Digital Negative

Digital Negative (DNG) is a open, lossless developed by Adobe and used for digital photography. It was launched on September 27, 2004. The launch was accompanied by the first version of the DNG specification, plus various products, including a free-of-charge DNG converter utility. All Adobe photo manipulation software (such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom) released since the launch supports DNG. DNG is based on the standard format, and mandates significant use of metadata. Use of the file format is royalty-free and not subject to any known intellectual property restrictions or patents. Adobe states that, given the existence of a wide variety of camera-brand-specific s, it introduced DNG as a standardized and backward-compatible universal file format. It is based on the TIFF 6.0 standard. Various professional archivists and conservationists, working in institutional settings have adopted DNG for archival purposes. These objectives are repeatedly emphasized in Adobe documents: Digital image preservation (sometimes known as "archiving") to be suitable for the purpose of preserving digital images as an authentic resource for future generations. Assessment: The US Library of Congress states that DNG is a recommended alternative to other raw image formats: "Less desirable file formats: RAW; Suggested alternatives: TIFF_UNC, JP2_J2K_C_LL, DNG". The Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow (dpBestflow) project, funded by the United States Library of Congress and run by the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), singles out DNG, and states "DNG files have proven to be significantly more useful than the proprietary raw files in our workflow". Easy and/or comprehensive exploitation by software developers to enable software to be developed without the need for reverse engineering; and to avoid the need for frequent software upgrades and re-releases to cater for new cameras. Assessment: Software could support raw formats without DNG, by using reverse engineering and/or dcraw; DNG makes it easier, and many software products can handle, via DNG, images from cameras that they have no specific knowledge of.