I have a ten year old Leica M8.2 which is not recognized by PL4. It’s probably too old to expect any support from DxO, and it’s not all that popular as a camera anyway. It does save (non-full-frame) files in a “dng” format file.
Lightroom seems to recognize the M8.2, and therefore I think PhotoShop would recognize it. Adobe also makes a “dng converter” which takes raw files in different formats, and converts them into a standard dng format.
Are there any reasonable work-arounds for this situation? It was suggested in a different thread that I find an editor that will save them as “tiff” files. If PL4 opens one of these files converted into “.tif” format, would I still have all the editing tools that PL4 provides for raw files?
Other choices are to open the files in Luminar, and export to a format Luminar will work with. Maybe there’s a better choice than Luminar. Or, I can just continue to work with these files in Lightroom.
PhotoLab opens .dng files, if (and only if) they come from a supported camera. If the camera is not supported, PhotoLab will not open the file. PhotoLab will open JPG and TIFF files of unsupported cameras, but the key differentiating tools/features cannot be used.
You can easily see what is not available if you use a workspace setup like this: All-In-DPLv4.dopworkspace.zip (1.5 KB)
Note: the file was written by DPL4 on Mac. This is what’s implemented:
You can open a Leica M8 or M9 dng file directly in Picture Window Pro 8, free software (donationware).
Recent versions added support for raw file processing.
You can then save as TIF and continue with Photolab, Nik Collection etc., or do some processing in PWP8.
It doesn’t say on the website if this is for Windows or Mac. I don’t see the choice under downloads either. Will it run on the latest macOS software Big Sur ?
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. The only person who seems to understand me is Joanna.
I already have Afinity - haven’t used it much.
I also have Luminar, which didn’t impress me at all (other than for photo illustrations).
I also have ON1, Lightroom, Photoshop, and probably a few more I don’t remember.
The reason the Leica M8.2 is especially interesting to me, is that it lacks an anti-IR filter, meaning it is a great camera for mounting a suitable filter and taking infrared photographs.
By the way, I can fully accept why PL4 will not correct camera or lens errors from this Leica, but I find it difficult to accept that it won’t even open them. For people who work with lots of different cameras, this is pushing me back towards Lightroom, while I was trying to go the other way.
JPEG is adequate for snap-shots, but you have to shoot RAW to extract the maximum quality from your digital images. Consequently this requires RAW conversion to make the images usable for editing, printing etc.
So what are your better-quality RAW converter options, which also support Leica “DNG” RAW files?…
Capture One Pro
Mac OS X and Windoze. By Phase One - the MF digital-back people - so they know what pro photographer’s want. C1 is pretty much the industry standard, but neither the “lite” or “pro” versions are cheap.
Photo Raw Processor (RPP)
Mac OS X. A free RAW converter for Mac which creates very high quality images. The interface is a little clunky, there is no image editing (use Photoshop!) and the conversion speed is slow - but the images come out sharp and the colours are spot-on without any undue fiddling (this is the converter I currently use).
Bibble
Mac OS X and Windoze. A popular, high quality converter with built-in Noise Ninjanoise reduction. Available in “lite” and “pro” versions, Leica DMR DNG support was only added from v4.9 onwards. BTW according to Eric Hyman from Bibble (and contrary to net mythology), the actual RAW converter used in the app. is proprietary and not based on “Dcraw”!
Adobe Lightroom
Mac OS X or Windoze. A resource hog but many love it for it’s batch conversion and multi-image workflow features (Ars Technica Review - Feb 2007).
Light Crafts LightZone
Mac OS X or Windoze. Similar to C1 or Lightroom, it’s more than just a RAW converter in that it also has heavy-duty workflow features. Unfortunately also like C1, it isn’t exactly cheap.
Dcraw
Mac OS X, Linux or Windoze. An open-source (free) RAW converter used “under the hood” by many professional applications. Dcraw can be scripted via Shell Scripts (Mac OS X or Linux) to do what it does best, high quality RAW conversions without resource bloat or user-interface fiddling.
It’s an old list, but the question then is what format to save the images to, in order to work with them as raw images in PL4. I suspect that’s not possible. Maybe someone here knows of a program that can do this??
…and if I do find a different raw format, won’t PL4 reject it because it thinks it came from a Leica M8.2 ?
If your plan is to use the output of one or more of the programs in your list with PL4, understand that PL4 works with native raw images, DNG files created by Adobe, and TIFF and JPEG images. None of the software in your list permanently writes their edits directly to the original raw file. Only Lightroom created DNG files are supported by PL4.
If you want to use any of these programs with the output from PL4 then your choices are JPEG, TIFF and possibly DNG. I’m not sure which, if any, of the programs in your list will read DNG files created by PhotoLab 4.
Additionally you will not be able to use PRIME or DeepPRIME with any output from these other programs. PRIME and DeepPRIME is only applied to native raw files in PL4. If you want to use DeepPRIME your processing MUST start in PL4
You can already see what editing tools are available for TIF files. Just open a TIF file in Photolab and see what editing tools are enabled. You will find that only a few are disabled.
Getting too complicated, I’ll either use Lightroom or buy the full version of ON1. I have the Fujifilm version of Capture One. Not sure how expensive it is to update to the full program. This is probably a silly thing for me to do anyway, since Leica M8.2 files work great with Lightroom.
What you quoted is not really accurate - all the DNG files we’ve been editing lately in my ClearView discussion were taken with my Leica M10.
I’m going to stop worrying about this. I hoped it had an easy answer, and in a way, I guess it does, but apparently the Leica M8.2 is incompatible with PL4 for using the in-camera dng raw images.
