To DNG or not to DNG?
I've been following with interest the threads on using Lightroom together with Capture One (or another raw converter). Though I'd already been out a few times with Raw Developer, some friends suggested I'd find Capture One more attractive and even organized a date for me with C1. Unfortunately we didn't hit it off. Then
Doug Peterson suggested I try to get back together with Raw Developer, saying that RD "manages to get better results (in pure IQ terms) than LR and is on par with C1 (sometimes better)". He was right -- it was love at second sight.
So now my workflow is:
* Photo Mechanic for keywords and rating which produces XMP sidecar files to accompany the original NEFs
* Photo Mechanic to copy selects (one or more stars) into a Lightroom watched folder which automatically populates a Selects catalog containing the NEF+XMP files
* Use Raw Developer to convert two (or more) star images to 16-bit TIFF files, saving these to the LR watched folder so that they wind up alongside the original NEF files
* Additional PP either within LR or in CS4 (using the Nik plugins: Dfine, Sharpener Pro, Viveza)
* LR for printing or web galleries
In any case, having settled on a PM+LR+RD workflow, I was intrigued by one statement in Michael Reichmann's LR+C1 article:
The major steps which I take in Capture One are to choose the appropriate camera profile, do a white balance, and then set black point and white point. These are the critical steps that need to be done in raw mode. I then export the file to Lightroom for further processing. I send the file as a 16 bit TIFF. DNG would be preferable, but the DNG export from C1 doesn't include any of the process settings, and one would thus lose the advantage of C1 matrix decoding.
I am curious as to why he regards DNG as preferable to a 16-bit TIFF.
Is it for archival reasons, because he believes the DNG format offers greater longevity than the RAW files he gets from his Phase and other cameras?
Or is it because he believes that programs such as Lightroom have "essentially rendered Photoshop redundant for maybe 90% of the needs of most photographers. Many, myself included, now rarely use Photoshop except for a few specialized tasks"?
This latter statement implies that -- apart from setting WB and black & white points in C1 -- he does all of his other adjustments in LR. Which means that he doesn't use any plugins at all since, even if you want to use (for example) the LR versions of the Dfine or Sharpener Pro plugins, LR creates a TIFF anyway (because your only option with the original RAW file or a DNG is to "Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments").
I'd be grateful if any forum members could point out if I'm missing something and/or explain the benefit(s) of converting camera original RAW files to DNG. As a Ricoh GRD user, I'm aware that certain cameras (Leica, Pentax, etc) use the DNG format for their RAW files.