Abobe DNG Converter
This is an update to our Digital Photography Workflow. I wrote about the workflow in previous article. It turns out that article described the old workflow. Our new workflow is almost the same but it makes use of the new Adobe DNG Converter program.
Adobe DNG Converter
Adobe DNG Converter is a free program available for the Macintosh or PC that converts many different raw camera formats to Adobe DNG. It works with pretty much all the Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Kodak digital cameras out there.
Under our old workflow, we opened camera RAW files in Adobe Bridge, did all the adjustments, and then converted to DNG using Bridge.
The change is that now we use the Adobe DNG Converter program to convert Camera RAW files straight out of the camera directly into Adobe Digital Negative files, before color correction is performed. After that the workflow is the same as before.
With the new workflow the RAW files out of the camera never get opened. Instead they are immediately converted to .dng files and then archived. This streamlines the workflow and speeds things up. It shows that the digital negative format is central to our image processing and storage.
A minor annoyance with camera RAW files was all the editing is contained in sidecar files which are separate from the RAW files. You have to keep them together and the names have to match. I remember one time the sidecar files accidently got renamed and it created a real mess. Someone had to write a Unix shell script to read the sidecar files and rename them to match the RAW file. Sidecar files are just text files and one line has the name of the RAW file it applies to.
A downside to the new workflow is that if we ever need to go back to the original camera RAW archives, all the edits will be lost.
You can find the links to download Adobe DNG Converter for Macintosh or Windows on theAdobe’s DNG Page. You can also find the DNG Specification, DNG Profile Editor and other information.
Additional Resources
Below is a link to a page on the Adobe website that has a bunch of PDF files about Camera Raw and DNG. Some of the article are written by Bruce Fraser. Highly recommended that you download this stuff and study it.
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:59 am
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