seriously doubt DxO is handing off anything but rendered data (how could Lightroom understand whatever proprietary processing metadata Dx0 produced and use it within the LR engine?).

A DNG isn't necessarily a digital negative unfortunately, despite the name.
Title: Lightroom cannot handle DNG files. Why?
Post by: NikosR on January 20, 2009, 12:13:26 pm
Quote from: digitaldog
Ah but is this rendered data inside the DNG or Raw data? I seriously doubt DxO is handing off anything but rendered data (how could Lightroom understand whatever proprietary processing metadata Dx0 produced and use it within the LR engine?).

A DNG isn't necessarily a digital negative unfortunately, despite the name.

It is RGB data in linear DNG format
Title: Lightroom cannot handle DNG files. Why?
Post by: digitaldog on January 20, 2009, 12:28:22 pm
Quote from: NikosR
It is RGB data in linear DNG format

Then its not Raw data but rendered data.
Title: Lightroom cannot handle DNG files. Why?
Post by: NikosR on January 20, 2009, 01:19:47 pm
Quote from: digitaldog
Then its not Raw data but rendered data.

Of course