Any Consensus on DNG Compression?

[chrism]

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I started out using uncompressed DNG's, and set Lightroom to convert them to their standard DNG on ingestion, which involves lossless compression. Thus 36MB files were reduced to about 18MB, which is nice for saving disk space. Now Capture One in its v.3 iterations couldn't read DNGs that had been compressed by LR, but the v.4 iterations can, BUT seem to have strange effects when used this way*. I still use C1 now and then to achieve what I want to see, so I am thinking I will set LR to simply import the Leica DNGs. In this case I'll need to decide if there is any qualitative difference between compressed 36MB files and compressed 18MB files. So I wondered what others have found so far - is there any benefit in the larger files?

 

Chris

 

*Not necessarily a bad thing. Here is a CV15 shot (please ignore the left sided magenta stain; this was before the new version of Cornerfix), taken uncompressed in the camera, and then imported with conversion to Adobe DNG and thus compressed at this stage:

[ATTACH]169585[/ATTACH]

 

When opened in C1 4.8.3 you get this:

[ATTACH]169586[/ATTACH]

 

Not unpleasing, but still nothing like the original. I cannot duplicate the effect in LR.

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[sandymc]

Short answer is that C1 4.8.3 (the latest version) does not correctly read DNG files that have been losslessly compressed by Lightroom (or any other program for that matter).

 

Broadly speaking, my experience is that C1 is very fussy about what it will read - generally any modification to the camera native representation can cause it to fail; the only exceptions are programs such as CornerFix that have been specifically coded to generate a C1 compatible file.

 

Sandy