Adobe Offers Standard For Raw Photo Formats

KingFish

Adobe Systems on Monday unveiled a digital photo format that it hopes will become an industry standard, plus a tool designed to convert photos to that format from the many that are used today.

With the company's new Digital Negative specification and converter tool, users can translate and store raw files, which contain images prior to any in-camera processing, from more than 65 types of cameras. This process is different from storing the images as JPEGs or TIFFs, which are altered from an image's raw file. One concern about the myriad raw formats currently in use is that they're tied to specific camera models, creating a risk that over time, the formats used to archive some photos may not be supported, Adobe said. The Digital Negative, or DNG, format can be used in digital cameras, printers and software products for free, without legal restrictions.

Source: ZDNet

primesuspect

I can't wait for this. When you buy a mid- to high-end digital camera, you want to obviously use the maximum resolution, which means using a RAW format. That's fine, but the only program I can open the RAW files in is Photoshop CS (even Photoshop 7 won't let you unless you buy the $99 camera raw plugin, which is no longer even sold, cause they want you to buy photoshop CS)... You can use Extensis Portofolio 7, but that's only a sorting/cataloging program and that's $200!

It's a pain not having a universal RAW format. Hopefully with DNG, vendors of other software like Picasa will toss in support for a single format (Rather than having to make a filter for Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Minolta, etc.) and then I can use RAW mode ALL the time instead of only when I want to take "real" pictures

Once again, Adobe leads the pack in standards. Go PDF!

KingFish

My sentiments exactly.. Adobe rocks w00t