A workflow discussion
Sep 7, 2014, 8:50 pm
#16
Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: US
Programs: (PM)AA SPG (Marriott), Hilton
Posts: 1,040
File Format Selection in Workflow
File format is another item for discussion. A while ago, I had a lot of film scanned to PhotoCD, to Kodak gold disks that were supposed to last for many, many years.
Too bad the company didn't.
There are a few pieces of software that can read PCD these days, some not very well, and the format will be orphaned eventually.
Lesson learned: To keep your digital photos requires careful selection of file format. Canon, Nikon and Sony are probably not going anywhere, but they could decide to not support an older camera's raw format some time the future. Besides selecting a format, the other requirement may be pulling out the digital shoebox of files every few years, and bringing the files forward to the current format.
In a Lightroom workflow, this may mean occasionally outputting your non-destructive edits to a flat file to save them. Otherwise when the software or the process or support for that version of a manufacturer's raw file format changes, the work you did, may be lost. This applies to Photoshop and the camera manufacturer's software as well.
[Kodak is still there, having emerged from bankruptcy, but sold off a lot, and is not what they once were.]
Too bad the company didn't.
There are a few pieces of software that can read PCD these days, some not very well, and the format will be orphaned eventually.
Lesson learned: To keep your digital photos requires careful selection of file format. Canon, Nikon and Sony are probably not going anywhere, but they could decide to not support an older camera's raw format some time the future. Besides selecting a format, the other requirement may be pulling out the digital shoebox of files every few years, and bringing the files forward to the current format.
In a Lightroom workflow, this may mean occasionally outputting your non-destructive edits to a flat file to save them. Otherwise when the software or the process or support for that version of a manufacturer's raw file format changes, the work you did, may be lost. This applies to Photoshop and the camera manufacturer's software as well.
[Kodak is still there, having emerged from bankruptcy, but sold off a lot, and is not what they once were.]
Sep 9, 2014, 11:52 am
#17
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Seattle, Wash. USA
Posts: 1,531
Lightroom is still available as a stand-alone, store-bought product -- you don't have to mess with the Creative Cloud subscription business, unless you want to do the mobile version on a tablet as well.
Sep 9, 2014, 4:46 pm
#18
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: SFOSJCOAK
Programs: AA-EXP & 1MM+, AS, MR-LTT, HH Gold
Posts: 7,581
Sep 13, 2014, 4:40 pm
#19
Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: US
Programs: (PM)AA SPG (Marriott), Hilton
Posts: 1,040
DXO Optic
Like many things in the technical past, DNG has promise, but not enough adoption yet. There is a bigger trail of fail in technology, of companies who "will be around forever" and aren't. Kodak didn't embrace digitial imaging. Polaroid sued Kodak over instant cameras and it ended them because they ignored their market.
Backup rule of thumb for corporations is 321. 3 Copies, 2 Formats (meaning media) one off-site.
For photographers, it should mean (for important images) 3 copies in 3 different formats. preserve the camera original, copy it to dng, tif or psd, then create a post-edit save that can be viewed in at least two programs. For better or worse right now, the lingua franca is jpeg format. At least they can be tagged with color profiles.
DNG shows promise. I'd feel better if both Canon and Nikon adopted it, without proprietary extensions, but think the changes are slim and none, but who knows.
DXO Optics Pro 9 Evaluation
The evaluation copy is available for download for price of one of your email addresses you get 32 days. It drills down into a camera raw data and dig things out. Setting NR to "PRIME" it will take an 8 core Intel to 100% on all 8 cylinders when you tell it to export, and leave it there for a while, but it seems to work nicely in background while other things go on. It doesn't seem to be memory intensive. I can easily get Photoshop CC 2014 up to 14G. To be fair, ACR doesn't seem to use a lot of RAM either.
The software seems solid, and looks like it can deliver. I haven't done side by side comparisons to the same work in ACR. It writes it's own side car files which ACR doesn't see, but it does read the data left behind by [Canon] DPP. On some old images processed in DPP it showed the crop marks. I am guessing it would have grabbed some of the other data as well.
For easiest use, copy one of your images from each body+lens combination into a directory, point DXO at it, and it'll want to go online and get all the lens profiles it can recognize.
The Elite version is require for FF frame DSLRs, the non-Elite version for crop bodies & non-DSLRS (equipment list on DXO's site). The demo version is reported to be the Elite version.
Buy? Probably. Testing with trouble images shot in a high contrast scene, it didn't take much work for DXO to dig out useable images. It does its exposure/noise magic best with camera raw images, and seems to do it's optical correction work well with raw or jpg.
Backup rule of thumb for corporations is 321. 3 Copies, 2 Formats (meaning media) one off-site.
For photographers, it should mean (for important images) 3 copies in 3 different formats. preserve the camera original, copy it to dng, tif or psd, then create a post-edit save that can be viewed in at least two programs. For better or worse right now, the lingua franca is jpeg format. At least they can be tagged with color profiles.
DNG shows promise. I'd feel better if both Canon and Nikon adopted it, without proprietary extensions, but think the changes are slim and none, but who knows.
DXO Optics Pro 9 Evaluation
The evaluation copy is available for download for price of one of your email addresses you get 32 days. It drills down into a camera raw data and dig things out. Setting NR to "PRIME" it will take an 8 core Intel to 100% on all 8 cylinders when you tell it to export, and leave it there for a while, but it seems to work nicely in background while other things go on. It doesn't seem to be memory intensive. I can easily get Photoshop CC 2014 up to 14G. To be fair, ACR doesn't seem to use a lot of RAM either.
The software seems solid, and looks like it can deliver. I haven't done side by side comparisons to the same work in ACR. It writes it's own side car files which ACR doesn't see, but it does read the data left behind by [Canon] DPP. On some old images processed in DPP it showed the crop marks. I am guessing it would have grabbed some of the other data as well.
For easiest use, copy one of your images from each body+lens combination into a directory, point DXO at it, and it'll want to go online and get all the lens profiles it can recognize.
The Elite version is require for FF frame DSLRs, the non-Elite version for crop bodies & non-DSLRS (equipment list on DXO's site). The demo version is reported to be the Elite version.
Buy? Probably. Testing with trouble images shot in a high contrast scene, it didn't take much work for DXO to dig out useable images. It does its exposure/noise magic best with camera raw images, and seems to do it's optical correction work well with raw or jpg.