DNG Dread

With all the spitting and spite currently being vented upon the devils of Adobe at the moment it’s probably only natural that the future of their allegedly open-source file system, DNG (Digital Negative) is now being called into question.

DNG has been touted by Adobe as the file system that all the camera manufacturers should use, as they (Adobe) say it is ensures camera files will be accessible no matter what the camera or age of the image . Nikon and Canon were both pilloried some years ago when they refused to change their raw systems to DNG preferring to keep their own of NEF and CR2, although Leica did switch. Adobe say that users could find that the files they have in archives from manufacturers’ proprietary systems may be unreadable by software in the future, whereas DNG will always be viewable by all software.

However with the news of Adobe placing their software only available for subscription in the future, people are now thinking that maybe the two biggest camera manufacturers were right in retaining their own systems. Will Adobe soon start charging photographers for the use of the DNG format? This I think is unlikely, but many believe that the subscription software issue is only the start of a complete reconstruction of Adobe’s sales strategy which could include periphery products and services, including the DNG files system.

I currently archive all my NEF and ORF (Olympus RAW) files as they are and then convert to DNG when I import them into Lightroom, but some photographers save the DNG files directly to their archives and do away with their original camera files. Some are now worrying that they may have accidentally built some redundancy into their photo archives by such an action.