With the lack of DNG support I am having to use two programs but if its still not supported am not see any point in paying out yet more mony.
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DNG support in what context? DNG can be used to host wide verity of formats and packaged in many different ways. You can save out a JPEG in DNG wrapper and it will have .dng extension, but it will not be same as other DNG. My point is that DNG is not the same as propitiatory RAW format that camera records. DNG can contain all sorts of data, and some of that data can be even JPEG, but it can also contain whole original RAW + plus other data. To say that one should support DNG format, its not enough because DNG format itself can contain a lot of stuff.
From Adobe: “Digital Negative (DNG) is a publicly available archival format for raw files which are generated by various digital cameras. This addresses the lack of an open standard for raw files created by individual camera models and ensures that photographers easily access their files.”
It was meant to be archival format, addressing the problem that one day we may not be able to open up proprietary raw files if they are not supported beyond a certain date. And DNG was meant to be open source code that allows people to store their images safely for future.
While DNG can be used as working format, and there are pros and cons to that, it was always meant to be primarily an archival format.
DXO can read propitiatory raw formats and export them as linear DNG that is both compatible with other apps such as Lightroom or Capture One, while also doubling as archival format, if one chooses to do that.
Adobe’s DNG (Digital Negative) raw file format was based on TIFF/EP, and the DNG specification states “DNG… is compatible with the TIFF-EP standard”.[2] Several cameras use DNG as their raw file format, so in that limited sense they use TIFF/EP too
But DNG as TIFF can be used to store more or less raw data. You can take a file from Photoshop for example, and save it out as DNG. But it will not have the raw data of camera capture.
So when you say support for DNG, you need to know what that means. I had a friend who was a retoucher and he worked with RAW files, retouched them in Photoshop and client was so clueless how it all works, he demanded retouched files in DNG format. After failing to convince this client that they are not going to get RAW data back once the retouching process starts, my friend simply saved out the reotuch file, essentially JPEG as DNG and send that to the client. Who was happy. Go figure. Well, don’t be that guy. Know what you mean when you say DNG support.
Technical summary
A DNG file always contains data for one main image, plus metadata, and optionally contains at least one JPEG preview.[3] It normally has the extension “dng” or “DNG”.
DNG conforms to TIFF/EP and is structured according to TIFF. DNG supports various formats of metadata (including Exif metadata, XMP metadata, IPTC metadata) and specifies a set of mandated metadata.[33]
DNG is both a raw image format and a format that supports “non-raw”, or partly processed, images.[3] The latter (non-raw) format is known as “Linear DNG”.[37] Linear DNG is still scene-referred[38] and can still benefit from many of the operations typically performed by a raw converter, such as white balance, the application of a camera color profile, HDR compositing, etc. All images that can be supported as raw images can also be supported as Linear DNG. Images from the Foveon X3 sensor or similar, hence especially Sigma cameras, can only be supported as Linear DNG.
DNG can contain raw image data from sensors with various configurations of color filter array (CFA). These include: conventional Bayer filters, using three colors and rectangular pixels; four-color CFAs, for example the RGBE filter used in the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F828; rectangular (non-square) pixels, for example as used in the Nikon D1X; and offset sensors (for example with octagonal pixels) such as Super CCD sensors of various types, as used in various Fujifilm cameras. (Or combinations of these if necessary). DNG specifies metadata describing these individual parameters; this is one significant extension to TIFF/EP.
When used in a CinemaDNG movie clip, each frame is encoded using the above DNG image format. The clip’s image stream can then be stored in one of two formats: either as video essence using frame-based wrapping in an MXF file, or as a sequence of DNG files in a specified file directory.
Contrary to its name (Digital Negative) the DNG format doesn’t distinguish negative and positive data[3] - all data is considered to be describing a positive image. While this is not an issue when working with images from digital cameras (which are always positive), working with scanned (by a film scanner or DSLR copy stand) film negatives saved as raw DNG files is complicated, because the resultant image is not automatically inverted and thus impossible to be used directly. A way to get around this is using an inverted curve in the photo editing application, however this reverses the effect of the image controls (Exposure, Shadow and Highlight details, etc.) which complicates the photo editing.
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DNG support in DXO is pretty much as I would expect a professional company to offer it and that is documented on their website. Sadly, DNG is a confusing term that people don’t want to learn about, enough to know what is good for and what is not good for, and what are the pros and cons of using it in different ways.
DXO is an innovative company that does a lot of innovations that I guess are mostly valued by those who understand it. So maybe that is the market for them. It probably is not mass market.
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That DXO block DNG from cameras has been covered in many posts and for cameras the basic argument is corrections are built into the images by the camera but better output than jpegs can be done from them. You can open the much lesser jpg in PL but not DNG’s. Few users are saying camera corrections are expected just the ability to used DNGs as jpegs now. As more ability is added to phones and more users of cameras mix usage with phones programs that force camera users to process output in two different programs are losing out to those that will allow camera DNGs to be processed with camera RAW and jpegs. From experience of my wife, over 80 now, is unable to carry her old camera but does use her phone. She no longer uses PL and had moved away as she started to use both in the one processing program. Many are like that and I now use PL for RAW but Affinity for Phone, but as with many others I am wondering why pay the high cost of PL for the diminishing use I make of it and have to learn and remember how to process in two different programs. Its basically boiling down to a publisher trying to hold back change and that change flowing round them and I fear making them irrelevant to many former users who use cameras and phones.
But is that a market that can sustain a business. Niche is not always good.
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The problem is also I think a shrinking market, few years ago out and about many cameras seen now very few and lots of phones. Admittedly only a proportion of the cameras were using RAW as now only a very small number of phones are using DNG. We had a photography group in our U3A and most of those used RAW, now only me (out of those around) use a camera and another uses a phone with DNG (well 2 with my wife) the rest use jpeg as its simpler but PL has lost 2 out of the 3 for sales of PL something Capture One and others have spotted.
Almost all moderately specced smartphones can capture true undebayered raw images. That DXO refuses to support them is another discussion…
Anyway this thread, as usual has turned from a discussion about a reasonable feature request available in other tools to an argument about why you shouldn’t need it, or other slower ways to accomplish a similar, but not the same effect…
Typical of these forums unfortunately…
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Well I suppose we will find out over time. The rule is that if you can’t be among first three in your niche, time to find or make another niche where you can be among top three or ideally number one.
I know form a user perspective there is a tendency to think if comparing one company vs another. But There is a lot more to it, both behind the scenes and out in the open.
There is a whole niche and growing of people who “want to own something and be happy” if you get my reference. Subscription services not only don’t allow you to own software you pay for, but also there is a problem of being a perpetual beta tester and paying for the privilege. And there is a segment of the market that is looking for alternative, regardless of money, just out of principle. So that is something that company like DXO can exploit if they don’t get greedy for short term profit and enter the trap of competing in a game they cannot win.
Affinity tries to pick up the market left behind by Adobe Photoshop. While Generative fill will win over some users, there are others who will out of principle use Affinity instead of Photoshop and use various free alternatives to generative fill online. Its not a large market, I agree, but its a growing market and its a valuable niche that Adobe simply won’t go for because it is not part of their business model.
There is also woke politics in companies that can play a role. As we have seen with backlash against woke companies such as anheuser-busch, activission/Blizzard, Target, Disney, Starbucks is the latest one etc. If DXO does not go woke it has a good change of not going broke. If they stay off the subscription trap, they can win over those that are trying to escape it.
Just those two things, business wise go a long way. And if they keep innovating in their niche for those that appreciate it. they don’t have to do much, other than make large mistakes, because profit is not measured in revenue. Profit is calculated as total revenue less total expenses. Smaller companies can save a lot bey staying small and nimble and being smart about who they hire, how they communicate with the users and what their focus is on.
Take something like the Estonian guy behind AI retouch4me plug ins. The guy found a niche that was not taken by other brands, build himself or with small team bunch of great plug ins and he is killing it. Found his niche.
Also there are a lot of talented and skillful developers just dying to get a chance to work on something cool, and they can’t get a break in large companies because of all the diversity and inclusion politics, so I’m sure they would work for less if you treat them right and they ill blow out of the water the big companies on a fraction of a budget. I won’t list examples here, but there are companies like DeepL from Germany, Proton from Switzerland and many others. They foudn their niche and under lower budget they were more innovative and more user oriented.
So there is opportunity, One has to think about fundamentals and outside the box on how to implement it.
One encouraging thing you might have noticed, is that DXO used to be very low marketing footprint company. It was not well known outside a small circle. Than they hired someoen to revamp their website, start engaging with influences online to promote new releases, start engaging with tech blogs and websites and brand awareness grew and with good products people were willing to share good news even when they were not being paid.
As for niche and innovation. Small stuff like DXO Wide Gamut color profile, softproofing “protect color details”, DXO DeepPrime and DeepPrimeXD, and their old school lens correction really is adding to a powerful combo for those who value it. Also ReShape tool was added, but need optimization, some clever user interface improvment and little features were added in the last few releases. DXO Pure RAW was a good product that didn’t cost too much to make, used existing technology and was quite a success I would say. Even forced Adobe to eventually try to replicate it with their new Noise Reduction AI that is implemented like a plug in, like DXO did it.
Also if you have noticed new camera and lens support is more and more frequent and on more rapid release schedule than before. Most welcomed. Etc. etc.
I guess will see what happens in the future, but I can’t say DXO is not trying and some ideas are unexpected but very welcomed and looking back I don’t want to work without them.
By comparison a company like On1 tried to play the Adobe game. They make mediocre product, hype the new features, usually nothing inventive but inferior version of what Adobe and others are doing. They usually have a lot of bugs and performance issues because they are going for rapid growth with new headline features they can market, rather than focus on stability and performance. So they are gaining market share, but they will never be number one and eventually will have to compete on price.
Luminar is an example of a company that tried to promote itself as new revolution in AI technology, but quickly ended up changing business model with Luminar Neo where they build a host app, and than sell AI tools as basically plug ins for the host they built. And like On1 they offer noise reduction, up-scaling all that , but they are not the best at it.
There is Topaz with their model on the market as well , there is adobe and capture one and there is DXO. Plus few others that are not as important.
As you can see each company has their preferred business model and so far they have managed to survive and some gained a market share and some invented new niches. So will see.
I would say fortunately. I’ve not seen a forum that survived based on strictly regulated and segmented topics. People use forums to contribute because it feels organic and like being in a bar. Once you start dividing people in a bar based on their height and color of skin and date of birth, you lose the organic banter and creativity and back and forth that produces results that cannot be gotten in other ways. Any forum that I’ve been on that let it happened always was better visited and people stayed and contributed as they felt like it. When forums started to moderate everything, they killed that interaction and in the end killed themselves.
People are not robots and bureaucracy is not good way to nurture creatively. Things need to happen organically or they won’t happen at all. When two people meet on the street they start taking where they meet, if they wait to go somewhere, the chitchat that is organic is lost. Granted there is such a thing as too much banter and get in the way of other people, so healthy middle is best. I would agree with that.
Instead we divide people based on their preferences or genre…
Still dividing people is bad… frankly it’s a senseless argument to tell other people they don’t need a feature they have requested. Especially when that feature has already been brought to the market with rave reviews.
Seems everyone else know what I need.
Too many defenders of DXO here… apologists….
The cell phone thing was a good example. Someone posts why won’t DXO support the cameras almost everyone has in their pockets? DeepPRIME would be fantastic on cell phone RAWs… and the first comment was that the cell phone RAW probably wasn’t actually raw. (Which is wrong.)
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I’m not talking about moderators moderating.
I’m talking about people being considerate of others.
And respecting that others may have different preferences.
Too many preachers here telling others they’re doing it wrong.
I think probably comment was about already processed DNG. At least I assume that is what they meant. Its probably correct that DNG that some smartphone brands output is already somewhat baked in with at least some processing by the smartphone.
The most famous smartphone would probably be iPhone. And as Apple states on their website:
About Apple ProRAW
On iPhone 12 Pro and later Pro models with iOS 14.3 or later, you can take photos in Apple ProRAW. ProRAW gives you greater creative control when editing photos.
Apple ProRAW combines the information of a standard RAW format along with iPhone image processing, which gives you more flexibility when editing the exposure, color, and white balance in your photo. With iOS 14.3 or later and an iPhone 12 Pro or later Pro models, your phone can capture images in ProRAW format using any of its cameras, including when also using the Smart HDR, Deep Fusion, or Night mode features.* You can edit ProRAW photos in the Photos app and other third-party photo apps.
ProRAW uses the industry standard digital negative (DNG) file format, so you can open ProRAW files with apps that are compatible with DNG files. You can open a ProRAW photo in an app that doesn’t support ProRAW, but it might look different than expected when opened. If the ProRAW photo doesn’t look as expected, try using the app’s feature for automatically enhancing the photo.
Knowing how Apple is anal about their control over brand image, I wonder if the original untouched RAW data is protected by copyright and its not even available to third parties, like DXO.
I know DXO wrote about this on one of the blogs, where they could not support iPhone raw files in some older version of iPhone because of proprietary code and lack of access to it.
I assume this might be one of the bottlenecks. Simply getting access to RAW data. You mentioend that DeepPrime would be great for smartphone photos, and I agree, but we have to take into account that DeepPrime is not just de noising technology its also demosicing technology, meaning it has to have access to raw data.
If someone is factually wrong, should they be left uncorrected? What is your policy on that?
From what I have been able to glean, Apple’s idea of RAW is not “untouched” but a record of whatever it needed to create the image using HDR, Deep Fusion, Night Mode, etc.
In which case, I would say it is highly unlikely that they would release the spec, especially as it would be a moving target that is likely to change with each new phone.
Or I could be talking a different version of the same rubbish others are postulating.
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That is my impression as well. It would make sense that many brands turning to computational photography tricks want to keep
a) the results of that in a nice neat little package, since the reputation of a phone being able to take great photos, is tied to tricks they can do with computational photography. E.g. Google Pixel phones are known to not have a great camera in specs but produce results that punch above its weight thanks to Google computational photography. Considering this end results of processed image are linked to the brand reputation as a smartphone that takes impressive photos, would they be willing to open source that technology? Maybe. Would apple? Would Samsung? Probably not. They are not know for open source.
b) As you said, the technology and psychical cameras change all the time and there are so many smartphone brands released that it would tax the resources of DXO team if they wanted to make sure all those cameras have corrected lens distortion, and support for lens sharpness and DXO technology like deepprime. Stuff we came to love about DXO.
c) I guess if there was a big enough market for people who shoot with smartphones, shoot raw and want to process it in DXO… DXO could dedicate a team of people to work on support for all those lenses and cameras. Because I think they measure it all manually at DXO. Lens sharpness, and distortions and all that. My question in the threat about that request was about market share. How many people actually shoot raw in smartphone sand want to process it in DXO. If there is not enough people who were ready to do that, or if there is no data about it, it would seem to me like a big risk to invest so much resources in something no many people use. If there are large number of users, there should be some kind of data about it so investment can be judged on that merit.
d) and finally there is all the copyright and access to data needed to access raw files. I don’t even know how many new flagship smartphones like iPhone have iOS feature to shoot proper raw and not already processed raw. As I’ve said, Apple is very protective on their brand image and they want to provide the kind of image that paints their camera/phone in best of light. Its like when they shoot their ads for iPhone and use gimbals , super expensive sets and directors etc all to create a sense that iPhone is better than it is. And with some brands in South Korea they actually used stock photos or shot with DSLR and use the image as ad for their camera on a smartphone.
Strike four: Huawei caught passing DSLR images as smartphone camera photos again
Apr 21, 2020 by Dunja Djudjic
Here we go again….
iPhones can capture two different types of raw images. The ProRAW format is the “augmented” format and not really raw. It’s debayered and computationally modified.
However iPhones can also capture true RAW images. Also stored in DNG containers. Undebayered. Unprocessed. And ripe for processing in DXO. Except you can’t.
Anyway thanks for completely proving my point. Both of you… preaching like you know everything and know what others need or don’t need. (You guys both think you are right. And in full on preach mode…. But you are both wrong.)
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Ok, I made wrong assumption if that is the case that iPhone can also shoot RAW. I stand corrected.
As for “preaching”, I will continue to “preach” because I have something to say. You can as well. If you don’t like it, find another forum or join the conversation.
Speaking of all this, I raised an important question about investing in developed support for smartphone raw file. Since you think you know more, explain that one. Can you find data that supports investment in that market? Smartphone photographers who shoot RAW (Undebayered. Unprocessed as you put it) and want to process it in DXO PhotoLab.
I remember when for years hybrid shooters wanted their hybrid mirrorless cameras to be able to record RAW video internally. It became the latest thing on the list of requested features around forums etc. Eventually some brands with a lot of effort put RAW file recording in the cameras. When the users finally realized the hassle of using a lot of expensive storage, needs of processing etc vs the benefits of it, they mostly chose not to use it and went with more manageable formats. That’s when I learned that what people think they want and what they really need may not always be the same thing. And that between connivance and little extra quality, most chose convince. Hence it would be prudent to know what is the real market share for people shooting and processing raw files from their smartphones.
Feel free to preach all you want. But when you preach wrong information your credibility will suffer.
That’s your choice.
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I was being sarcastic, hence the quotation. You chose to you the term “preaching” but I never though of it as such. Since you have a bone to pick, I have more stuff to share. If you think of it as “preaching” rather than sharing thoughts and information, right or wrong, that’s YOUR choice. Now, if you think I’m wrong, feel free to correct me. I don’t mind. But if you are wrong, don’t expect me to let it go. Fair enough?
Sure. There are people here that take a tone of discussion. I’m all for discussion. And respect for each others ideas…
There are others here who have no respect for others ideas. And preach…. Talk down to others like “you’re doing it wrong”… I’m even okay for someone to say “you’re doing it wrong”. And I say it sometimes myself. But I try hard to make sure I understand where they’re coming from first.
Well, when I posted this request, I didn’t know it would would sparkle so many discussions. I started to use PL in addition to LR, because of the quality of the RAW conversion and PrimeXd. I also have and eventually use Luminar NEO and ON1. However, with the inclusion of the denoise and AI masking tools in these softwares I’ve been using PL less frequently. I shoot birds and to have a tool that can draw a mask with two clicks in 2 sec with extremelly good precision (in case of LR) really helps a lot. We can draw masks in PL, but it’s much more time consuming and complicated that LR or ON1. It’s fine if PL won’t pursue these time saving functionalities, but be aware that you might lose users along the way. This is just my two cents. Thanks to all.
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It would be fine if Photolab could import a DNG (non-serialized) from Capture One for example.
It could also be nice if Photolab could open even any DNG that lacks a DXO profile.
… and the third case: It would also be very nice if DXO would be able to open a serialized DNG (RGB) from the industry standard scanner software Vuescan.
You see the only DNG compatibility issue DXO has managed to solve so far (from what I know) is the use of DNG in the integration with Lightroom so they have a lot to do concerning DNG interoperability with other software.
A lot of treads here in this forum is about that and the inability to open RAW-files lacking camera profiles and they ought really to take away the unlogic that prevent users from using a software they paid for with any of their RAW-files. If you are into using DNG go to Lightroom instead.
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