Adobe believes that with the Digital Negative (DNG) image format, it is possible to improve the quality and longevity of digital photographs. However, the company needs to win the support of the manufacturers of the sector so that the DNG starts to be adopted.
At a time when archives raw become more popular with photography professionals, Adobe promotes DNG as a «public file format for files raw generated by digital cameras «and a replacement for the various models – paid – that cannot always be read by the applications on the market.
In this way, and using an open standard for the files raw created on certain camera models, DNG helps to «ensure that photographers have access to their files in the future».
Believing that the industry and consumers will be able to benefit from a unified format, the company’s challenge is currently with the strategies to be developed to create allies in its promotion.
So far, support for Digital Negative has been adopted by a few brands, including Samsung. However, Adobe believes that this trend will be countered. Tom Hogarty, a member of the company’s digital photography division, even says that «when the format was launched two years ago it was known that the process of adopting it would be slow. However, there are already several models that support DNG and this is progress remarkable».
The Digital Negative Format is characterized by being a type of «raw» digital file, that is, containing all the image data captured by the camera’s sensor, unlike what happens in most equipment that automatically converts information in JPEG format through data compression.
As it includes all the information in the captured image, and has greater color depth, the size of these files is usually much larger than most photographic files, except when they incorporate a compression system.
Basically, the format raw it is used in situations where it is in the photographer’s interest to have the photograph «in a natural state» and without compressions or any type of manipulation of the camera. In this way, users are able to work the image better, on the computer, in photo processing programs.
Given the said incompatibility between formats rawdue to the lack of standards, Adobe launched DNG in 2004 as an open format for this type of files.
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