Convert to DNG in Lightroom? Or keep the CR2?

LV Moose wrote in post #17581030
Boy, I remember those
And I still have some 3.5" disks along with an external disk drive that I can use.

To this day, every time I do some "new" clean outs of boxes in the attic or of the closet in my classroom I magically find a pack of unopened 3.5" floppies... It's like there is a floppy disk gnome randomly hiding them in stuff for me to find...

Well, there's a Title Fairy, why not a floppy-disk gnome?

Zip Drive.

GeoKras1989 wrote in post #17580742
I don't get the point of DNG. Adobe sells it as 'forever compatibility', which makes no sense to me. I have LR 5.7, DPP 3.n, and DPP 4.n now, which all work with every Canon camera currently on the market. Does someone plan to sneak into my computer and remove the current programs? Or send out a firmware update for my cameras that makes them incompatible? Sure, maybe someday Adobe will stop supporting new Canon cameras. At that point Adobe will go out of business. My old software will still be compatible with my old cameras. DNG makes no sense at all to me.

GeoKras1989 wrote in post #17580906
This makes no sense to me. If my current version of LR works NOW on my 60D/6D/G15/260HS, how does Adobe not supporting those cameras in the future have any bearing at all on how my current version of LR works? Sure, they can stop supporting cameras in future versions. LR 5.7 will ALWAYS support the cameras I have now. The CR2 obsolescence issue is a red herring. If Adobe stops supporting Canon cameras, Adobe will become irrelevant. Whatever file format they have will go away with the company. DNG may well be useful for HDR and Panos, but that is internal to Adobe programs. Lots of other software is available to do those things. DNG offers nothing outside of the Adobe platform. So far, it never has. I can't see how it ever will.

Adobe has made the DNG format open-source/public, so someone can always provide a tool for it. CR2 files are proprietary and any support for them outside of Canon is done via reverse-egineering if I recall. Software bloat could be a reason old native RAW formats are dropped one day (just a guess) or perhaps the new (as in future) algorithms won't work or won't work well on the older RAW data for whatever reason.

As for the bold - why it matters now? It doesn't. But let's say x number of years from now your current CR2 file is no longer supported by your favorite raw converter and you want to reprocess the file due to advances in raw converters - with DNG that would still supposedly be possible. Scott Kelby has mentioned this. He went back to some photos he shot a few years ago and reprocessed them in a newer version of Lr than what he had at the time because the "process" version, tools and brushes were updated and yielded better results.

I don't convert. I'm still using a 30D and the I don't see a point in converting. Maybe one day I will for this "future proof" bit, but not for size. I will consider converting from the start if DNGs are "good enough" for me and are considerably smaller than the RAW from whatever camera I may finally get (I sooo want a 7D mkII right now). I'm not concerned about any imperceivable quality loss.

Wilt wrote in post #17580912
I did NOT raise the issue of ADOBE 'not supporting those cameras in the future'...I used the example of Canon wanting to drop support for CR2 for 20D or 30D in its own software. But what guarantees that Windows 10 or Windows 25 128-bit can even load and run LR3 32-bit or LR5 64-bit in the future? If they do not run, then what?

And we are back to Adobe WILL still support the 20D. So what if Canon drops their cr2 support, TOTALLY? If Adobe continues to support old versions of CR2, what do you need DNG for? Just work the CR2 in whatever Adobe product you have. Canon could NEVER have supported its own files. In that case, I'd still be using LR and CR2 files. There isn't a shred of a reason in this thread to EVER use DNG outside of an Adobe product. I don't see how anything Canon could do could make DNG useful.

This is an interesting look at DNG:

http://www.openraw.org​/node/1482/

The DNG spec is "open" but the software that does the work is not open source. There is an SDK to interface with the DNG code, available from Adobe for free.

dcraw, the raw decoding C library, is open source.

kirk

kirkt wrote in post #17581350
Zip Drive.

Ugh, just realized that I still have some. Only two weeks ago, I got rid of the last old computer that the drive can plug in to. Those zip drives should have gone away with the rest of my old computer junk.

Those Zip disks contained some of the papers that I wrote in college 20 years ago, and a couple of CAD projects, and probably some Soundgarden MP3s. You know, important things that need to be preserved forever.

nathancarter wrote in post #17581434
Ugh, just realized that I still have some. Only two weeks ago, I got rid of the last old computer that the drive can plug in to. Those zip drives should have gone away with the rest of my old computer junk.

Those Zip disks contained some of the papers that I wrote in college 20 years ago, and a couple of CAD projects, and probably some Soundgarden MP3s. You know, important things that need to be preserved forever.

Exactly.

kirk

kirkt wrote in post #17581431
This is an interesting look at DNG:

http://www.openraw.org​/node/1482/

The DNG spec is "open" but the software that does the work is not open source. There is an SDK to interface with the DNG code, available from Adobe for free.

kirk

So in order to use the open source DNG I would have to use software that already supports CR2, and go through a few more layers of coniption to use the DNG. That makes perfect sense. This software natively opens CR2, but I'd rather take the time to convert to DNG, then hassle with more gibba-gibba just to get the software I'm already using to open files I could have opened without converting. Got it. Do any DNG users ever wonder why this format is NOT more popular?

GeoKras1989 wrote in post #17581428
And we are back to Adobe WILL still support the 20D. So what if Canon drops their cr2 support, TOTALLY? If Adobe continues to support old versions of CR2, what do you need DNG for? Just work the CR2 in whatever Adobe product you have. Canon could NEVER have supported its own files. In that case, I'd still be using LR and CR2 files. There isn't a shred of a reason in this thread to EVER use DNG outside of an Adobe product. I don't see how anything Canon could do could make DNG useful.

Some cameras use DNG as their RAW format - I think that was one of Adobe's other goals - a common file across all platforms instead of all these closed proprietary formats.

jc1350 wrote in post #17581438
Some cameras use DNG as their RAW format - I think that was one of Adobe's other goals - a common file across all platforms instead of all these closed proprietary formats.

That was a very nice goal. It seems to have fallen flat on its face, though.

GeoKras1989 wrote in post #17581428
And we are back to Adobe WILL still support the 20D. So what if Canon drops their cr2 support, TOTALLY? If Adobe continues to support old versions of CR2, what do you need DNG for? Just work the CR2 in whatever Adobe product you have. Canon could NEVER have supported its own files. In that case, I'd still be using LR and CR2 files. There isn't a shred of a reason in this thread to EVER use DNG outside of an Adobe product. I don't see how anything Canon could do could make DNG useful.

I do not disagree, i was merely taking into consideration the many possibilities of the future, and what might happen in each of those cases, to have continued access to our very old data.

Those businesses who thought the 3 Billion dollar company Wang Technologies would not disappear, or that the 116 Billion dollar Digital Equipment Corporation would not disappear, and leave them suddenly with the challenge of past data access were sorely left with problems on their hands for lack of sufficient foresight. Adobe was only 4 Billion in revenue in 2013, so we cannot be assured it will continue to exist; Digital Equipment was purchased by Compaq which foundered, and now while some of DEC products are produced under the HP name, HP itself has not been the paradigm of fiscal success.

GeoKras1989 wrote in post #17581442
That was a very nice goal. It seems to have fallen flat on its face, though.

Agreed.

Well if your still using let's say a 20D, then you will need a raw converter that supports it. No if ands or buts, however if the converter no longer runs on "modern"/"future" OSs, then it's useless, sorta like older scanners with no driver support for Vista and newer.


Also on the lines of CR2s... look how many programs can handle an old graphics format like LBM (good ole Deluxe Paintbrush's format), just a few. Thankfully anything I had in LBM has been lost to time.

Interesting. Seems as though most are in favor of the original flavor. I think I'll try that out and I hope it doesn't cause any problems in my existing catalogue.