Some time ago, I made the break in taking photos as JPEGs in favour of the superior RAW format. Through using the Lightroom tool, i found my photos becoming much more superior in their tonality and colour ranges. The only caveat I had was that if anyone wanted to see my photos, they had to be exported in the Jpeg format.

There have been many recommended updates to the standards over the past several years: Jpeg2000, PNG, HD but none of them have supplanted the increasingly obsolete format with its limited dynamic range and lossy compression. It may have been replaced by now with a superior format if it was not for the fact that the past several years has seen an explosion akin to the Big Bang when it comes to photos on the Internet. Everyone is taking and posting photos and since most people have compact digital cameras, they invariably have jpegs as the only format available to them.

On the other hand, RAW format images have an issue in that between different manufacturers and camera models there is no standard. Programs that deal with RAW images have to load large libraries of code for every RAW specification.

That is why I looked favorably on Adobe’s Digital Negative format (DNG). The RAW format variations will still exist for now but by converting them into a standardised format primarily for Adobe’s imaging programs but also to give portability to the image for other programs. If the format becomes a standard, we may see it implemented on the cameras themselves in the future at first supplanting the RAW format on the high end Digital SLR cameras but eventually on to the compact cameras too. Then it is just a step away to become the JPEG format replacement though I am not holding my breath for that. Still, anything that can ease the movement of an image from a camera to the web page with high dynamic range, excellent tonality and no loss in detail will be greatly appreciated.