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Originally Posted by Richard D
... 1) Can you convert .RWL images to TIFF in Capture One? 2) And what's ACR? I'm new at all this, and the process seems daunting...
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard D
And what the heck is a DNG?
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Rich--Jeff's responses are good (and succinct). Let me come at the matter just a little differently:
If you open the RWL in Capture One, it lets you output it undistorted as a TIFF or uncorrected as a DNG.
DNG was to be the open-source, 'never-go-out-of-date,' future-proof "Digital NeGative." It's interesting that this Panasonic camera has made Adobe rethink the format.
Adobe explains the difference between their own and Capture One's approach to the RWL file at
Adobe - Adobe Camera Raw and DNG Converter : For Macintosh : Camera Raw 5.2 update et al.
The difference explains why some people are having trouble with their RWL files and the supposedly universal DNG: Capture One writes a DNG that captures the RAW data only, and does so in the general format that all RAW interpreters recognize.
Adobe, on the other hand, with the new Adobe Camera Raw and the new Adobe DNG Converter and the soon-to-come Lightroom update, makes it possible to decode the complete RWL file, with its software correction for distortion and chromatic aberration, into a version of DNG foreseen in the original DNG specification but never used before now.
In other words, no one had previously needed to use the linear version of DNG, so no one's software could recognize it. Now Adobe is writing de-mosaicked DNGs for the first time, and other programs may have trouble with them.
But that's short-term; the others will soon catch up. It happens whenever there is a change in technology. The same thing happened when the Leica M8 came out. Only Capture One could read its files, because they made use of a version of DNG that hadn't previously been implemented. People were up in arms then just as now. But after a month or so, all RAW interpreters could read the M8's DNGs, and today no one complains about it.
You're correct, it is daunting. All of us have gone through that stage of "oh, no, not another acronym," followed by "okay, that's what the acronym stands for--but what does it mean?" Don't worry. Gradually it becomes clearer.
And then someone tosses a monkey-wrench into the works, as Panasonic / Leica have just done, developing a RAW format that contains much more complex data than previously: Not just the data from the sensor, but instructions on how to process it.
Feel free to scream, but don't give up.
