Reply To: CR2 or DNG?

[fstopper89]

Thank you everyone. I did look up some info online and got similar answers. Basically it sounds like DNG is more “universal” and there in preparation for in the future when camera manufacturers may all go with the same format. I’ve heard DNG may cause some data loss. Really though, there shouldn’t even be a need for a universal platform between Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc. since you have to export any of them to a JPG or PNG to use in most finished applications anyway. It’s not like having an external hard drive formatted to either Mac or Windows and running into problems when you want to read/write files on the other machine.

The photographer I used to work for imported all her images as DNGs in Lightroom, so I thought she maybe knew a trade secret. My workflow is similar to soaringturkeys’ – I shoot in RAW (in my case with a Canon, CR2) and use Lightroom to download the images to my computer. At the same time it catalogs them in the program. I do some adjustments in LR, then edit in Photoshop, save as a TIFF so it’s back in Lightroom like that, and make final adjustments. Then I export as a JPG. If there are any photos that I want to keep the separate layers active I will save a separate PSD.