Lack of DNG support needs to be adressed

DxO PhotoLab
41

Can you explain what you mean by this??

DXO´s responsibility is that their users who have payed and invested in their software also shall be able to use it for the conversion of their files. Isn´t that the basics of that software agreement? The customer pays to be able to use the product. When I couldn’t open my A7 IV-files with Photolab 5 for more than 6 months I felt that DXO broke that agreement. That’s what it´s all about for me regardless if my file format is ARW or DNG. I like everybody else should always be able to open our files - if there are supporting profiles or not - it should be our decisions to make whether we want that or not and not DXO’s or any other converter manufacturer either for that matter because this is not just a DXO Photolab problem but the effects of these problems have been the most severe since they have been so extremely slow to release the new profiles.

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42

It is this sort of stupidity that kills applications (and companies). If DxO turns’ its back on a whole global industry, one where Photo-Lab should be the fist choice, it will harm DxO. People will stop buying it

Actually it is several interlinked industries that will not use DxO…

DNG support is one of the main things that will determin if I upgrade or not.

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43

@Joanna

Well I will tell you a comment from one of the museums’s photographers where I used to work for seven years. When we walked through a new budget maybe in 2013-14, we found that the next biggest cost except wages was storage and the storage of our digitized images.

The old scanning standard was TIFF and we had old glass sheet image originals that scanned landed on 1 GB per image. At that time the town had an agreement with Volvo IT that took around 100 SEK or 10 U$ a year to store one single picture like that. The storage prize was set with type Office-files in mind and not for images.

The photographer I refer to then said something like: “Well than we might not upload so many images, because then we might get sacked!”

Our photographers put their RAW in a special TEMP-folder on their local machines and converted their RAW into DNG with a special action in FotoWare Fotostation (a client to FotoWare’s Enterprise DAM). Then they developed the files in Lightroom. That DNG held both the RAW-data, and the changes the photographer had made to it and as a result of that even an embedded fully developed JPEG with all the pixels preserved. They also added XMP-metadata with FotoWare Photostation.

**When these files where developed they exported them to the systems automation hub that matched the images image numbers with the corresponding image numbers in the museums SQL-based “photometadata database” and if there was a match the automation hub converted the SQL-data to XMP-data via the systems XMP-schema and pushed the data into the DNG-files XMP-headers.

Then the DNG-files were transferred to the “Master File Archive”. After that the system copied the embedded full size JPEG from the DNG and transferred the XMP-metadata to the JPEG before it was transferred by the hub to the “Delivery File Archive”.**

The last and very important step created a second more light weight system JPEG with 1280 pixels at the long side with XMP-master metadata that was sent to the Sketch File Archive. It was that file representation that carried all the XMP-masterdata and it´s considered to be a good practise not to pump around too heavy end inefficient files in the Fotoweb (not misspelled just spelled in Norwegian :slight_smile: Especially big TIFF-files were sometimes painfully slow to process when updating metadata because TIFF seems to lack a distinctly defines XMP-header that DNG and JPEG have.

What about mismatches in metadata between the files. Well the metadata in both the Master- and Delivery-files were only updated in the archives once and that was done in the initial process of uploading the Master-File. If a webuser wanted a copy of a Master or a Delivery file the metadata was copied on the fly during the download process from the metadata master, which was always the light weight Sketch files.

So Joanna, I´m a very big fan of DNG especially in DAM-systems of these reasons despite their advantage of being single standardized RAW-format in our chaotic proprietary RAW-file world. There is nothing wrong about DNG. The problem is that the proprietary camera and converter world won´t let it shine because they have their own interests in not doing so.

If it had been possible even in Photolab just to open any DNG without stopping it because the file it was made from happened not to be supported yet by DXO, then it could really begin to work as a universal RAW in a real sence.

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44

As I wrote.
We can’t demand.
We can offer our wishes or present our feature requests.

Then it’s up to DxO to analyse the business opportunities and risks.
DxO have chosen no to go the subscription route like other have gone. But as there are far more users of Adobes suites than there are DxO users - who is right and wrong?
Who should change their business strategy?

I’m just someone who wish us all to be humble and not loudly demand things.

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45

Vuescan also scans tiff, and i believe ed Handrick even advised against it (or even mocked it ) .

Since the scan is no more ‘raw’ then a tiff file, why save as anything other?
But i understand that decisions made are not in your control (or how you wished :)).

I wanted to try Negative Lab Pro once, which worked with the Vuescan DNG files to read them in Lightroom.

I had made scans in vuescan as tiff.

Now, vuescan has the option to ‘scan from raw’. It loads a raw scan it creates before , and uses that as input. What if you scanned ‘from raw, to raw’? Vuescan basically converts the file . I could use the batch scan options to scan a whole directory even.

So, i used this to convert a folder of scanned raw tiffs to ‘vuescan dng’ files , with the correct metadata how Lightroom and Negative Lab Pro wanted it.

Maybe you can try it to go the other way around. Batch a group of scanned vuescan DNG files to vuescan tiff files .

The tiffs open fine in DxO (and most other image processing software ) .

But, renaming the file extension might be enough . Or exiftool could extract something ? Or the official libtiff cli utilities.
Imagemagick by forcing the input format to tiff ?

46

So you have a solution. Scan to TIFF, correct in PhotoLab, export as DNG. There is no value in having a DNG from the scanner if you are making corrections to the final archive file anyway.

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47

The files are already in DNG format.

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48

Hey,
I’ve searched around the web and there are a lot of versus article for the theme e.g. DNG vs TIFF: The Best Lossless Imaging Format? - Lapse of the Shutter and others.
But one argument for me is still that many smartphones today have the ability to save in RAW with the result as a DNG file.
And we always talk about loving the best RAW converter…?
I can even edit the files in a free app like Snapseed with many tools and looks. On my computer I don’t have any graphics program except DXO which can’t handle the DNG’s.
And if I have understood everything correctly the DNG is something like a quasi standard.
But probably the discussion can be continued endlessly and without result.

A nice week wishes you a “DNG must in DXO” advocate :smile:

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49

I assumed you were the one doing the scanning, or at least have some control over it. I’m saying make the scans in TIFF. If you already have a lot of DNG files, then you should be able to batch convert them to TIFF with, as far as I understand it, no loss of information.

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50

Everyone’s files are all in DNG. Now you want me to batch convert to TIFF do the work. All 14,000 files? So more time and storage and then keep track of converting them back to DNG

It would be a lot more useful if PhotoLab handled DNG like everything else.

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51

I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m suggesting, based on the quoted section of your original post, that scanning directly to DNG is a problem (given PhotoLab does not support this) that can be worked around by not scanning directly to DNG. That’s all.

52

The problem is everything does support DNG except PhotoLab. The easiest option is not to have PhotoLab in the workflow

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53

I’m not sure there aren’t still other converters not supporting an open import procedure of DNG. Historically there were others too.

… and besides the import problems in DXO of all new camera files for as long as half a year recently from release date I think of another.

A reminder:
It’s not many years since DXO had major problems that severely threthened the very existens of the company. Luckily it survived and still offers perpetual licenses. The backside of this is that they on the contrary to Adobe needs to constantly attract people with more value that Adobe doesn’t need in the same way since their businessmodel guarantee their revenues anyway - it’s almost like a tax system.

Of this reason DXO unlike Adobe can’t ignore to ghost their user base. Since I’m also a user of Photo Mechanic, I’m struck by how Camera Bits, with one of the worlds best support organisations are handling their support and dialogue with their users. THEY LISTEN! … and act promptly and have at least this fantastic Kirk Baker that seems to see and address every damn problem of importance.

DXO: Check that up and learn!

Many of us have invested a lot in DXO over the years and the best insurance for that investment is a broad and sound user base that has a vivid dialog with each other. Without that dialog DXO would not survive in the long run and now we can see the development is lagging behind already. That is a serious sign.

… and a final word DXO: For your own best, you really need to monitor and participate in your own DXO Forums at least. We are a lot off people here giving you support in your efforts to develope your products. We are an extension of your own work force really and act like a test and support group for you. Listen, participate and make productive use that experiences and support!

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54

I agree with Stenis and I noticed also that nobody of DXO joins the discussions, where we all poke about in the fog. It’s a little bit like a punch in the face when we consider how much time and energy many of us have spent improving Dxo and also gave our knowledge to new or not so experienced users.
I learned how to do it differently when I evaluated Topaz AI for myself and ran into a memory leak while batch processing 400 TIFFs. A mail describing the problem, a answer within 1 business day wit detailed instructions what they need, after 3 days getting a message with the info about a new version is coming, a little failure again after installing new version, a short answer with the logs, and the last version AI 1.0.6 which works. And the support agent Lingyu Kong works fast, with clear instructions and all the informations I want to have by support call.

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55

I can only agree 100% with Stenis’ contribution, my experience with Topaz support was similarly good.

However, I fear that DxO has a different “business model” than the one we want.
At least that’s what I interpret from the current major update to 6.0, where of the existing features, DxO DeepPrime in particular has been improved, the very feature that is Photolab’s key unique selling point (the Topaz products are also excellent, but Pl remains the benchmark here).
I don’t mean to belittle the improved repair tool, wide gamut and addition of perspective correction, but these are not the improvements I had hoped for.

An example of my assumption:
If you spend a lot of time in various forums on the subject of image processing, the most frequently mentioned disadvantage of Photolab is the poor control over highlights and shadows. Many then use DxO only for denoising and then continue working with Lightroom or Capture One via the DNG export. Apparently these channels are not monitored, because nothing has been improved in this area.
Or it is ignored or accepted because it does not correspond to the business model to also improve important basic functions.

I could write something similar about “masking”, “white balance”, “integration and standardisation of the Nik Collection” or “preview of changes”. These are all basic functions where other programmes are sometimes much better.

In another article it was pointed out that Photolab is not supposed to be a clone of other programmes, especially Ligthtroom.
That is not the expectation, but it is about basic functions that simply belong to every programme and should function as optimally as possible, completely independent of how the other programmes have been solved.

Perhaps it is also the case that DxO - in order to remain profitable - only has a limited number of resources and must use them specifically for the “business model”. The wishes of the users are certainly helpful, but what is then implemented is primarily decided by the return on investment.

I don’t want to give the impression that I would turn my back on Photolab or only use it for denoising. On the contrary: I use it for 90 % of my processing and I am still convinced that almost all image processing issues can be solved with it, even if the “workarounds” are often awkward or time-consuming. In fact, various attempts to return to Capture One (which was my preferred programme for many years) have failed.
Why I’m writing all this: because I hope that the management will turn its attention to other functions and take a close look at how they can be improved.

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56

This article ends with “ A common workflow is: shoot in RAW → convert to DNG on import to Lightroom or Photoshop → Edit your photo, potentially adding layers in Photoshop → save as TIFF for long term storage.”

Which is suggesting TIFF for archive because of Photoshop layers. However for museums and archives you won’t be adding layers in photoshop. So don’t need the final Tiff stage. However it does advocate RAW-> DNG which is what the Museums do. No one is suggesting scaning in tiff other than PL fanboys. DxO needs to properly support DNG

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57

Post a feature wish, describe the idea and benefits and vote for it.
Ask kindly.

Repetitions of must, need and have to are not the most humble approach.

58

I did post a feature request… DxO needs to handle DNG properly and better.

I don’t need to be humble, I am not asking for money to upgrade to PL6.
I am just stating my needs before I part with any more money.

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59

You might be right but if they see their core business as selling denoise and preset tools Plug-ins to Lightroom or Camera Raw on the larger Adobe market instead of developing and improving Photolab as a real alternative to Lightroom then I think they are out on deep water. Photolab is not just a Topaz alternative for most of us - until now it has been almost all for many of us when it comes to post processing of images and if the plug-in business really is the new focus for the company, then some of us might have to question this relationship of ours with DXO.

Until now I have upgraded every year - like a voluntary subscription to support the DXO R&D - but today after the disappointments with version 6 - i might reconsider. The only really positive thing for me with version 6 is that the automatic sync of XMP-metadata with Photo Mechanic works so well. I’m glad for that but are deeply disappointed that they failed to deliver a more mature layer and masking control system. I will give CO 23 a real try instead when I can upgrade my version 22 trial I have begun to use. There aren’t any thresholds for me since I have used CO since version 8.

The efficiency advantages I earlier really saw in Photolab versus CO has diminished over the years since CO has been improved and the development of Photolab have stalled and failed to keep up with the competition as I see it.

It’s a pity DXO doesn’t recognize the scalability in the integration with other photo DAM-softwares as Photo Mechanic because it’s really a terrific combo and it could have been even much better if they had understood that and made it a real option to disable the now mandatory use of the PhotoLibrary. If we could have that possibility we could be relieved by the now incredible sluggish performance when Photolab is rendering previews and automatically creates XPM-files for all the RAW that lacks XMP when opened and on top of that tries to keep the PhotoLibrary database in sync with the rest.

Despite I have a pretty fast new computer that really has impressed me by relatively lightning-fast exports of my RAW to JPEG-files with Deep Prime in 3-4 seconds I still now find myself staring at a dead screen wating for a RAW-folder to open for minutes - a RAW-folder with already processed files!! … and it even have forced me in some cases to confirm lens profiles too that even they once have been updated. That is really painful watching all lost productivity going down the drain and it’s nothing I had expected even in my darkest dreams. Big disappointment! Suddenly Photolab version 6 felt more like the old Lightroom 6.x. - the last version of Lightroom I have used and that I hated of exactly the same reason.

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60

Excuse me for suggesting a workaround that has no benefit to me whatsoever.