Standard Bearers
Two new standards were introduced today in the real of digital photography. Or I should say, one new standard, and a standards body. Time will only tell whether how these pan out. Standards in technology are one of those sticky issues. On the one hand some companies, particularly huge ones like Microsoft, have decided to use their clout to enforce their own standards because they carry so much market weight. They can create a way of doing something which will simply become a standard by the fact that huge numbers of people use their software anyway. There are definitely good arguments (as there are bad) for a single company leading the way. Standards bodies comprising many interests can take long periods of time to develop a set of standards that have lots of compromises to the point that they don’t really push the envelop much. Too many cooks can ruin the broth when it becomes so watered down. On the other hand, a single company can make a standard that only serves their purposes, or at least gives them by far the biggest advantage. It can close things off to competitors and generally hinder competition.
Adobe, the makers of the premier digital photopraphy editing tool, Photoshop, has come out with a standard format for RAW files. RAW files are a type of file that more advanced digital cameras use to save raw data from the image sensor. The advantage over the much more common jpeg format is that the file is usually basically the exact information that the sensor received when taking the picture, whereas jpeg is a “developed” or “processed” interpretation of this data. So, with a raw file you can change settings as if you were still in the process of taking the picture. You can change white balance, sharpness, exposure, etc., and it’s as if you changed these things before you actually hit the shutter. This is very useful for digital photographers because it gives them the power to kind of “go back in time” if you will and correct incorrectly made settings. One CAN correct these things in a jpeg, but it’s not nearly as effective because the jpeg has already been processed. Think of it as making a copy of a copy, although it’s not quite that bad. RAW files are truly the digital equivalent of a negative, and this is aptly what Adobe is calling their new standard format. The .DNG extension obviously stands for “Digital Negative…” what? Graphics? Not sure. In any case, Adobe has made this format free of restrictions or royalties. Doing otherwise would have killed such a nascent standard. Hopefully everyone’s learned the lesson of CompuServe and the .gif format. Of course, the only programs that will currently support this DNG file are Adobe products like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Acrobat, so we will have to see whether it is adopted by other software makers as well as camera manufacturers (currently it’s not supported by anyone but Adobe, although one can convert one’s old RAW files to the new format via a tool that Adobe has made available). Let’s hope so. This will make it a whole lot easier for software makers to concentrate on features and not have to deal with converter intricacies every time a new camera comes out.
In other news Fuji, Konica Minolta, and Kodak have decided to form a standards body called the “Picture Archiving and Sharing Group” or PASSG. This group aims to develop standards around not just digital photography, but audio and video as well. For digital photographers (and I assume for videographers as well), one of the most challenging parts of the job (or hobby) is what’s referred to as “digital workflow.” This means refers to how the image goes from the shutter release to the end product, whether that’s a print, a web page, or what have you. It involves the process of transferring the file from the camera to a computer, editing the file, or converting it to different formats, archiving it for posterity in various forms and places, sending it to labs, or to a local printer, posting it to an image hosting site or to a more standard website, etc. As you can see, this can become a complex process with many steps many different options and decisions to make along the way. Different people have very different workflows depending on the size of their business (if they have one at all), how they run their business, what they want to do with their photos, or simply their personal style. Having a set of standards around workflow, I would think, can only serve to make it more manageable. This is one of the areas where more choice can be a double-edged sword. Choice in and of itself is good, but too much of a good thing isn’t always a good thing. You can get overwhelmed and this can make developing a simple and straightforward workflow extremely challenging and time consuming.