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Leica M9 DNG's, Hasselblad and its Phocus...

S

sperera

Member
Hasselblad has Phocus; Nikon has Capture NX2, Phase One has Capture One etc etc etc

for me the big stinker is NOT being able to handle all my images in Lightroom which i feel is a great programme but does NOT open up RAW files as well as for example Nikon opens up its images in NX2....THIS IS MY OPINION....

So, have Leica managed to output perfect images onto the DNG format unlike Hasselblad, Nikon and everyone else????????

will be interesting to see......

The spec on the Leica M9 is a 'full frame' 18+ megabytes CCD sensor outputting 16-bit images as either DNG or jpeg formats. Price is more or less what the Nikon D3x costs now.
 
I'm making a point as to whether unlike Haselblad, Nikon, Canon and anyone else who make us use their own software before we can do anything in Photoshop, have Leica managed to give us full quality DNG's....a valid question for anyone with a professional workflow to consider.....
 
Unless I need to go back to school to get some reading lessons your question concerns Leica's decision how to handle files.
Not much Hasselblad content in that question is there?


Paul
 
shall i rephrase? ok.....

with this i am questioning Hasselblad not giving us a format such as DNG that can be opened straight from the camera by Photoshop, Lightroom etc etc that provides a full quality image file without the need to use software like Phocus to 'fix' things.....Nikon is the same as you need Capture NX2 for example and so are the other manufacturers RAW files.......

.....with the release of the Leica M9 and the fact the files come out as DNGs or jpegs it means they are confident they have done away with the bottleneck us professional imagemakers face everytime we shoot......

I think this is a great question for users stuck in post-processing drudgery......

....by the way, are we here to debate and think freely or simply to pay homage to Hasselblad.....only by questioning and NOT agreeing with everything they do will we get better products......
 
Sperera, I agree with you. I own and use Nikon, Hasselblad and Leica equipment and the different software solutions that each maker seem to insist you should use are a concern to me. I choose my camera for my needs: fast, long lenses : Nikon, Slow, max quality : Hasselblad. Leica, never leave home without it. For the rest I would prefer to be able to stick to one workflow with one set of tools. I salut Leica's decisions to use DNG. In order to add Hasselblad content: I have decided for the CFV39 but am not looking forward to have to install new software in order to get most out of the files.
By the way, this not only concerns software. I bought an Epson P-7000 storage viewer the other day to find out it only read the Nikon files. I returned it next day. Just as I don't like multiple software solutions I would prefer one temporary storage tool and viewer, it is a related problem.

scvgr
 
thanks for your post......I'm glad you understand what I'm trying to say.....

.....workflow....that's the bottom line for us professional image makers...there are plenty of us crying out in desperation all over the world for better workflow.....look in any forum anywhere in the world......

....read this press release by Adobe from 2005:

SAN JOSE, Calif. — March 8, 2005 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that Hasselblad and Leica Camera AG are among the first camera manufacturers to commit to support the Digital Negative Specification (DNG). Hasselblad will work to allow export to the Digital Negative (.DNG) file format and Leica plans to include native support within their new camera models. Just a few months after Adobe announced the free Adobe DNG Converter, which translates all Photoshop® supported raw photo formats into the new universal .DNG file format, Hasselblad and Leica, along with respected software companies Phase One (Capture One), DxO Labs, Extensis Portfolio and iView, have rallied around this single unified file format for archiving raw files.

Responding to customer and industry feedback, Adobe today also announced an update to the DNG Specification. The DNG Specification now gives photographers the ability to embed the original image within the .DNG file format directly from the Adobe DNG Converter. This is particularly useful when DNG is not the original file format within the camera a photographer is shooting with.

"Hasselblad and Leica Camera are photo industry icons and innovators and their support for DNG is great news for professional photographers who want to simplify their Digital Negative workflows," said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of Digital Imaging and Digital Video at Adobe. "Adobe will continue to update the DNG Specification as customers and industry partners integrate DNG into their everyday work and we look forward to their feedback."

"Hasselblad is proud to be one of the first camera manufacturers to support the export of image files to the DNG format," said Christian Poulsen, CEO at Hasselblad. "Hasselblad has a long history of providing the highest quality cameras for professional photographers who demand the flexibility of customizing their workflow in pursuit of the finest images. Adobe's open DNG specification has given us the added flexibility, enabling Hasselblad images to be compatible with the variety of software applications already supporting DNG today, as well as with the DNG-compliant software and hardware to come in the future."

......so much for that then.....sure, you can save as DNG after you handle your .fff files in Phocus but that's not the point!

.....personally, am stuck with the following as a designer/photographer that I am....and I havent bought into Hasselblad digital cos of it....

step 1 - shoot RAW
2 - load card and save files to hard drive
3 - open Lightroom, archive all the shots and then create seperate folders for the 'keepers
4 - process the keepers in RAW editor (nay of Phocus, Capture NX2, Capture One, etc etc)
5 - save 'keepers' and batch as 16-bit TIFF files or jpegs
6 - back into Photoshop to tweak the keepers further
= a whole load of time in front of this damn computer.
 
more from Adobe:

Raw file formats are becoming extremely popular in digital photography workflows because they offer creative professionals greater creative control. However, cameras can use many different raw formats — the specifications for which are not publicly available — which means that not every raw file can be read by a variety of software applications.
As a result, the use of these proprietary raw files as a long-term archival solution carries risk, and sharing these files across complex workflows is even more challenging. (TELL ME ABOUT IT!!)

The solution to this growing problem? The Digital Negative (DNG), a publicly available archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras. By addressing the lack of an open standard for the raw files created by individual camera models, DNG helps ensure that photographers will be able to access their files in the future.
 
From Luminous Landscape reviewers


"....record their raw files in DNG format. This is a huge plus as it allows the files (at last in theory) to be processed in any raw processing program that one wishes. It also ensures, going forward, that photographers have unrestricted access to their original files and are not at the mercy of a manufacturer orphaning a proprietary file, as has already happened with some companies."


THIS is the issue I wanted to debate on....
​
 
sperera said:
From Luminous Landscape reviewers


"....record their raw files in DNG format. This is a huge plus as it allows the files (at last in theory) to be processed in any raw processing program that one wishes. It also ensures, going forward, that photographers have unrestricted access to their original files and are not at the mercy of a manufacturer orphaning a proprietary file, as has already happened with some companies."

THIS is the issue I wanted to debate on....
​
Click to expand...

Amen to that!

Wilko
 
I will put forth an opinon--I hope it is not too controversial, but here goes:

Myth: Your proprietary raw files may be orphaned one day by the manufacturer, leaving you unable to open your images.

I don't think I've ever properly understood this argument that Adobe has been advancing for years. Ironically, Adobe is the producer of one of several of the 'swiss army knife' demosaicers which let one develop hundreds of different raw formats, even discontinued ones.

Can anyone point me to a proprietary camera raw file format that has existed that cannot be opened today? I've never heard of one...

I've been shooting digital since 2000, and involved in computer graphics and imaging since 1987--even now I can't think of an image format that I once used that I can't open today--that's 22 years...

To me, Adobe is spreading FUD, designed to frighten people into adopting this format.

Please don't mistake this for an anti-Adobe position. If any manufacturer came to me today and asked what mosaiced file format they should have their camera/digital back write, I would push for DNG. Not because a proprietary format is dangerous or will be orphaned, but because fewer formats are better for me as a user. I'd say the same thing if a manufacturer asked me about a lens mount. Manufacturers invest in proprietary file formats and proprietary lens mounts for valid business reasons. I am just saying that in the end, the 'orphaned proprietary file format' argument for DNG just doesn't seem to hold water.

Fact: Using a proprietary raw file complicates an already complicated digital workflow.

I certainly can't deny this. But the question I pose is, is it the PROPRIETARY raw file that makes this more complicated, or the fact that ANY raw file (DNG included) makes it more complicated? IMHO, it is the latter that is the issue.

I cannot move any mosaic'ed file to any OS and fully utilize the file. Apple, Windows, Linux all require additional software (iPhoto, WIC codecs, DCRaw, or 3rd party applications) to manipulate a raw file. Apple is doing the best job with CoreImage--many raw files are at least readable by the base OS (eg. Finder), although transcoding or editing requires additional software. To their credit, they often ship iPhoto pre-installed.

So I'll argue that the problem here isn't whether the raw format is proprietary, it is the fact that it is a raw format.

(Note: I had a small supporting role in helping to bring about the new JPEG-XR standard, so I must disclose this in order to allow others to decide if I am biased or have a conflict of interest.)

Going forward, I believe this issue will go away for 99% of us. Once JPEG-XR begins to appear in cameras, the need to deal with raw files will be nearly completely eliminated. Why? Because 100% of the information contained within a raw file can be encoded into a JPEG-XR file (no loss), and the manufacturer can decode the file in-camera, giving us the photographer the default colors and look intended by the manufacturer. If you have used raw developing software in the past decade you have already seen that the best looking files consistently come from the camera/back manufacturer's software, but that software is frequently buggier, slower and more cumbersome than 3rd party (ie. Adobe or Apple) software.

In this way you get the look the manufacturer intended without having to do any extra work. The camera delivers a fully useable (demosaic'ed) JPEG-XR file which may be 100% lossless for quality or lossy to save space (your choice). The JPEG-XR file, which is a "normal" image file will be transportable and useable just about anywhere a JPEG file is today.

There is one drawback to this approach, that only the pickiest of the picky will get held up on, and that's the fact that because your image gets demosaic'ed at the time it is captured, you will not be able to benefit from advancements in demosaicing technology as time moves forward. Today, if you open your raw file from 2000 in Lightroom 2.4, theoretically, it could look better than it would have had it been developed 9 years ago, because demosaicers are better today. In practice, though, this is not a significant concern.

Conclusion

So I hope I have helped you breathe a little easier. My suggestion is to hang on for another year or two (just keep doing whatever works best for you) until the JPEG committee can get the standard finalized and into the hands of the camera manufacturers and into shipping products. Then I predict most of us will be shooting JPEG-XR and won't need proprietary software to manange the files. Until then, feel free to use either DNG or your manufacturer's proprietary raw files without fear. You will be able to convert everything you wish (should you wish to) to JPEG-XR at that time, en masse. Even if you do not convert your work to JPEG-XR, I would be shocked (yes, shocked! :)) if any proprietary raw files were 'unreadable' even 25 years from now.

I'll save a discussion around archiving (>25 year access) for another time.

Best regards,
-Brad
 
thanks for posting....very interesting reading indeed.....I must say I havent heard of this jpeg XR format...do you have a link to read more about it....sounds great....
 
....when and if the RAW convertor bottleneck is a thing of the past will we be trully emancipated from our computers, open the windows, let the light in, grab our cameras and lenses and go out to shoot........
 
sperera said:
thanks for posting....very interesting reading indeed.....I must say I havent heard of this jpeg XR format...do you have a link to read more about it....sounds great....
Click to expand...

Dry technical overview: JPEG XR @ Wikipedia. Most people haven't heard about it because we have discussed it in terms like this article. It's next to impossible to see how that will help your photography!! :)

Another place to find out about what it can do is at Bill Crow's blog. It's probably still to technical, but it may be of interest to some. Bill is the Program Manager responsible for bringing this technology to light. He was my boss for a time and we collaborated on some of the early thinking that went into it, and later when I was working on other technology, my team's work supported his team's when it seemed that nobody was interested.

I worked with him to ensure that the container format would be what photographers would need, and that the supported bit formats could safely encode our photography raw files without loss. There are even a few other surprises in there that are off-topic for this thread that will make editing your images easier and safer (in terms of clipping/data loss) than ever, but that is off-topic for this thread.

In the end it was a long 5+ years to go from "cool idea" to real, live file format and even longer for the low-level engineering folks, marketing folks and standards committee folks.

Let me give a quick summary in English of the benefits to photographers:
* JPEG-XR is not limited to 8-bits (256 colors) per channel like JPEG is. If 8-bits are enough for you, it will still support it at approximately double the efficiency of JPEG--in other words, same quality in half the filesize, or measurably improved quality at the same filesize.
* Supports a number of 16 and 32-bit formats so your raw files and scanner scans are covered.
* Supports a number of HDR encodings. This does not mean those ultra-saturated, questionable value images we see all over the net today (of course, if that's what you want to do with it, no one will stop you! :)) What it means is that the standard will allow you to represent values 'whiter than white' and 'blacker than black'. For all intents and purposes if you pick certain bit formats, you can't clip your data (in normal usage scenarios). It may show up on your display as clipped, but the data's still there. You can recover it, and use it later, without even being aware of or needing to know the details of image processing.
* Lossless (perfect) or lossy (smaller file size) compression. Technically the JPEG standard supports both today, but because they use completely different techniques (algorithms), lossless JPEG is very poorly supported. No cameras implement it and very few software applications do either. Hardware and software manufacturers don't like doing things twice, so they usually don't. JPEG-XR's compression technology uses just one technique, once you have JPEG-XR you have both lossy and lossless.

Anyway, it'll offer a lot of options (which are bound to be confusing), and there bound to be some gnashing of teeth once this gets off the ground, to be sure. But done right, IMHO, it does represent a signficant step forward for simplifying all of our workflows.

Looking forward to seeing it in cameras myself! That's the first step. None of this means anything if I've still got to start with a raw file...

-Brad
 
Thank you Brad

for your "scientific" contributions .
I appreciate your comments very much .

I must admit , that sometimes I have trouble to follow all details and I do feel unable to answer , because my vocabulary is not as good as i would like to have it .

I think , I will take some time off the forum and get familiar with my CFV-39 in more detail . There were too many personal things in the last time , not allowing me to do all I wanted .

Regards Jürgen
 
Hi, Jurgen,

Thank you--and I enjoy your contributions as well.

I'm sorry that what I write is difficult to understand--sometimes I do go on a bit--I'll try to keep in mind that that many people don't speak English as their first language. Thank you for letting me know!

And I wish you all the best in your exploits with your new CFV-39! I hope you will share some of your favorites with us once you return.

All the best,
-Brad
 
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