Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/11/04
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]alistar sed: >I have noticed a "convert to DNG" function in Lightroom: If I convert >my scanned tiff files to DNG I gain 30 megs over the 130meg tiff >file: do I "lose" anything? if you convert a TIF to a DNG you don't get "extra" information. you just get a bigger file. it's like taking a 35mm negative, making a 4x6 print, and then photographing that print with a 4x5 camera -- you haven't added data to your image, you've just made it bigger. the only thing you should convert to DNG is your camera's RAW files. DNG is Adobe's "Digital NeGative" format. it's a type of RAW. many camera manufacturers have a propriatary RAW format (such as nikon's NEF format). DNG is an open source raw file. one reason to convert your NEF to DNG files is that some day NEF files may go away but the ability to read a DNG file will, theoretically be around longer because the standard is open. DNG files are also compressed, so they're smaller than NEF files. RAW files are lossless. TIF files are lossless jpeg files are lossey there are many other file formats which are also lossless: .gif, .psd, and .png, notably. converting a DNG to a TIF is lossy, you throw out some information and say "this is what i want to use in my image" -- you'll convert to tif or jpeg eventually, and you don't want ALL the information in your image, you WANT to get rid of it at some point (though not forever, so keep your RAW files backed up in case you some day want to dig a license plate out of the shadows somewhere). so, again, if you convert a TIF to a DNG you don't get "extra" information. you just get a bigger file. it's like taking a 35mm negative, making a 4x6 print, and then photographing that print with a 4x5 camera -- you haven't added data to your image, you've just made it bigger. hope this helps. keep photographing that breakfast, it'll get cold eventually, kc