I'm too verbose for this little comment field, but I think what you've said here is interesting, and wrote some commentary on my own blog, linked below (if I did this right).

One who requests an unethical practice and one who accepts an unethical practice are equally guilty. Shame on both Adobe and Panasonic.

Stop JPGitization of DNG

Hello Amin & all,

The problem is not DNG format itself but Adobe's converter. I think (I will test it later to be sure) that LX3 converted files are already demosaiced and lens barrel correction level is not a value in the metadata, which is absolutely unacceptable. If that is true, there is no real advantage in that DNG compared with a TIFF opened in ACR.

Due to this issue, I have recently proposed to byte d'light team (ie. perfectRaw and Zero Noise developers) the convenience of writting a DNG converter based on dcraw. They are focusing on their main programs, but that real "raw2dng" should come in a near future. By the moment, they have already achieved a pure DNG output (no demosaiced and with the whole metadata) from blending several RAWs for Zero Noise (a serious HDR program), so it will be really easy to adapt the code to our needs. It will be faster than Adobe DNG Converter, multiplatform, its weight will be about 300KB (instead of 35MB) and will be updated with every new version of dcraw, which means it will support new cameras two or three months before Adobe's product did. Of course you could use a batch frontend for processing thousands of files if you want.

I thought this could be of some interest here. It's just a project, but I hope they can bring it into reality soon.

Please,sorry for my poor english!

-Conversio

One thing missing froom this blog post and the comments so far is that this is a *temporary* situation. Adobe itself advises not to use the current DNG for archive, just use it for conversion to open the files in older ACR and 3rd party software. The problem is that the DNG specification needs to be updated to store the metadata for "lens compensation" as they call it.

So yes, Conversio, currently the DNG conversion demosaics and corrects distortion, no need to test; it it has been said more or less clearly in Adobe release notes and forum posts from Adobe folks. With the next DNG revision this will be fixed and real RAW data plus the lens metadata will be stored. It isn't clear how old applications will behave when dealing with this new revision, but it will be technically possible to ignore the lens compensation metadata. I still welcome the idea of an independent converter, actually I was wondering why DCRAW cannot output to DNG; however I suspect that some proprietary metadata may be hard to read, while Adobe have access to it.

As for why Adobe accepted to do it, I think it's very simple. They need Panasonic help to properly decode the RW2 without reverse engineering. If you look at the color rendition of Rawtherapee you know what I mean. So they had to choose between not supporting the camera or accepting Panasonic's requests (that are likely to become the norm in the future, from any manufacturer). I think they made the wrong choice, just for a matter of principle since it's me and not Panasonic that pays for PS, but maybe they just couldn't afford it .

Amin, I know what DNG is supposed to be, what I pointed out is that it actually is in most cases. The LX3 is a temporary exception, as noted in the download page for ACR 5.2 http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp...
The only thing thay don't explicitly tell is what "Panasonic's and Leica's intended image rendering" actually means, I think we all understand why thay are vague about this. But they clearly statethat for this cameras DNG is out of question for archiving, just wait a future release and use it for temporary backwards compatibility.

Rawtherapee screws the colours just because of the lack of a color matrix in the underlying DCRAW. Raw Developer does a good job with color, but still doesn't read the metadata about lens correction. ACR does, and does because of the good relationship between Panasonic and Adobe. The point is that when you are an independent small developer you can afford almost anything, when you are a corporate you have to keep good relationship with the neighborhood. I think Adobe has a policy about not reverse engineering other people files, it may even be illegal.

I don't want to defend Adobe, they made a wrong move that sets a bad precedent, that's for sure. But on the other side I understand their position. The fact is that apart from a bunch of online nerds nobody knows of this querelle, the others are still praising the lens. If they don't support a camera people is going to blame Adobe (and Apple, and...), not Panasonic, you saw that everyday on every forum. And I don't think Adobe and Apple can write on their websites "we don't support your camera because Panasonic is cheating you". But I'd really like to see it happen. :-)

"...the others are still praising the lens..."
Jesus, maybe because it takes excellent pictures.

Maki,

I have made the test before reading your response, and there is a way to store original bayer pattern into the DNG. However, it also stores every lens-corrected RGB channel and there is no way to remove them, so the LX3 DNGs are about 58MB. Thanks anyway!

I know this is a temporary situation, but I have the camera since september and I think that was time enough to deal with the problem. To Dave Coffin took just two days! Of course Adobe cannot do the things this way, but the time difference is significant, so I said the need of a dcraw based DNG converted.

BTW, I think Adobe should have enough influence to silent Panasonic queries. In my opinion there will be more people who won't buy the LX3 due to the lack of ACR support than to its lens distortion issue. With ACR they can do whatever they want, but they have to be careful with the essence of DNG. I am sure that all this question opened an argument in the Adobe team, as they are somewhat between the devil and the deep blue sea and it should not be easy to please both Panasonic and photographers!

I entirely agree that Adobe was wrong to agree to this. Photography should not have it's creativity limited in such a fashion.
I came across this post whilst researching the Pana G1 and a suitable software package to use with it. If I go for Lightroom, can I just leave the files as RAW files and avoid the obligatory lens correction that happens when changing to DNG but still process the RAW files as normal? Or, does Adobe transfer all raw files to DNG when you imprt them into LR?
Thanks,
Crom

As maki noted above, it is very important to note that the current RW2 -> DNG approach taken by Adobe (as of December 2008) is a TEMPORARY measure. This was explicitly mentioned in the Camera Raw 5.2 release notes, the Lightroom 2.2 release note, and in Tom Hogarty's blog posts, such as the one here:

http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2008/12/l...

Future updates to the DNG specification and DNG Converter will allow the full preservation of the RW2 (and RWL) raw image data in the DNG container.

Although a linear DNG is not equivalent to the original raw data, it still permits the majority of the operations that a raw converter does, such as colorimetric interpretation (using a color profile), white balance, and highlight recovery (among others). These abilities make linear DNG files fundamentally different from fully rendered files. The main ability that is lost with the use of linear DNG is the ability to use different demosaic algorithms down the road (and of course, as you've noted, the file size of a linear DNG is much bigger because the single channel data has already been expanded to 3 or 4 color channel data).