Adobe updates DNG photo format, adds Vista support

Adobe's Digital Negative specification, also known as the DNG format, was updated Tuesday, as the company pushes it to become a unified standard for working with raw photographic images taken by digital cameras.

Currently, major camera manufacturers utilize their own specifications, which are often incompatible and require software developers -- such as Adobe -- to painstakingly add support for each format and every change thereafter. DNG has seem some uptake with companies such as Pentax, but it's not used by Canon or Nikon.

Adobe says the updated specification (version 1.2) brings more flexibility to DNG, responding to industry requirements. DNG now supports the embedding of multiple different camera profiles into a single image file. The result is having different versions of the same photo in a more streamlined manner.

In addition, new metadata tags have been defined for DNG, including a field to indicate the integrity of the raw data within the file, which would let future cameras and software applications validate the image data and possibly fix corruption.

Windows and Mac OS X downloads of the DNG Converter are available from Adobe's Web site.

Adobe has concurrently released a DNG Codec for Windows Vista in order to make working with raw files more seamless under Microsoft's latest operating system. It joins Microsoft's own image standard called HD Photo, which is meant to replace the aging JPEG format and is also under review for standardization.