Re: Counteracting data transience
Re: Counteracting data transience
- Subject: Re: Counteracting data transience
- From: Bob Smith <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2007 04:43:36 -0500
On Jul 16, 2007, at 3:46 AM, Bob Frost wrote:
The raw files aren't the 'art'; the 'art' is the finished product -
that is what we need to preserve and we can do that as tiffs or
prints.
true, but we shouldn't HAVE to do that for lack of a better alternative.
I write this having just spent almost the entire weekend archiving
image files for one particular client that go back to about '96.
Most are Kodak raw files... the earliest of which have not been fully
supported by any current software (Kodak or otherwise) for a few
years now. To access the raw data with any level of control I have
to launch a System 9 Mac running Photoshop 6. I've spent the weekend
running various bits of older software and saving out piles of raw
files to 16bit RGB TIFFs. Given my experience with these older files
I don't get that warm fuzzy feeling about letting more recent and
still currently supported raw files languish in an archive. I've
moved all into DNGs where possible. If nothing else, the DNG gives
me a fully rendered, full size decent quality jpeg that can be
correctly recognized by an increasingly wide variety of software...
along with the raw data. I have more confidence in that than the
longevity of support for my native format raw files. Its all a crap
shoot but in this case I'll bet on DNG for now until something better
comes along. When it does, it will likely be easier to move from
DNG, with more metadata intact, than from most proprietary raw files.
Regarding the discussion of raw files where rendering instruction
edits are written back into the original raw files. Kodak has done
this for ages... going back to at least the mid nineties. Works like
a charm as long as I stick with Kodak software. Let any third party
software write even simple metadata back into the files and all bets
are off. It's only happened very rarely but I've had enough raw
files ruined by metadata edits that I resorted to always archiving an
untouched version of the raw file. DNG has proven to me much safer
at handling metadata edits.
Bob Smith
Accurate Image • Bob Smith Photographer • Waco Texas USA
http://www.accurateimage.org
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