Posted on 09/27/2004 10:35:42 AM PDT by crushelits
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Adobe Systems Inc. plans to introduce a new format for digital photos on Monday in an attempt to create an industry public standard to make the archiving and editing process compatible across all types of cameras and photo software.
Most consumer digital cameras today capture images in the JPEG format, but a higher-quality raw photo format is gaining in popularity among higher-end and professional camera models.
A major frustration among photographers, however, has been how different digital camera makers use different, proprietary versions of the so-called raw format, industry analysts say.
That incompatibility has forced users, especially in media and other companies, to maintain multiple software programs to handle the raw photos taken by different cameras. It has also raised concerns that archived raw images could become inaccessible with future software.
Now, Adobe, which dominates the photo editing market with its Photoshop products, is proposing that its new Digital Negative Specification, or DNG, becomes a universal standard for the raw format. The San Jose-based company is also launching a free software tool that will allow users to convert the raw formats from more than 65 cameras into the DNG format.
Raw photo files contain all the original information captured by a digital camera sensor before any in-camera processing occurs and thus gives users truer images and more flexibility when editing. By comparison, JPEG photo files are compressed images that suffer some data loss.
Last year, Adobe began offering support for some of the raw formats from different cameras in its Photoshop program but decided that wasn't enough.
"Our customers have been struggling over the past few years. They see the flexibility of raw files but don't want the pain of having to deal with different formats," said Bryan Lamkin, an Adobe senior vice president.
Yet it will be up to camera makers to support the specification, which Adobe is making available for free.
"It will be adopted by many, maybe not this year, but within five years because it's to everyone's advantage," predicted Paul Worthington, an analyst at the Future Image Inc. research firm.
Eventually, more consumer cameras may end up offering the higher-quality raw photo format as well, Worthington said.
http://www.adobe.com/
Whatever happened to TIFF?
About time.
TIFF files are too large.
I save all my photos as MacPaint files.
Raw files are about the same size as TIFF.
.png's
GIF will do.
JPG's are indeed a pain some times.
I hope this will be available as a firmware upgrade on my Digital Rebel when Canon decides to adopt it.
I like PNGs as well.
A GIF will only render in 256 colors. This isn't very useful for photographic images.
RAW is a completely different concept from TIFF. And PSD is the Photoshop standard anyway. Both of these are simple loss free compression standards, although PSD holds color space information needed to produce professional prints or magazine images.
RAW files are the unprocessed data from the imaging chip in the camera. You would be shocked by the amount of photo editing done every time you snap a digital picture. The data for red and blue pixels are truncated. Together, red and blue ard given the same storage space given to green. The better cameras do special processing to diminish the purple fringing around high contrast edges. Color is corrected for the light source. The image may be sharpened.
A RAW image is pretty useless to a snapshooter, but to a profesional with high power software, there is a great deal more detail available in highlights and shadows, and a great deal more color information available for color correction.
Raw file formats are becoming extremely popular in digital photography workflows because they offer creative professionals greater creative control.
However, cameras can use many different raw formats — the specifications for which are not publicly available — which means that not every raw file can be read by a variety of software applications. As a result, the use of these proprietary raw files as a long-term archival solution carries risk, and sharing these files across complex workflows is even more challenging.
The solution to this growing problem? The Digital Negative (DNG), a new, publicly available archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras. By addressing the lack of an open standard for the raw files created by individual camera models, DNG helps ensure that photographers will be able to access their files in the future.
In addition to announcing the Digital Negative, Adobe announces the availability of the free Adobe DNG Converter, which easily translates raw files from many of today's popular cameras. Software developers and manufacturers can download the complete DNG specification (PDF: 276k). DNG is supported by both Adobe® Photoshop® CS and Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 (Windows® | Macintosh) software.
Ping
I find TIFF files for best color separation and manipulation.
Ha! It will probably cost us all a software upgrade for $299, if we're previous users of Adobe; $699 if we have version 5.0 and earlier.
That's because GIFs were designed expressly for small size. Of compressed bitmap images (as opposed to vector) they are good for logos--especially ones that will be used on the web and they are also decent for grayscale images since 256 shades of gray are adequate to make a good B&W image. They also have the advantage of being a low bandwith medium for animation. But due to their limit of 256 colors, they are useless for representing photographic images.
I don't know why .png's aren't the standard. There's no loss, they handle transparencies, handle millions of colors like any other high quality format, and they're compressed. (Depending on the image and how "clean" they are, I've seen times a .png is smaller in file size than a .jpg at 100 percent, which still throws data away).
I can't see a pixel of difference in a .png and anything else, so they're my favorite.
As far as photo/graphic software I'll stick with JASC. I've been buying from them since v.3 with no complaints.
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