Adobe Releasing New Photo Format

salmonz writes "Toronto Star just posted a story that Adobe is releasing a new digital picture format; the Digital Negative Specification,or DNG. " Supposed to be use in raw photo formats; without the lossyness of JPEG.

Maybe

[nonameisgood]

The kicker is, IF the camera companies decide to use it. Standards are only standard is they are used. My questions is, can existing cameras be updated to the new format, or will the manufacturers just want to sell the new ones.
--

Re:Why?

[beh]

Well, if compression processing is an issue, use a low compression - gzip -1 is a LOT faster than gzip -9; and if DNG is less resource intensive then my guess would be that its compression is also on the "low" end...

But could you clarify what makes PNG *not* good for photography? Also - isn't there some other format that might be better suited and is already present?

I like my photo formats RAW

[BitWarrior]

RAW is the way to go for professional photo stuff. From my Nikon D70 I can get RAW format pics which contain lots of extra info about the camera settings and ALL the digital data from the camera, not just what the JPG compressor decided I should have. This is critical for later processing of the photos. Without this extra data, lots of detail in the shadows and highlight regions will likely be lost. I for one want to choose what data to keep and what to throw away, I don't want a compression algorithm making that decision. But, here's the catch... 98% of the people won't give a rat's ass about this. This kind of format is for professional photographers or serious enthusiasts. So for most people, it means nothing, but for me it may be another great format to use since I already use all the Adobe products.

Re:I can't remember...

[alanxyzzy]

Are we supposed to hate Adobe?

Well - Adobe were the ones that set the FBI onto Dmitry Sklyarov [freesklyarov.org]

Remember, however, that Elcomsoft are associated with spammers [spamhaus.org]

Re:Why?

[robkill]

The real question then becomes why don't digital cameras use PNG instead of their own version of a RAW format. Adobe is stepping in to try and consolidate the different formats to simplify importing into Photoshop. I can easily see a couple of questions from a hardware perspective.

What is the time cost of compressing to PNG versus directly writing a larger uncompressed RAW file?

If compression is too costly, can a simple form of run length encoding be used instead of PNG?

Does the flash storage medium have an effect on which file formats are more efficient to write (SD vs. compact flash)? If so, what compromises must be made?

Camera makers are choosing a format based on other considerations than software compatibility. Where do the current formats fail to meet their needs?

Supplied software

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe supplies castrated versions of photoshop which get shipped with some digital camera's. They are in a very good position to pull this off.

Re:Why?

[GigsVT]

What's wrong with TIFF?

It's lossless, high end cameras already support it, and it's the gold standard for lossless transfer of bitmap data already.

So why make something new when TIFF does the job?

Re:JPEG-2000?

[GigsVT]

We don't know that it will be proprietary.

Adobe has traditionally understood the value of releasing full file specifications under a non-restrictive license, as they have done with PDF and PS.

They have no motivation to make this standard proprietary, if they did that, digital camera makers wouldn't use it! All signs point to them making this one completely open.

Re:Why?

[n3k5]

Does this format offer anything that couldn't be done with PNG?

Well, I would hope so, because otherwise it would be incredibly retarded. As the article says, "Raw photo files contain all the original information captured by a digital camera sensor before any in-camera processing occurs [...]" Many cameras have sensors with not just sensors for red, green, and blue, but also a fourth colour. PNG can possibly contain a fourth colour channel, but can it also save meta-information about that channel, which colour it represents? Surely not in any standardised, widely compatible way. In the future, there could be CCDs that don't have square pixels, but hex ones, like an insect's eye. And then there already are cameras with a laser sensor that adds depth information to every pixel. A truly universal file format would have to handle this. Adobe's current version probably doesn't support that kind of funky stuff, but they could include it in a future version and make it backwards compatible. I'm not sure if PNG can even save basic information that's vital for a photographer, like aperture or exposure time.

Re:Me too.

[magefile]

Except that they don't control DNG either. It was released "for free" (legally & royalty-wise). So it's either NIH, stupidity, or something we don't get.

Re:Why?

[dspeyer]

So what's wrong with JPEG 2000 [jpeg.org]? It's a lossless, free compression scheme with similar file sizes to JPEG. There's already an open source implementation [sourceforge.net] even if it's not quite good enough for embedded use.

For that matter, why aren't we seeing J2k everywhere? It looks like a great format.

Re:Why?

[Too Much Noise]

Tiff is HUGE (at least in uncompressed form, which seems to be what cameras use these days). On the other hand (quote from here [theregister.co.uk])

DNG is based on the TIFF-EP format with extra metadata and scope for lossless JPEG compression, Adobe said. The format supports both mosaiced (CFA) and demosaiced interpolation.

Re:More info available ... specs too

[Binary Boy]

Adobe can save money with the adoption of DNG - but more money will be saved by smaller developers who cannot do the ongoing reverse engineering that Adobe does to support new RAW formats.

Adobe is leveraging their reverse engineering work in providing the free DNG Converter - this will actually benefit smaller developers more than Adobe, as they will only have to tell their users to download DNG Converter to move their RAW into DNG - the third-parties can focus on supporting DNG and providing excellent processing tools, while Adobe will continue to do the hard work of camera support (until the cameras produce DNG directly - which is of course the long-term goal).

Re:Why?

[eddy]

There are actual lossless implementations outside of the research community?

I thought that died The Death Of A Thousand Software Patents :-\

Re:Great idea. Some info.

[Anonymous Coward]

"In fact it uses less storage than the bitmap that can be produced from it."

This is because bitmap uses 24 bits per pixel (8 per color) and raw image contains only 12 bits per pixel.

Re:JPEG-2000?

[Naikrovek]

JPEG-2000 probably wasn't even considered because its not just about lossless images. There is a lot of data in a RAW image besides the image itself. The camera settings, the zoom, aperture, simulated film speed, time of day & date, shutter speed, and a lot of other information that isn't really translatable into human-visible imagery. It is the raw sensor data plus all of those things above and more.

The greatest advantage of photographing in RAW is that you can adjust the white balance long AFTER the image has been taken. My GF (at the time) took photos of an entire party (this was a paid gig) with the incorrect white balance, which would have effectively ruined the entire set if i'd had her shoot in JPEG (or even JPEG-2000), but since she shot in RAW we could easily adjust the white balance after.

JPEG-2000 simply couldn't work in that scenario.

What has not been said

[Anonymous Coward]

What has not been said here is:

1) Adobe does not have the support of any major camera vendor yet, that's where this really counts

2) Adobe in it's traditional greedyness did not release this as Open Source, they released a spec but not code. They just don;t get how to work with the open source community. They think like a 1980s company.

Re:Great idea. Some info.

[rgmoore]

Of course, since the nature of the data will be very different depending on what kind of image sensor you have

Which shouldn't be a worry for the vast majority of cameras that use square pixels in a RGB Bayer array. I'd expect that it would be pretty easy to deal with other square pixel Bayer arrays, like Sony's RGBE and the occasional CMY. Non-square arrays, like the ones used in some Nikon pro-series SLRs, and non-Bayer setups, like Foveon's X3 system, might be harder, but I'd expect that they could be accomodated without great difficulty.

Re:Why?

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

So are the instructions for how to do this processing embedded within the DNG format, or do programs viewing and manipulating DNG files have to be constantly updated for every new camera release, in order to properly process additional metadata?

Or, to paraphrase, is it possible for camera manufacturers to produce "standard" DNG files that aren't actually viewable on anything other than that camera's included software without reverse engineering proprietary metadata?

Insert AOL! here.

[Glytch]

Amen to that. At the risk of sounding like an elitist asshole, it's obvious that a good many folks on Slashdot don't know much about photography, and think that just because they bought Sony's newest fucking Cybershot that they're the next Helmut Newton.

As for myself, I've been eagerly waiting for an influential company to propose something like this; I work in a pro lab, and having to master and keep up to date on a dozen different raw converters is very stressful. A single standardized open format that I can use right inside Photoshop (at work) or the Gimp (at home) is like the holy grail to me!

It would be interesting if this could somehow be adapted to 35mm or medium format negative scanners, too. Being able to do big corrections after the scan would save me a hell of a lot of time.

Re:Rant much?

[MustardMan]

In their idiotic kneejerks, 99% of the posters forgot to explain why PNG would be a better choice. Just because it's PNG doesn't automatically make it suited for everything.

It's quite simple why TIFF is a better choice for adobe: they own it and are familiar with it.

Your troll tried to use the "technical" argument to throw off the point of my post. My post wasn't about technical merit, it was about typical slashdot groupthink. You don't need a technical argument, you need an argument of simple economics. Adobe owns TIFF, therefore they used it. Simple as that. I nowhere said TIFF was technically superior to PNG, nor will I now. Neither will I argue the technical merits of each. There's a much simpler reason to use TIFF.

NAME RECOGNITION. When you go to a website, and they post their "publication-quality" pictures, almost universally those pictures will be posted as TIFFs, and not PNGs. By basing your raw data standard on TIFF, you throw out a term that is familiar to publishers and photographers alike, neither of whom really care about the nitty-gritty details of how the data format works. Familiarity breeds a warm fuzzy feeling and will make adoption of this format more likely.

There's an obvious reason to advocate PNG over GIF, and that's the ridiculous issues that we all know about. However, there's very little reason to reccomend PNG over TIFF for the pure sake of "BUT ITS PNG AND PNG IS 31337 LOL LMFAO U FAG" which is pretty much the gist of the /. arguments.

Re:What a stupid name

[ceoyoyo]

Actually, most professionals and advanced amateurs who tend to shoot in RAW call the RAW files "negatives" and refer to processing them as "developing."

Re:Why?

[lucifuge31337]

Based on being a user of several pieces of raw image processing software, I can tell you that choosing event eh wrong camera type (even if its int he correct family) produces crappy results. Also, different raw post-processing engines give different results (some better, some worse, some depending on the raw file). Based on those observations, I'm going to have to guess that any raw processing engine is going to need to know quite a bit about the camera in order to actually be any good.....so even if the file format is standard, I'd say that you'll still need some data about the camera the file came from. And probably a whole lot more than what woudl be reasonable to put in the file itself.

Re:JPEG-2000?

[tyrione]

Clarification:

PDF 1.5 is Adobe's current standard and soon followed by PDF 1.6.

Mac OS X utilizes PDF 1.4 and soon PDF 1.5. Adobe licenses prior versions of PDF to be royalty free which only makes sense--give them a taste to what PDF does and encourage them to purchase the latest version to leverage all that PDF can do.

We had a huge pain in the rear issue with Adobe at NeXT and then Apple dealing with Display Postscript--even though we co-developed the standard and actually perfected it. After months of futile negotiations the DPS model for then Rhapsody, now OS X was switched to a modified PDF- Display PDF with custom additions for OS X only.

Adobe is not in the business of free software. They leverage it, yes, but they are a consulting firm.

Re:Nope, just have to get photographers using it

[rgmoore]

If you're looking for a command-line tool, jhead might read Exif tags.

Jhead does read EXIF tags. This can be very useful if you want to analyze something about your photo usage. As an example, I've been considering getting a fast prime lens for available light photography in a range that I currently have covered by a slower zoom lens, but I wasn't sure whether to get 20 mm, 24 mm, or 28 mm. I used jhead to extract the focal length for every picture I've taken and found that I use 24 mm a lot more than either 20 mm or 28 mm. Now I know which lens to buy.