Timing of DNG conversion

[preiss1965]

Peter,

Just finished your book- was exactly what I was looking for.  I suspect that the book will do well given that there is no real competition on the market.  

My questions:  1) My recollection is that the primary reason you give for applying camera raw changes prior to DNG conversion is the time it takes to do the conversion- time that could be better spent working on the images themselves.  I currently convert to DNG as soon as the RAW files are downloaded.  Is there any other compelling reason to apply camera raw changes (as well as bulk metadata, etc
Paul

[peterkrogh]

Paul,
I bet you have not changed you Camera Raw defaults to "always Update" the DNG preview.  This is the preferred setting because it will make the embedded preview match the current settings of the file.  It will also make it take quite a bit of time to everytime you change Camera Raw settings, since Bridge needs to entirely remake the DNG file, and this cannot be done in the background. (Page 126).

Try a few experiments and you will see what I am talking about. There are some work-arounds, but they make the workflow more complicated and open you to the possibility that your settings will not match your preview.

There's also another reason, coming soon, in the form of another DAMuseful product...
Peter

[preiss1965]

Peter,

Thanks for responding.  I do have the program set up to immediateley update DNG previews and yes in my experience it does take time for the PC to crunch theses changes.  As an aside, I tested it with idimager last night and the camera raw changes are also reflected there when you update the "thumb".  I also checked again to see if changes made to the Bridge DNG ranking get changed in iview (3.01) when synching annotations in iview.  They do.  However, labels still do not carry over to iview.  I took another look at Rank and File this morning and just wanted to confirm that labels in Bridge DNG's will be reflected in iview after running Rank and File.  In your response, you alluded to another forthcoming reason to maintain the existing DNG workflow.  Can you elaborate?  Still wondering if there is a critical reason to not immediately convert CR2's to DNGS upon downloading the CR2's.  Thanks.

Paul

[peterkrogh]

Paul,
Rank and File will put your Bridge Label value into IPTC Keywords (or one of several other fields), so, yes, they will be visible to iView in a DNG.

At the moment, there is no other reason NOT to convert to DNG right away, other than the speed hit you take on re-adjustment.  In the near future, we will be releasing a product that will extend Camera Raw functionality to Bridge, and reduce the time you need to make adjustments to images shot in changing light.  But it only works on RAW + Sidecar for now.  (You will then convert to DNG after adjustment).  Hope to have more details public in a week or so.

Peter

[preiss1965]

Peter,

The light has gone off.  I made changes to a CR2 within Bridge/Camera Raw- took a couple of seconds to process after hitting done.  Did the same thing to the same image as a DNG file- took at least a couple of additional seconds to process compared to the CR2.  As you indicate, definitely makes sense to make changes directly to the CR2 before conversion to DNG.  This is rather unintuitive- one would think that making changes to an Adobe created open file standard within an Adobe application would be faster than making that same change to Canon proprietary file type.

Paul

[peterkrogh]

The difference is the embedded preview.  When you change a RAW file, you are only really changing the Camera Raw XMP settings - small text information.  The preview you see in Camera Raw and Bridge is made "on the fly" and can be created in the background.  No big deal if it crashes the program before it is created, since it will be recreated the next time

When you change a DNG that has "always update", then it has to rebuild the DNG to include the corrected preview, which can take a while.  And since you would end up with a corrupted image file if Bridge crashed during rebuild, it locks you out of doing ANYTHING else until it has accomplished this vital task.
Peter

[preiss1965]

Thanks for taking the time to explain.  Really appreciate it.  Best of luck with what has been a very helpful book for me.

Paul