The Adobe Lightroom 3 class put on by SMUGMUG Seattle and presented by Tom Hogarty, Sr. Product Manager for Adobe Systems Professional Digital Imaging Department was fun, informative and best of all, I won a retail copy of Lightroom 3, which there were only two of that they gave away! Sweet...couldn't have been better timing because first the product is awesome as I'm already using it and Linda was really wanting to get it for her Mac.
I definitely had to earn the prize though because nobody really raised their hand to Tom's pop trivia question which was, what are three key advantages to using the .DNG format instead of a different RAW format like Canon's .CR2 raw format. Not even knowing he was going to give a prize and since nobody really seemed to know, I raised my hand like a uncertain little school boy and gave it a shot and got it right on the money, booyah! I have no idea how I got it right on the spot like that but people were clapping for me and everything. It was very entertaining. I felt like going in on a round of Jeopardy after that. =)
For those curious, the advantages are:
1. The .DNG file format isn't a company's proprietary format so there isn't the risk of it going obsolete because a company goes under.
2. This format is smaller in size while still uncompressed and lossless, so it can save significant disk space in the long run.
3. The untouched RAW file plus it's associated processing file (aka sidecar .xmp file) are all encapsulated into one container file which is the .DNG file, so in otherwords all your post processing for a file will always stay together with the original RAW file.
I had just recently switched from Canon's .CR2 format to .DNG about two weeks ago when I randomly read that the file size is about a third smaller than .CR2. That sold it for me because I am already running out of disk space on my large partition where I store my raw files.
Value of the prize is $275...Somebody was a very happy girl last night! =)
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