Post processing part 2 – The shot

Raw

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 + SB800 at ISO200, 85mm, f5.0, 1/500sec, exposure -2/3EV, flash +0.7EV

This is the photo straight from the camera. Often, white balance and exposure correction is required but not in this case. With the white balance set to “cloudy”, the colour was right.

This photo is a fairly typical of the way I do things. Since I am only interested in the persons face, I use center weighted metering to get the exposure for the face correct. I only care a little about the exposure of the environment behind them – a little – I want to darken it to make the persons face stand out from the background. I set my camera exposure compensation to -2/3EV making the whole image darker than it would be, and then I set my flash (SB800) to +0.7EV in commander mode (Custom Menu Setting, e3 Flash cntrl for built-in flash, Commander mode). This will lighten the foreground to a good exposure level, and leave the more distant background darker.

Basically, all I’m doing is setting a relative exposure difference between the background and the person.

Of course, there are some fine points to it.

• More often than not, I err on the side of slightly overexposing the person since it is easier to correct that than underexposure (well, at least with my camera).
• If I have time (and can be bothered), I use matrix metering and read the exposure setting for the whole scene and then later spot meter the person – this give an acurate exposure setting but it takes time to do.
• If it’s very sunny, then I increase the exposure difference and this reminds me of the most important thing, shot in the shade!

Importing

I import the photo in Lightroom, and then right-click it and select “Edit in Photoshop”. This will conveniently stack the Photoshop image with the original raw on in Lightroom so that the two images (the oringal raw, and the photoshoped one) are kept together.

From Lightroom, Edit in Photoshop

In Photoshop, I try not to make any changes directly to image, so there are still things I haven’t figured out and a few slightly mucky steps to manage and use layers – I must learn better ways!

Post process series

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?
Post processing part 2 – The shot
Post processing part 3 – Nice skin
Post processing part 4 – Dazzling eyes
Post processing part 5 – Brilliant hair
Post processing part 6 – Cool clothes (soon)
Post processing part 7 – Final tweaks (soon)

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?

I was asked “What post processing do you do?”

“I really don’t know what I’m doing, but just enough to so that the person is really happy with their shot”, I replied. Truthfully, just “I really don’t know what I’m doing” would be right. I work through a few processes that I’ve discovered but I’m always learning and looking for better ways of doing things. At the moment, I’m not entirely happy with the way I currently process skin.

Anyway, yesterday I took a photo that I really liked – no white balance or exposure correction was required, but I then performed some post processing. The amount of post processing and the actual steps I carry out vary from photo to photo, but this is a reasonably typical example.

Here is a half-size crop (click the image to see the full size) that show the Photoshop alterations – skin, eyes, hair, clothing.The changes are subtle, I hope, but they add some impact, again, I hope :)

Before and after

The final Lightroom adjustments are some exposure gradients, and the obvious crop.

Full image

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 + SB800 at ISO200, 85mm, f5.0, 1/500sec, exposure -2/3EV, flash +0.7EV

After Photoshop

Finally, after some Lightroom tweaks and cropping before publishing

Post process series

Post processing part 1 – What post processing?
Post processing part 2 – The shot
Post processing part 3 – Nice skin
Post processing part 4 – Dazzling eyes
Post processing part 5 – Brilliant hair
Post processing part 6 – Cool clothes (soon)
Post processing part 7 – Final tweaks (soon)

What editing can Lightroom do?

Tonight I was asked, “what editing can Lightroom do”?

I use Lightroom as my library management tool. It allows me to sort and find all my photos with ease.

I also use it for most of my initial gross editing too. A few things I use pretty much all the time are file conversion, white balance correction and cropping. Frequently I use exposure and saturation corrections too. This type of change that is made to the entire the photo is what I call “gross editing”. Some slightly more localised editing is possible in Lightroom such as vignetting and gradients – this sort of editing only affects certain regions of a photo.

Here’s an example of the original photo (cropped) and after I had finished the gross editing in Lightroom.

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO2000, 85mm, f1.4, 1/80sec, cropped

D700 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4 at ISO2000, 85mm, f1.4, 1/80sec, cropped and post processed in Lightroom

There are also some finer selective editing features in Lightroom too; these affect really small areas that you choose. Spot correction and red eye correction are two examples, and both work reasonably well. You can also use a brush a change the exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, clarity and sharpness over areas that you paint. But personally, I find that the brush does not give the control or the very careful selection that I want. And for the kind of portraits I do, I think that spot and eye correction can be done better elsewhere.

Lightroom is fast and easy to use, but the Lightroom adjustments were not quite enough for me with this photo. To complete it, I used Photoshop. I made very fine changes to the musician’s eyes, hair, and some other tweaks, in particular to the overblown forehead and ear. The final version is here.

Finally, who is he? Check out www.mayhewmusic.com :)

Lightroom workflow part 4 – Exporting photos to disk

I’ve come to the last step of my Lightroom workflow, exporting the photos.

Exporting photos does not change your original files in anyway, or removing them from Lightroom. Exporting uses the photos in Lightroom to make a copy – the way that that copy is made is what exporting is all about. For example, I usually export my DNG files inside Lightroom to produce small jpeg files that I can email to people – the DNGs are not affected at all.

I either export the photos from Lightroom to disk, or export them directly to Flickr.

I used to export the photos to disk and then manually upload them to Flickr, but now, I’m using a nifty Lightroom plugin that uploads them to Flickr for me. I’ll describe is later. I still frequently export the photos to disk usually so that I can email them to people who want copies of the photos.

The export settings

Since exporting to disk is something that I do often, usually with the same settings, it is a great to save all those settings and just use them again later. But first, all those settings must be set! I select the photo (or photos) to export, right click on them, and from the popup menu choose “Export”, “Export…”.

The opens up the Export window. There is quite a lot in this window, but one thing that I really like is that when all the section are collapsed, it shows a summary a summary of the settings. For example, from the Export Location section, I can see where the file is going to be written to. I can glance over the summary it to make sure that setting are what I expect, or if I need to make any changes.

Let’s go through the settings that I use to export the photo to disk.

Export Location

The location is the folder where the photo file is going to be created. I don’t keep the exported files – once they are dealt with (such as emailing them), I delete them. So I simply dump the exported files into a temporary folder named “Untilted Export”, and you can also see that I choose not to add the exported photos back into the catalogue.

Just in case you are wondering “why would someone ever want to add a photo back into Lightroom that was just exported from Lightroom”, it is because the are many changes made to the photo during exporting. It can be resized, changed file format, sharpened and even watermarked. By adding the exported photo back into Lightroom, that exported photo is available again without having to remember all the export settings that were used to create it. For me, that’s not so import – I don’t mind if I can’t export the original and get the exact same file again.

File Naming

The File Naming section lets you rename all the exported photos, and in very useful ways too. For example, you can rename a set of photos to “Chinese New Year – 1″, then “… – 2″ and so on, you add dates or other handy things to the file names.

I simply use the name of the original file… Because the file name matches the original file in Lightroom so I can quickly reconcile them if I need to, the exported file is only temporary and will soon be deleted, the Flickr title comes from the photo Title metadata and not the file name (if it is set), and because the file name is part of my naming convention… but perhaps, because I’m too lazy to be bothered thinking about a better file name. :)

File Settings

The File Settings section offers several different file formats that the photos will be exported to. And depending on which file format is chosen, different additional options are displayed.

I choose to export my photos in jpeg format, and at a quality level of 80 (which is pretty high). This is always good enough for Flickr, you may even want to go to a lower quality level if you are worried that someone might steal your photos from Flickr. This is also almost good enough for all people I meet, except other photographers – I usually just them the raw DNGs.

Image Sizing

Image Sizing is a very important setting since the size of the image has, of course, such a large impact on the size of the file produced. Of course, if have chosen to export a DNG or copy of the original file, you can resize it.

I size my photos so that the longest side is 1024. This size matches the largest size, other than full size, that Flickr can display photos. It is also a fairly large size to email to people – they’ll get a high quality print from a jpeg this large at a quality level of 80. I never enlarge the photo when exporting it, because I think that quality will degrade too much. And for people who want full size images, perhaps for high quality printing or their own photo editing, then I export those and hope that their email system can handle such large files! :)

Output Sharpening

Oh, this is awful – turn it off! Sharpening does exactly what is expected, it sharpened the exported photos. However I’ve usually done all my own editing before hand, and don’t want any further processing to wreck the photos. I once mistakenly had this setting on and what a mess!

It might be good if you had lots of photos just to rapidly dump out with minimal work, but it doesn’t fit the that I work.

Metadata

Metadata is all the extra information that is contained within a photo such as the camera and lens detail, when it was taken, keywords, title and comments… there is a lot of metadata. Perhaps you don’t want to export it all, then the “Minimize Embedded Metadata” is the option for you. I’ve not yet looked into what metadatais removed, and what metadata remained.

I have no idea what “Write Keywords as Lightroom Hierarchy” does, and I do know what “Add Copyright Watermark” does. It adds some text to the bottom of your photos – it is not pretty but if are worried about people stealing your photos, this is a very easy way to mark your photos. The text comes from the photo metadata, the Copyright field.

I have all three of these options not set. Even though I have been thinking about watermarking my photos, I want something that looks better that what the “Add Copyright Watermark” produces but is just as fast and easy.

Post-Processing

In the Post-Processing section I do nothing because once again, my exported photos are normally only temporary. However an option that I find myself using more and more for “After Export” is “Show in Explorer”. This opens up a file manager to the exported photos once the exporting is finished. It is handy to quickly glance over the files, attach them to email, and do what ever else before deleting them.

But with post processing, it is possible to do things such as open the exported photo in Photoshop, or chose any other application.

Making an export preset

That’s the settings I use for export photos to disk but before you hit the “ok” and export them, it’s a good idea to save the settings so that they can used again for the next time, and the time after that, and the time after that…

Under the Preset panel on the left hand side of the Export Window, simply click the Add button. In the New Preset window, type in a name, and then click Create to create the preset. I used the name “1024 Disk” to remind me the size and destination of the export.

This present will now be available in the popup menu when right click on a photo and select “Export” – how handy is that! It will also be available in the Export window, just select it and all the settings will be set for you.

Preset problems

Updating an export preset can be a little tricky, first make any changes to any settings you like, then right-click on the preset name and chose “Update with Current Settings”. Take care not to select the preset and highlight it otherwise all the settings from the preset will be applied and you’ll lose the changes you’ve just made. Just right-click it. But if there are multiple presets, it can be hard to know for sure that you right-clicked on the correct one in the list because it will not be highlighted, and you might accidentally update the wrong present!

Either take great care, or to be safe create a brand new present and then delete the old one.

The exported files are ready

Finally, the exported photo are ready to be emailed, processed or whatever. They can of course be uploaded to Flickr… but there is a better way to upload them to Flickr which I’ll cover in my next workflow post.

Phew, there is a lot of detail in this post – probably too much! Once you’ve exported a few photos, and especially once you’ve set up a export presets, all this becomes so easy that you wont even think about it.

Lightroom workflow part 3 – Rating photos

Here is part three of my Lightroom workflow – but it is method that I have just recently starting using. Many thanks to fishsuckeggs who explained this to me – it is faster and easier than what I was doing.

Rating photos

In the Library module, I display all my recently imported photos. Or maybe just a particular set I want to evaluate. I usually view the photos one at time instead of grid view so that I can look at little more closely at them, but if there is a bunch of photos that are similar, I switch to Grid view. Sadly, this usually when I have made some terrible mistake and bunch of photos are so bad, that they should just be deleted :(

With the selected photo, I mostly use only 4 options (thanks fishsuckeggs)

• Press key X, to mark a photos as rejected, for a photo that is so bad, that it will be deleted.
• Press 1, to give a photo one star, for ones that are just passable.
• Press 3, to give a photo four stars, for photos that are ok and maybe with some work might be fine.
• or press 5, to give a photo five stars, for photos that are great as they are and probably should be published right away.

Sadly, I don’t get that many five star photos straight away – I need a lot more practice! The ones that I usually immediately mark as rejected are typically because the focus is bad, or the composition is not salvageable – I have too many of those :(

But for photos that are rated 3, I can then do some editing, correcting, cropping, whatever, and probably improve it. I try and work it up to a four star, or even five star photo to get it to a sate that I happy to show. Sometimes thought, the photo can not be “saved”. So the star rating I give a photo is flexible, it can change over time while the photo is be being edited.

It also changes over a slower time, as my like or dislike of certain changes, and as I improve my taking photos. But I don’t re-rate all those old photos – that would just take way too long!

I said that “I mostly use only 4 options” – sometimes I press 4 to give a photo 4 star that with just a little work, could become great. I almost never use 2.

After flagging all the photos and working through them, I end with rated groups:

• Five star photos that should be published right away because I think that they are great!
• Four start photos that are pretty good and can be published, and with a little work might become five star photos.
• Three star photos that are only ok, but maybe someone wants them or there is some little aspect about them I like.
• One, two and zero start photos that I learn “how not to do” from!
• And rejected photos that should not ever see the light of day.

Deleting rejected photos is easy, select the set you wish work with, and use the “Photo” menu, then “Delete Rejected Photos…” or just press Ctlr-Backspace. I must admit that I take quite a while to delete my rejected photos. They are not kept forever, just a few months before I am comfortable with losing them forever.

As you’d expect, it is easy to search for photos with whatever rating you want, and as you’d expect, I’ll cover searching later.

I don’t use the “Flagged” flag for photos, nor do I use colour labels. I did try and use the colour labels, and I marked different photos with different colours but in the end, I found it confusing and restrictive. For example, I would forget what the red label set was supposed to represent, and then I would become annoyed that I could apply more than one colour label to a photo at a time. This pushed me towards using tagging more – I could have descriptive tags than meant something, and I tag photos in extremely flexible ways. Basically, don’t use the coloured labels feature – it sucks.

Speaking of tagging, while I’m rating of photos, I am often refining the tags for photo at the same time.

What’s next?
Not searching, not the full tagging example, but the end – exporting.

Lightroom workflow part 2 – Tagging photos

This is the second part of my Lightroom workflow – it is how I apply keywords to photos.

Lightroom uses the term “keywords” but I tend use the more common term, “tags”, so be prepared since I’ll probably slip between each term. When For example, when I talk of “tagging” photos, others might talk of “keywording” photos.

Tagging photos

Tagging is adding keywords to photos so that they can be categorised, and later searched for. It is the primary mechanism by which I organise my photos. The date named folders created while importing photos are useful too, but to me, tagging is more important. I usually tag and rate photos at the same time as I browse them. However I generally start tagging first, and then refine the tags while I rate the photos.

My tags are organised in a hierarchy and the Keyword List panel nicely displays the hierarchy. I start off by creating a top level tag of a general description for the group a photos. Then as I go through the photos, I create child tags and tag the photos with these child tags, not the parent tag if possible. It’s easiest explained with an example.

Tagging example

I recently attended a cross country running event – I wasn’t running! I was photographing :). After all the photos had been imported and tagged, here was the end Keyword List hierarchy that I created.

This hierarchy was not created all at once, instead it was built up as I worked my way through the photos.

One of the very top level tags I have is “events”. Under “events” I crated a tag named after the event, “Bupa Great Winter Run 2009″.

I added the synonyms “Bupa” and “run” and set the options to export the tag and synonyms – this is so that when I export the photo to Flickr, the tag and synonyms are exported along with it. The parent tag, “events”, is set to not be exported, it is just a high level organisational tag.

There are multiple ways to add photos to tags. You can select photos and while creating the tag, choose “Add to selected photos”. You can also create the tag, and then add the photos to the tag afterwards. Use what ever you find most convenient, I use both depending on what I’m doing. For the top tag, I usually select the recently imported photos (by using Library model, Catalog panel, Previous Import, then pressing Ctrl-A or picking the photos) and then create the tag with “Add to selected photos” picked. If there are other groups of photo, I create other top tags – this lets me very quickly separate the different groups of photos with the monolithic collection of “Previous Import”.

Next, I go through the photos and create child tags as necessary. Such as when going through the running photos, I created child tags for “runners” and “spectators”. Of course, some photos have both runners and spectators in them so those photos were added to both tags.

The important trick

Here is a slightly tricky thing I do. Whenever I tag a photo with a child tag, I remove it from the parent tag. For example, if one of the photos that is tagged with “Bupa Great Winter Run 2009″, was actually a photo of a winner, I would tag that photo with the child tag “winner” and remove it from the parent tag “Bupa Great Winter Run 2009″. When the winner photo is exported, it will exported with the tag “winner”, as well as the parent tag “Bupa Great Winter Run 2009″ (but not with the topmost tag “events” because that is set to not export). In the end, I have most photos sorted into child tags, and photos that don’t really fit any nice child tag, such a photo of the empty finishing line, remain in the top tag. I can easily find any category of photo that I like by the child tags, as well as all the photos for the event, and even the photos that are for the event but are not further refined by a child tag – it give me great flexibility in organising and finding my photos.

Of course, you can have have as many tags, and as many child tags nested as deep as you like. For example, my topmost tags so far this year are “events”, “people”, “places” and “tech”. Under “places” I have countries such as “Scotland” and “Canada”, and under “Scotland” I have cities “Edinburgh”, “Inverness” and on and on. Under “people” I have “friends” and “photographers”. With this arrangement I can find photos of friends in Edinburgh quickly and easily. Or I can find photographers that are not in Scotland. Of course, I will have to explain searching in a future post.

Unfortunately, there is a further complication – this was a simplified example. I tag photos across multiple hierarchies. For example, ordinarily I don’t have a child tag of staff under the event. I have a “staff” child tag under “people”. Staff of an event are simply tagged with the event name, as well as “staff” in the entirely separate “people” hierarchy. This way, with one click I see all staff of any event, or the whole event, or with a few clicks I can see the staff of a particular event. In yet another future post, I’ll go over this further refinement, and I have just an example, a visit to a zoo, which would be good to describe searching as well.

What’s next

But next, rating photos.

Lightroom workflow part 1 – Importing

This is the first part of my Lightroom workflow – it is how I import my photos.

Taking the shots

I often take photos of people I met, and then give them the photos. But to keep track of who is who in photos, I use a simple file naming system. When I take a photo of someone, I write onto my card their photo number, and give them the card. They can then later email me the photo number, and I can then reply to them with their photo. This avoids the hassle of writing down loads of email addresses of people I meet and the probably making a complete mess up of it.

In the camera by, using Shooting Menu\File naming I set the first three characters of the filename to the year and the month. So today is 901, that is year 2009, month 01. All photos I take this month will have a filename that starts with 901 followed by a four digit sequence number.

I’ve never taken more 10,000 photos in a month so the four digit sequence is enough for me. And as for the three digit prefix for 2010, I’ll use 0 (zero) for the year.

Attaching the camera

I attach my D700 to my computer with a USB cable for importing the photos, launch Lightroom and turn on the camera. Then in the Library module, I click Import. The D700 is set to USB PTP mode so that when Lightroom lists locations to import from, it nicely lists D700.

Sadly, transferring photos in USB PTP mode is very slow. And unlike earlier cameras, such the D300, you cant change the mode to MSC (mass storage). Not being able to select MSC mode is really a big and annoying error by Nikon. It is much faster to remove the card and insert it into a card reader attached to the computer. And faster again if you are able to use firewire connection (and soon the upcoming USB 3.0). If you are able to, choose MSC mode, but for those with D700 or D90, you’re out of luck. In an effort to come up with something positive about USB PTP, I like to delude myself in thinking that USB PTP mode is slightly “friendlier” since Lightroom lists my camera, but with the faster MSC mode you may have to navigate to the card folder.

But I choose to put up with the slow speed and load my photos via the camera so that I don’t have to keep removing and inserting the cards from the camera. I worry that the fine pins inside the camera card slot are delicate and fragile. I think that the less that I fiddle with the card, the better. Now, the only time I extract a card from my camera is when it is full and I want to change to a spare card. I import the photos via from the camera for the card in the camera, and via a card reader for the other full cards.

Am I enduring slow imports because I am unnecessarily fearful of damaging the card pins within the camera? Probably, but one of my friends did manage to bend the pins inside their camera (luckily it was still under warranty). I have enough patience while one card full of photos is transferred via the camera (and other full cards via a card reader), and there is always something else to do on the computer.

Just how much slower is it? My non-scientific test shows that it is at least 50% slower! It also shows that quite a bit of the time importing the photos is taken up by converting the raw NEF files to DNG. Even when importing via a card reader, it takes quite a while. About 400 photos from via a card reader takes 20 minutes, while via the camera it takes 29. If I did not convert the NEF files to DNG (but I do) and just copied the NEF files, via a card reader it takes only 8 minutes, and via the camera it takes 15. Perhaps I should re-think my policy – nah, I’m too lazy to remove the card to save a few minutes.

Ideally, I would like to be able to change the USB mode like I could before – perhaps this could be done by a firmware update? And I would like a card contact system similar SD cards instead of pins – but this means a new body or a mount inside the card slot for a different type of card.

That’s a lot of woffle about USB connectivity but for me, it’s just plug the camera to computer, and go.

Importing

The import dialog is fairly straight forward.

File Handling I copy the raw files from the camera and convert them to DNG.

Copy to and Organize Photos are copied into date named folders. Later I rename the folder – I’ll cover that in future post.

File Naming I don’t rename the files – it is part of my file naming system.

Develop Settings I don’t use any. Any editing I perform are usually only a few photos after I have rated them – more on rating photos later.

Metadata This is very handy. I use presets to attach my name, website, copyright info etc to photos. Plus I have other presets for locations that I am frequently in, such as Edinburgh.
To create a preset, select New from the dropdown list, give the preset a name, enter all the settings you would like to apply to your photos, then click Create to save the preset. Now it will be available for whenever you import photos.

Keywords I leave blank. Perhaps I will will start to trying to use this to set some keywords by using this. But I have a thorough and detailed keywording system for my photos that I apply while rating the photos – again, I’ll cover this next time.

That’s all there is for importing.

Renaming the folders

After the importing is complete, I rename the dated folder name by appending a simple description. I rename the folder inside Lightroom so that it remains in sync with the Windows files, otherwise there is a little of pain to resync things.

The description just more than a reminder so that when I am browsing the files in Windows, I know what the folders contain. Here are the folders that began named just with a date, and then I renamed them to also include a simple description.

This leads me to another thought, I carry out all file manipulation inside Lightroom. That way, Lightroom remains synchronised with underlying files.

What’s next

That is my import process in too much gory detail. I take a break, relax, and then move onto rating and keywording, and ultimately editing the photos. I’ll go over my slightly complex tagging system next, then how I rate the photos.

DNG versus NEF

The question of what file format to save your photos is a common one. The jury is still out over whether photo files should be saved in a camera raw format (such as Nikon’s NEF or Canon’s CR2) or converted to Digital Negative (Adobe’s DNG). Search the internet for “DNG vs NEF” or “DNG versus CR2″ – you’ll find many long discussions to read you can read to help you choose the best file format for yourself.

I’m a Nikon shooter, which produces NEF files, but I then convert these files to DNG. Here is why I do it:

Here is why:

• DNG has very recently become an open format. NEF, CR2, and all the other camera specific formats are proprietary. Hopefully soon more software will start using DNG as a common format, but it hasn’t happened yet. A few brand new cameras are using DNG as their raw format.
• When editing a NEF image in Lightroom, an extra file that lists the edit operations is created because Lightroom can not write back to the proprietary file. This file is called a sidecar file, because it should always go along with the NEF, and it has the extension of XMP. But with a DNG, changes are recorded within the file. This avoids the hassle of having to managing two files (the NEF and XMP), and especially accidentally losing the XMP file of changes!
  I’ve had some problems with this – experimentation is required
• I don’t use Nikon’s tool Capture NX which only work with their NEF format, so there is no need for me to keep the NEF format.
• Some people fear that the conversion to DNG causes some data loss. There is some data lose (such as removing the embedded preview JPG and some obscure camera specific information) but image quality and EXIF are all retained perfectly fine. The removal of extraneous data makes DNG files smaller than NEF.

And some minor reasons why:

• A common standard, while usually beneficiary to the end user, is often considered adverse to business opportunities. Nikon has in the past attempted to ring-fence their file format, by encryption! I don’t want to be forced into using their software.
• It seems that the raw formats change almost as rapidly as new cameras come out. For a recent example, the new Nikon P6000 has an entirely new raw format, the NRW, that wasn’t even compatible with Capture NX! Eventually software updates became available. I don’t want to have deal with so many crazy file formats.
• Some people say that some camera settings are not converted from NEF to DNG, such as brightness, sharpness etc. I’ve never experienced such a fault – maybe it is now handled correctly. Besides, Lightroom 2 now has camera presets available.

One of the most extensive looks at DNG is by Barry Pearson. As I said, search the internet and make your own decision, but I’m happy using DNG for now.

Update (2009-04-05): I just found this discussion DNG a.k.a. Digital Negative where opinion is mixed – some people are die-hard camera raw fans, and others are moving to DNG.