jeep_daddy wrote:
My humble opinion:
1. Keep them in CR2 format because Canon' (DPP) software can interpret everything that the camera wrote to the image while the image was taken e.g. focus point, picture styles, crops etc. No other software can do this but Canon' proprietary DPP software. Each release of DPP, which can always be downloaded free from Canon' web site, is updated to work on past and present Canon camera CR2 images.
2. Importing raw images from the card and converting them to DNG takes twice as long and when it's said and done there's no advantage. If someone has a crystal ball that can tell us that Adobe or Canon will go belly up I'd like to borrow it for the Lotto.
There are many ways to do this and you can choose the one that suits you. So it's always your choice. Also, I'm sure there will always be some kind of codec or CR2 to DNG or CR2 to tif, that will help those people with obsolete image file formats. Canon offers one free and Adobe offers one free and I'm sure other web sites have similar software converters.
Some people, me included will:
1. Transfer image in CR2 to the computer using LR or some other raw editing program.
2. Edit as much as they can in the raw editing program.
3. ...then continue editing the same image in a full layering editing program such as PSE, CS, PSP etc. and then save the layered image as a tif or psd. The user now has an image ***.CR2 and one named ***.tif or ***.psd (a total of 2 images on their hard drive)
3a. Some people save them as psd just so they know that if the file is seen on their hard drive and the psd extension is attached they know that is a layered image.
3b. Some people save save their layered images to tif for the same reason as psd in 3a now because file size is not limited on tif images as psd images are limited to, I'm not sure, either 2GB or 4GB. Tif images have no limit to the size of the file.
4. Now that there are 2 images saved, if you want to print, share, upload to web or social media sites, then you open the saved layered file (psd or tif) and do a save for web or save-as and now create a third image file called a jpg. This cuts the file size down for faster email and uploads, makes it compatible with commercial print services, and is universally recognized by 99.9% of computers today. You still keep the raw(CR2), the layered psd/tif, and now the jpg in case you ever need to reproduce and/or change per a request etc.
Now that there are 3 files that are the same image on your computer you might want to throw one or more of them away - but this really doesn't make sense since hard drives (storage) are so cheap today. I remember the days when a 20 Megabyte hard drive cost more than $400. Now they make thumb drives that hold 16 Gigabytes for $10 and a 1TB external hard drive for about $100. DON'T throw anything away. Instead take advantage of a good organization program such as LR to keep your image files organized.
My humble opinion: br br 1. Keep them in CR2 form... (
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Very good post on the front end Jeepdaddy, and on the back end an affirmation of my points a few days ago about the cost of storage space as it relates to "redundant" storage. See here for the math......:
Much Ado About Nothing... well almost nothing.Is your concern about the price of storing a 10 Mb vs. a smaller file size. Since you mention file and storage space size, I presume cost is the factor involved. I could be wrong, but based on size and price of storage have you done the math?
I'm sure you know that the cost of storage continues to drop. Twenty years ago... about 1992, the price of a 10-12 MB hard drive was between $300 to $399.
I know because I was selling them. A 286 based PC running 20 Mh, with a 12 MB hard drive, and 2Mb of RAM with an amber (monochrome) 10 inch monitor, keyboard (no mouse then) and a 9pin dot matrix printer running DOS 3.0 was $2195.00.
You could only have stored ten of your images on such a drive.
No Kidding here. People were lining up to buy them.
Well things have changed. Storage prices have dropped. They have dropped to the point that your concern seems a waste of time to me.
Let's do the math.
Today, I checked the price on a 1 Terrabyte Hard Drive in a big box store. The price was $129.00.
1 Terrabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. Ten Megabytes is 10,000,000 bytes of information. Dividing the 1 Tb by 10Mb, you can store 100,000 files on a 1 TB drive.
Dividing the price of 129.00 by 100,000 files, it costs $00.00129 to store one file. Ten files would cost approx a Penny to store. 100 files would cost 13 cents. 1000 files would cost $1.29....
Do you really want to take the time and energy to make those 10Mb files any smaller when you can store 1000 of them for just over $1.
There are some good posts here on the functions of file compression, which is more about the simple concept of "throwing away data" and "degrading the files".
My observation has nothing to do with that, but simply the advisability of worrying about such a minimal issue.
I'd be using 100% on the compression factor, or at most 90% and buying a 2 or 3 Tb hard drive. The cost issue will go down even more because of the fact that doubling or tripling the storage space won't double or triple the cost of the drive... better, cheaper storage even then.
Heaven help you if you lose a 1, 2 or 3 Tb hard drive. Personally, I don't buy or use drives over 500 Gb. You can buy them for half the price of a 1 Tb drive.
So the math there remains the same. Store 1000 10Mb files for $1.30.
And at the end of all this, I do not find DNG as a positive function, going back to the original question. Which one to use? I find DNG irrelevant, and particularly am offended at the position take by Adobe, that this is the RAW file format of "the future"... It's unnecessary.