We have been talking recently about different variations of the RAW format attempting to either save some space on your card, or to save your time when working on the RAW images. Alongside with many advantages that the pure RAW image format definitely has (such as date precision, ability to control even tiny details of images to develop them up to the highest standards), the format has some inconveniences too, the most obvious of which is its incompatibility. Each camera type may have the RAW format proprietary of the specific manufacturer, if not the camera itself, which makes it problematic to edit the RAW image files and find the software able to recognize different variations of this image format. The DNG format is also considered RAW. Unlike a standard variation of RAW, it is not camera-specific. It is highly compatible and does not depend on the camera type and manufacturer. Other advantages of the DNG image format include:
– smaller file size
– ability to store full original RAW files that can be later extracted manually
– simple file management when there are changes introduced onto DNG
The latter one though may be considered as the main disadvantage, because you have to back-up your DNG file each time you introduce changes to it. Otherwise, the advantages overweigh to lots of users. However, for some photographers RAW is the strong preference, because this image format stores a few parameters that are always camera specific, such as, focus point, image settings, etc. Support for RAW and DNG is provided by ImageConverter Plus. Talking of the RAW format, we constantly add new camera specifications to make the list of supported format variations most up-to-date.