Adobe Camera Raw - Bait and Switch?

[Daniel Browning]

Thanks for the previous tip though
concerning the lastest version of DNG....I had sucess downloading the
DNG5.5 and was able to convert my 7D CR2's to DNG.

Great! You're welcome.

I realized that I could drop down to 8bit.....but that's not saving to jpeg from a 16bit TIFF.

David is right. There is no such thing as "saving to jpeg from a 16bit TIFF". It has to be converted to 8 bit first. Some software will do it for you automatically, others require you to manually do it (Photoshop).

how much do I lose in going from CR2 to DNG...as I noticed the files are smaller?

You lose nothing. The files are smaller because they use smarter compression. (It's like the difference between LZW-compressed TIFF and ZIP-compressed TIFF.)


If you use sRAW, you will find that the DNG files are much larger. That's because DNG was not designed to contain sRAW as is, so it has to be converted to a larger file size.

is DNG 8 or 16bit?

It's the same as whatever your raw file is. If your CR2 file is 14-bit, then the DNG is 14-bit.