Aperture lack of DNG support unfortunate

Rich Hayhurst wrote:

I would prefer camera RAW as well, but the camera provider does not offer it, only offering DNG support. My guess (a bit cynical I might add) is that Adobe is paying them for the "privlidge" of only offering DNG, that is not supported by Aperture. And conversely, I would guess that Apple is not going to chase every iteration of DNG that Adobe creates.

Rich, is it possible you have a misunderstanding of RAW images? There is no file fomat called "RAW". It's a generic term for a class of files that are essentially just a digital readout of the camera sensor (plus some extra metadata in many cases). DNG is one of those file formats that fall into the RAW classification. There are others such as CRW (Canon), PEF (Pentax), NEF (Nikon), ORF (Olympus), etc. What's different about DNG is it's a freely licensed format by Adobe which most any image editing application, such as Aperture, can read without having to specifically support the camera that generated the file. There are a few rare exceptions to this where Aperture can't read a DNG file but it's almost always because the camema added something to that file that Aperture or iPhoto doesn't recognnize. Does that help?

Knowing the actual camera they are installing and if DNG is its only option or if dji is setting it that way might help.

BTW that is some pretty cool gear they have!

Rich Hayhurst wrote:

"There are a few rare exceptions to this where Aperture can't read a DNG file but it's almost always because the camema added something to that file that Aperture or iPhoto doesn't recognnize. Does that help?"

Well, actually no, because if DNG is such a 'standard' and I was around when it was originally being developed and presented as a tool for circumventing the various manufacturer nuances, please tell me why, as a standard, Lightroom 5 reads these files just fine, and Aperture replys as "Unsupported Format."

I the world had problems reading 20 different iterations of PDF, well, PDF would never have become a standard.

I'm going to take a look at some other applications, outside of Apple, and see if they can open this dng file.

Because Lightroom can deal with whatever this odd metadata might be (more likely knows to ignore it) whereas Aperture fails when it see it. Same thing happened with the Pentax K-3 when it came out. The first Pentax camera to output DNG files that couldn't be read by Aperture (until they added support) yet they were readable by Lightroom. As to why... you'll have to ask Apple that.

Standards are fine. It's when companies add things to standards on their own that things don't always work perfectly.

The challenge is that DNG like many other "standards" is really a LOT of things.

A DNG is a big "container" for data. It can contain the original RAW data from a camera (say, a Canon RAW file), or it can contain "linearized" data (which is not at all the original RAW data, and has some processing applied). Aperture typicaly supports the former, but it does not currently support the latter. So just seeing the DNG file extension is not sufficient - you have to know what's in the DNG itself.

Also, a DNG file can BE a RAW file itself. For example, Leica RAW files are DNGs. Aperture didn't support these until it supported the cameras, so again a DNG from a Leica is different to one from a converted Nikon or Canon RAW image. One started in-camera as a DNG, and others were converted to it. You have to know the format of the image data inside - that's important.

And also, like many standards, there are multiple versions of the DNG standard ("standard" is a bit of a loaded term here: Adobe controls the "standard" and have submitted it to a standards body, but they really control the standard; it's not a vote-by-committee which is good and bad). Recent DNG versions (I think it's up to 1.6 or 1.7 now?) brought things ike lossy DNG compression and other things that Lightroom uses in its new "smart previews" feature leveraged in Lightroom 5 and the new Lightroom Mobile for iPad. Aperture does not support these versions of the DNG standard right now, so any DNGs created this way (say by creating smart previews, and exporting those as DNG files), won't work with Aperture. This isn't unusual - if you created a PDF in Adobe Acrobat today and tried to open it in a PDF reader from 1998, it wouldn't work.

All ways of saying "A DNG is not a DNG is not a DNG" because there are various feature sets, and various spec versions, that are necessary to know. It's a bit of a matrix of pain 😉 But if using DNGs is more important to you than editing or managing photos, going Adobe is probalby the best bet because they write this "standard" and thus tend to offer the leading-edge support because they update the spec as they implement new features that would be good to have in the spec.

...if DNG is such a 'standard' and I was around when it was originally being developed and presented as a tool for circumventing the various manufacturer nuances, please tell me why, as a standard, Lightroom 5 reads these files just fine, and Aperture replys as "Unsupported Format."

Because folks who call DNG an "industry standard" are wrong. I too was here at the inception of DNG. Adobe wanted to control imagery so Adobe created the DNG format and tried to push the world to adopt it. However Adobe is a software vendor not an image maker, and most of those pesky camera companies including Nikon and Canon rightfully said something to Adobe to the effect of "are you nuts?"

The rationale Adobe made when pushing DNG was "use our DNG and everyone will always be on the same page, the world will be a better place" (coincidentally, tech improvements by camera makers would need to comply with Adobe's wants and needs). Obviously (per the OP's experience that started this thread) every DNG file is not the generic solution stated by Adobe at the inception of DNG. IMO Adobe's rationale was false from the beginning.

Another absurd claim Adobe made at the time was that only DNG would allow image files to read far into the future. As readers for NEF and CRW will somehow fail to exist because Adobe is not in control.

I have been an Adobe user since the early days and own more than a dozen current Adobe products but today the firm makes me a bit sick. CS6 is my last upgrade.

-Allen

Rich Hayhurst wrote:

Thank you guys for all of the information.

Because of this peculuar DNG file structure I've been drawn, at least temporarily back into a Lightroom workflow for images from this camera, but the only issue will be having to relearn all of those keystroke shortcuts.

Rich, you might have another option. Adobe has a RAW conversion utilty that should process most any RAW file and output a new DNG file which Aperture can deal with. I know several people used this for Pentax K-3 DNG and PEF files before Aperture was updated. I think this is the appropriate link:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5738

What does Aperture show in the CameraMake and CameraModel EXIF fields when you look at the JPEGs from your drone camera?

Have you tried using Adobe DNG Converter to see if there are embedded RAW originals that you can extract back out?

When I initially bought my Nikon D7000, my first DSLR, I wanted to know more about the digital world. So I bought a copy of Peter Krogh's book — The D.A.M. Book (for digital asset management).

It is a little outdated today, but Krogh essential wrote the bible on digital photo formats. One of the big issues he addressed is the fact that various mediums become obsolete. Remember 8-Track car stereos from the late 1960s? Or Sony Beta TV recording equipment?

He said that new technologies render the storage of data obsolete with alarming regularity. He bemoaned the fact that digital camera manufacturers can't settle on a sort of 'Rosetta Stone' format that would be interchangeable between camera brands and PP software.

At the time, he thought that Adobe's introduction of the DNG protocol would be the 'lingua Franca' of everything related to DSLR. And thus readable by all cameras and all PP software.

Unfortunately, like any business, Adobe turned out to be somewhat protective and guarded in their business plan and so DNG wasn't universally accepted by makers of hardware and software. You can't really blame Adobe.They are in business to make a profit.

But I say, **** with DNG and insist on maintaining my entire photo library in the Nikon RAW format. Also known as NEF. Most files are close to 30Mb each.

My recall is that Adobe was a frequent client of Peter Krogh. His work was always heavily oriented toward Adobe solutions, and more recently he wrote a book on Adobe Lightroom.

The whole argument of don't use RAW (or for that matter 8-track) because it will become an obsolete standard, use Abobe's product instead has always been BS whether promulgated by Peter Krogh or by Adobe directly. Service bureaus or applications that can convert NEF will always exist even if Nikon (much older than Adobe) manages to self-destruct; much like service bureaus that convert 8-track and Beta formats will always exist.

-Allen