Format for Archiving

[dcclark]

Originally Posted by Photosbykev

The content of the RAW file will contain far more data than any other form of the image regardless of the meta data details. If someone else has a version of the image in jpg, tiff or any other form or cannot produce the electronic file then the owner of the raw file has the proof of ownership and copyright as the raw file is the original source of the image.

No, the person in possession of the raw file has possession of the raw file -- nothing more, nothing less. We're talking about computer files here -- easy to copy, easy to obtain through many not terribly tricky means. There is no guarantee that there's just one copy of the file, and so whatever you have is merely a file, not proof of anything. It's a bit of evidence, at best.

[inkista]

Originally Posted by beatryder

1) Import to LR, and convert to DNG upon import, this results in much larger files (2x in fact)

Just a thought, but if you aren't planning on pulling the full RAW file back out for processing within Canon/Nikon software, you may want to turn off the "preserve RAW image" option--that's actually embedding a copy of the original RAW file inside the DNG, and probably why you're seeing so much file bloat. Without embedding, a DNG is often smaller than the RAW file it's based on (probably because proprietary metadata got dumped).

@inkista I think your comparison of DNG to ASCII is flawed, but you make a good point. I would suggest a better analogy would be comparing DNG to the Open Document Format (used by OpenOffice) The information is there, but you may have to go through a bit of work to get to it.

I actually did make that analogy, but when I start posting at 3am, I lose track of what I said in which draft and which one actually got posted . I do agree. DNG is much more like .odt, while TIFF is more the RTF/XHTML of image formats. Not sure what would be the ASCII version, other than a uuencoded TIFF. [grin].

BTW, the more I dig, the more it looks like all Linux support for RAW conversion depends on a single project: dcraw. Interesting stuff, as there's decrypting and decompressing involved in the reverse-engineering, and it looks like it's a one-man project.

[gfPHOTO]

Originally Posted by beatryder

1) Import to LR, and convert to DNG upon import, this results in much larger files (2x in fact)

Yeah stop embedding the original file in the new DNG file. You'll see a little bit of disk savings over the original camera file. One person suggested this is due to discarded metadata - I'd like to propose that Adobe is actually doing some more efficient lossless compression. Open to being corrected, though.

I find that I get all the capabilities of the original RAW out of my converted DNG files, so I'm quite happy with the format. Not to mention the disk savings which really add up when you have tens of thousands of images.

Just food for thought - Adobe has historically proven to be quite a reliable image format curator. IIRC they're in charge of the TIFF standard, also.

While I agree that we may not have to worry too much about Canon disappearing in the near future, I do worry that they may eventually stop caring about the RAW files produced by their oldest model cameras.