JPG is a universal format which can be opened by almost all image-viewing or -editing programs, by web browsers, and by certain other apps, and they’re supported by most devices. You can store a whole lifetime of RAW shooting on a HDD costing less than $100USD.JPG, or JPEG, is one of the most widely used digital image formats. The cost of disk storage is trivial today. Lightroom can work with the proprietary RAW file format just as easily as the non proprietary DNG, so no advantage there. So if I converted to DNG I'd still keep the proprietary RAW NEF like Jim Wilde does. I would never want to destroy my copy of the RAW image file that came out of the camera. So, what is gained with 'Embed Original Raw File'?įWIW, the wisdom and benefits of converting to DNG escapes me. A much larger file than the original proprietary RAW file format. The end result is a DNG wrapper, one or more JPEG thumbnail preview data blocks, a DNG raw data block and a proprietary RAW data block. 'Embed Original Raw File' will create a separate data block copying the original RAW data block into the DNG wrapper. This is not much better than shooting lossy compressed JPEGs and IMO defeats the purpose of shooting RAW. Lossy compression will create an even smaller size image file BUT at the loss of data the uncompressed and is not a suitable replacement for the original proprietary RAW file. The generally accepted reason for converting your original RAW files is to reduce the footprint taken by the original RAW file A Lossless compressed DNG is a suitable replacement for the losslessly compressed original RAW. Having the best quality image files I can manage for large prints in the primary consideration. My computer is decently powerful with plenty of Ram and a decent graphics card and I don't have processing speed problems with the Sony raw files, unless I do loads of LR processing, in which case I close the program and start it up again, which usually clears any lag that seems to build up. However speed of processing DNG files in LR CC Classic and PS are considerations.

Storage isn't the issue or a driving concern. I'm using a Sony A7R4 so the files are quite large to start off with, but that isn't a problem as I'm not someone who snaps and keeps thousands of images a year, in a productive year I won't take more than 3000 images (including bracketing shots) and wouldn't keep more than 1000 and in time I'd reduce the keepers down to below 500.

The aim is to have a library of DNG files rather than proprietary raw, but not to lose any detail or have a degraded image file. Does 'Embed Original Raw File' makes the DNG file enormous?.Do I want 'Use Lossy Compression' ticked.A couple of questions about what boxes to tick please:

Batch convert nef to jpg