[stoppingdown]

Years ago I did some code development with raw formats, including DNG. While I'm definitely not an expert as the guys at RawDigger, I learned lots of things about coding and such. I agree with what other's said: DNG could have been a good thing, but Adobe screwed it up. This leaves the whole raw world in a mess, because sooner or later old camera formats are dropped.

 

 

Adobe Lightroom panorama (and HDR) are a good start, in which it is pretty simple to use those features and everything happens inside the app. But it's wrong the idea of generating another file and treating it as a new data source. I mean: the right thing to do composites, following the non-destructive approach, would be to store in the LR database the instructions to create the composite, so it can be recreated at any time. The DNG should be just a cache to avoid recomputing every time the same thing.

 

Given that, I keep my composites in DNG, as it seems the simpler thing to do, but TIFF would work all the same.

 

A stupid thing about DNG in LR is the fact that LR doesn't use sidecar .XMP files for storing the post-processing data; instead they are stored inside the DNG. This breaks the property that a raw file should stay forever as it came out of the camera. True that the bits in the photo aren't changed, but the archival workflow is affected. For instance, I compute the MD5 of every photo I take to check later that is didn't get corrupted. Its' good to make multiple backups, as far as the original file is safe. With a truly raw approach, you archive the file just after the fact, and forget it. Eventually you maintain the archival copy, in the sense that even optical media don't last forever. But the file never changes. On the contrary, whenever you make a change to that DNG, LR changes it, and you have to archive it again.