AV News 189 - August 2012
Photoshop - DNG File Format
Malcolm Gee
To Keith Scott,
In your article in issue 188 of AV NEWS, 'Photoshop - DNG File Format
Alternative to Native RAW', you do not highlight the problems that occur
with the backward compatibility of RAW files and specific versions of
Photoshop. For example, back in 2008 when I was using Photoshop CS3,
I purchased a Canon Powershot G10 camera. On converting the Canon
G10 RAW files to DNG format, using the then current version of
DNGConverter (4.7 for Mac OSX 10.4.11, if I remember correctly), I found
that Photoshop CS3 would not recognise them! I had the same problem last
year with RAW files from an Olympus PEN E-P2 camera! The situation was
only resolved when I upgraded from Photoshop CS3 to CS5.
After some research, the conclusion I came to was that if a new camera
model is introduced after the launch date of a version of Photoshop it is not
supported by Adobe. Of course this forces you to upgrade your version of
Photoshop to one that does support your DNG RAW files. Money in the
bank for Adobe, of course, but not very user friendly!!!
I hope that these comments may help some of the readers of AV News,
who may well run into similar problems as myself.
Reply
Keith Scott FRPS
For those of you who aren't familiar with Malcolm's work, he has a
wonderful sequence containing some exceptional quality ground to air
photography about the Red Arrows. These aircraft are of major interest to
me and quite close to my heart as I was heavily involved with the Hawk
Aircraft project for many years.
Whilst Malcolm's sentiments are quite understandable they may be
subjective. One of the major attributes of Adobe DNG is it's backward
compatibility with early versions of Adobe Camera Raw as used by
Photoshop, right back to Camera Raw version 2.4 used in the original CS.
This includes Camera Raw vers