[Commons-l] Allow Digital Negative (DNG) RAW format on Commons? (and increase filesize limit)

[David Gerard]

On 21/11/2007, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Worse, it's not a totally mechanizable process - typically the
> photographer needs to exercise some judgement as to how to produce an
> image that corresponds to what the scene actually looked like when the
> data was captured. Given that a couple of my pictures have been mangled
> by well-meaning people that weren't actually there when I took them, I'm
> a little skeptical that random wikignomes will be able to do the right
> thing. I could see raw files uploaded alongside an "official" image -
> the official image is what the photographer thinks the scene really
> looked like, and republishers could then tinker with the raw file as
> desired, whether it is to match the official image, or to alter it to
> meet some other need.


Yes, that's exactly it. The nicely cropped JPEG may be more suitable
for our daily use, but the original file (PNG or TIFF or DNG) is of
value for making better derivatives from. I'll tend to note on the
JPEG "nice crop of xxx.png, please use that for derivatives."

I suppose you could have a DNG, your own PNG developed from it and
then a perfectly cropped and tweaked JPEG for actual use, all linked.


> (How does cropping figure into all this? Almost every one of my uploads
> is cropped, sometimes by quite a lot. Does anybody really want multiple
> megabytes of out-of-focus background shrubbery? :-)


They might! You never know!


- d.