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Today, Adobe made several announcements relating to its Digital Negative format (DNG) including the availability of the 32-bit Vista codec. You can download it here.

Adobe positions DNG, which is actually a flavor of TIFF, as a nonproprietary alternative to the variety of camera raw formats used by most of the major dSLR manufacturers, including Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Olympus. Later-to-market entrants, like Samsung's GX models and Casio's Exilim Pro EX-F1, have embraced DNG. As Stephen Shankland alluded in a previous post, according to Kevin Connor, Adobe's director of product management for Professional Digital Imaging, Adobe has … Read more

Adobe Systems is discussing potential standardization of its Digital Negative (DNG) format for digital images, a company executive has said.

Most people are fine with plain-old JPEG for their images, but higher-end cameras can produce more flexible and higher-quality "raw" photos that are encoded with camera makers' proprietary formats. Because different cameras produce different formats, companies such as Adobe whose software deals with raw files face a daunting engineering challenge understanding.

DNG is designed as an alternative to the profusion--what Adobe calls a Tower of Babel--but it hasn't caught on widely. Ricoh, Casio, Pentax, and a few … Read more

Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and on Thursday plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows.

Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. Geotagging is an onerous chore with today's technology, but camera makers are working to build it into cameras, and it can pay off down the road.

That's because geotagging, done well, enables people to find photos by searching for the word "Paris&… Read more

Power Downloader tries his best to help all, but recently his friend Francois Foto approached him with a tricky problem: is there a way to easily convert photos from one format to another? ''Ze emphasees,'' said Francois, ''eez on easy.'' Power had a simple solution, a freeware program called XnView.

XnView is a robust program, an image browser and viewer as well as a converter. For conversions, though, it can handle more than 400 formats from Camera RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and other still image formats all the way through AVI, MOV, MPEG, and a multitude of movie formats. Metadata … Read more

Correction, 5:30 p.m. PDT: This blog initially misstated the day Adobe released Photoshop Lightroom 1.4.1. It is Thursday.

After a debugging session to fix problems with the flawed 1.4.0, Adobe Systems on Thursday released Photoshop Lightroom 1.4.1.

Raw images from higher-end digital cameras have more flexibility and quality than JPEGs, but also require processing in a computer to convert to more useful formats. Lightroom handles that task, along with cataloging and other chores. Adobe also released the corresponding version 4.4.1 of Adobe Camera Raw, the raw-image converter plug-in for regular … Read more

Update 6:40 AM PDT: I added some links to Adobe information and further detailed some new features.

When Adobe Systems launched Photoshop Lightroom, it presented users with an all-or-nothing photo editing philosophy. But with version 2, which goes into public beta testing Wednesday, the company is changing course.

Lightroom 2 offers local editing abilities that permit photographers to edit just a patch of an image--whitening a person's teeth, deepening the blue of a sky, illuminating a child in a tree's shadow. Changes are "painted" on with a variably sized circular brush.

Local editing doesn't … Read more

I was in a pinch a few weeks ago, and Google's Picasa software saved my skin. But now my warm glow of gratitude has begun wearing off, replaced by a simmering annoyance with camera makers for their profusion of proprietary raw formats.

Let me explain. I was covering the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas, toting my Canon EOS Rebel XT camera to photograph products and people. For my personal photography I usually shoot in raw format to maximize the detail and flexibility, but for work purposes I use JPEG because it's faster to process and … Read more

The good news is that there's some competition again for software to edit and catalog raw images, the detailed and flexible file formats from higher-end cameras. The bad news is that anybody buying the software has a harder choice to make.

With the new Aperture now available and Lightroom just celebrating its first birthday, I thought it opportune to survey readers. What would you buy? What would you advise somebody else?

Please vote in the poll here, and share your reasoning in the Talkback section below to enlighten others.

Photographers would be best to think carefully about which software … Read more

I'm going to Latin America for the month of March, and I don't know what to do with my photos. Does anyone out there have any advice they'd like to share?

For the gearheads out there, here are my constraints.

First of all, I'm trying to travel reasonably light--I'll only be backpacking a little, but I will be schlepping luggage a lot, and I don't want to lug a laptop. Second, I probably won't have to go more than two or three days without a wall socket for charging.

I'm guessing I'… Read more