Any advantage of .dng over RAW?

[rotherad]

Hi guys (and girls),

Recently when I have been importing photos into my lightroom catalogue I have been selecting the option to convert to .dng, is there any advantage over using dng's apart from not requiring separate XMP sidecar's?

thanks,

 

[foodpoison]

I thought that it was a disadvantage to using raw... they're less compatible I think. Or more compatible.
Heck, I don't know, someone will explain soon

 

[rotherad]

I understand that .cr2 and .nef are proprietary formats but I meant more performance wise.

 

[Terrywoodenpic]

Dng is an attempt at a universal format.
as it is an adobe product I suspect it will be supported longer than the Canon or nikon versions. Who regularly bring out new flavours.
I am perhaps not the wisest person as I convert to Tif. As then I do not have the option to go back and process again, once I have dumped the original raw file.

 

[Craikeybaby]

I keep meaning to write something up about this for my website.

Basically you are correct that .cr2/.nef are proprietart formats, whereas .dng is an open format, so in theory is more future proof.

The other two main advantages are:

DNG has smaller file sizes, (not by much, but 2Mb per image over a whole Lightroom catalog is a lot)
With DNG files all the metadata is embedded into the file, rather than needing to be in a separate sidecar file as with RAW files, this means moving images around, or using different programs is easier as you only need to worry about one file.

DNG does keep all of the information from the RAW file, so despite the smaller file size you do not need to worry about loosing detail.

It is also possible to get Lightroom to convert all the files already in your library, useful if you need to sae some disk space.

 

[john-oh]

I'm not really a user of DNG, but I see you can also embed the original RAW file into the one file, so you can always extract later if required. Bigger file size of course.