This new format is
in it's infancy and as I understand, is being more or less thrown
out by Adobe for developers and manufactures to do as they please.
Yep. This is just the first rev of a spec and supporting products. My
first impression based on what I have heard from others is that while
the products may have some issues with highly proprietary
(undocumented) features in some vendor's RAW formats, the spec
itself is pretty solid.
It is, to me, a major step when THE number one guy on the block in
the imaging world ... i.e., Adobe ... offers to the world a
possible solution to a real problem ... puts their money where
their mouth is by supporting it right out of the chute ... makes it
open source ... and gives it away.
Be careful when you say "open source". It can mean different things
to different people.
The spec has been made freely available. The spec was not developed
in an Open manner (e.g. IETF, ISO, etc). I hope that further spec
refinement will be a more Open process with participation by
other software vendors, hardware vendors, and the user community.
It does not necessarily have to be like ISO, but even the process
Sun uses for extending Java (the Java Community Process) is better
than nothing. Again, this may be overkill, but you can never have
toio much overkill
. So the spec could be considered open but
its definition was not.
And as far as the "source" side of it goes, I would love to see any
DNG SDK made available under GPL (or similar) licensing. It would
need a plugin framework for vendors to slot in code when they
have a new RAW format come out, or, more importantly, other
developers could extend the vendor's RAW integration or replace
entirely with something that works better or faster. This would
result in a DNG SDK that is "free" because anyone can get access
to the source code without cost and "free" because GPL prevents
any particular company from placing an additional restrictive license
on the use and distribution of the source or products produced
from the source.
[I, for one, would like to see optional support for cameras digitally
signing RAW data such that a DNG utility could later verify that some
particular image was captured by some particular camera with date,
time, and GPS info. There are a lot of different ways that this could
be useful for both legal and historical purposes. Also, my memory sucks.]
What really amazes me is that
with all that, they are critisized for their efforts. It never
ceases to amaze me how things of this nature can get so much
negative reaction when it is FREE and an honest attempt to solve a
real problem. Of course Adobe benefits from it because hopefully
they won't have to keep updating ACR to support more and more RAW
formats. I hardly begrudge them that ... as smaller, less well
financed, less powerful software developers will also benefit.
The only ones that I can see that don't benefit are camera vendors
who have a good revenue stream from the apps they sell to fiddle
with their RAW file formats.
However, the real benefactors are photographers ... users ... US!
Yep. Especially if the spec (and spec process) and a DNG SDK are
made truly open.
On the other hand ... one always has the option of just ignoring it
... don't download it ... don't update ACW ... don't keep a copy of
their RAWs in this new format for possible safekeeping ... and ...
go on their way. Cheers ...
I would keep RAW files around (on DVD, natch) until
a) I could convert RAW file to DNG and back to a RAW file that is
"identical" to the original.
b) I have a DNG tool that will store the compressed RAW file in a
DNG field so that I could later extract a bit copy of the original
RAW file.
ciao,
-xbytor
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