Lensbusters.com

Dealing with large digital files for events and other applications where large file size is not necessary. Ok, admit it. It’s a first world problem. Your yacht, house, digital file is too big. But if you are photographing events with say, a Sony A7rII, this really is an issue. You reasonably won’t want to shoot JPGs, which can be dumbed down in camera settings. But you should shoot raw files that can’t be reduced in camera to a reasonable pixel count, they’re always 42mp on this camera.  So here’s a strategy to consider. Use the Adobe DNG Converter app to both compress (or further compress) and at the same time reduce the pixel dimensions of your raw files.  Give this a try (see screen shots): Download Adobe DNG Converter (free) Select folder for files to convert, and destination (maybe try testing this on your memory card with your latest images first) Rename if you like In the bottom dialog box change preferences to the most recent compatibility, jpg preview to full size (speeds ed

Fairly recently I discovered the magic of lossy DNG's. My stock photo library is ever growing. Though JPG's might really be enough for my archive, I've been keeping my raw files. RAW files take up lots of space. And RAW files can't typically keep user generated EXIF data in the file. RAW files keep their keywords and other metadata in a sidecar, that is if you regularly save the EXIF data to file. So recently I've been converting all my RAW files to lossy DNG's. After testing the highest ISO setting on the new-to-me A7R IV, I converted the files to lossy DNG's only to find a surprise. The very high ISO lossy DNG's were much larger than the original Sony RAW files! Lossy ARW vs Lossy DNG full image sample So I thought it would be a good test to shoot from the lowest to highest ISO, convert to lossy DNG and see where the file size savings invert. Here's the data as seen in the above screen shot: ISO Lossy Sony ARW Raw file size (MB) Lossy DNG file siz

Storage has long been a problem. Despite Moore’s Law, I seem to keep filling larger cheaper drives. Ok, so it’s a first world problem, I admit it! At some point in the past, I was converting all my raw files to RAW. The appeal then was that the DNG files promised to be more universal than the RAW files produced by various camera manufacturers. Comparisons of RAW and Lossy DNG with Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and Capture One at 1:1 ARW file processed in Photoshop with auto settings (left), Lossy DNG processed in Photoshop with auto settings (center), Lossy DNG processed in Capture One with auto settings (right) all at 1:1 pixels. Unfortunately, Adobe seems to be a less and less friendly company. I’ve been doing the right thing for decades and paying for their software. But they seem to be trying to make everything much more difficult with licensing and not sharing the details of their DNG format with other image editing competitors. None-the-less We’re stuck with Adobe for a lot of t