Lightroom: New RAW Formats

You have just bought a new Nikon DZx or a new Olympus D/E333330 or a new Canikon Z45, and either you don’t want to upgrade your Lightroom or your Photoshop or can’t upgrade your Photoshop or your Lightroom because of some plug-in that will not work with the new version or some killer bug that will affect you.

Adobe tells you that you will have to upgrade or no new camera support. In fact, Adobe provides free support for all the same cameras as the latest Lightroom or the latest ARC, Adobe Raw Converter. Since the beginning, Lightroom has supported the DNG, Digital NeGative, format and at all the versions of Photoshop CSx support the DNG format.

Adobe provides a free “current” DNG converter at the Adobe DNG page. You can download it from the Download section.

It’s a batch processor. It will convert all the photos in the same directories from your native format to the DNG format.

Q: Will I lose my original unprocessed RAW file? A: No, you can embed your original raw file into the DNG file and extract it later.

Q: Will I lose quality by converting my original unprocessed RAW file to a DNG raw file? A: No, it’s exactly the same as processing the raw file with Lightroom or ARC.

Q: Am I adding an extra step to my workflow by converting my original unprocessed RAW file to a DNG raw file? A: Yes.

Q: Will my other software still be able to see the previews? A: Part of the job of the DNG batch converter is to embed a JPEG preview in the DNG file. Most software knows to search for the JPEG portion of your photo.

Q: Any benefit to converting to DNG? A: There are many like public domain format and not proprietary, my favourites benefit is that I don’t have to deal with the XMP sidecar. All the keywords, IPTC info… are all stored within the DNG file.