RAW formats can have higher dynamic range. One camera I have has 16 bits of color. CaptureOne, for instance, doesn't manage RAW in RGB space. It keeps the B&W and color data in different data spaces until it "prints" it into jpg. It's feasible that you might have two objects in two different lighting conditions in the same photo - for instance, a person in a shadow in the foreground and a building in the background. With the RAW you could crop, extract and correctly expose both objects. If you rendered into jpg you'd lose a lot of the information when you fixed the exposure.
I guess the question is how much "archival" of this sort of raw data you want in the commons. You could always just ask the photographer to do the processing for the various versions of the images.
On Nov 22, 2007, at 9:00 AM, Brianna Laugher wrote:
On 22/11/2007, Jastrow jastrow@pip-pip.org wrote:
Le 11/21/07 8:26 PM, Oldak Quill a écrit :
A user may want to crop an image containing multiple objects down to just one object. A high resolution image of a building could be cropped down to just show a distinctive window to go in a Wikipedia article about that style of window (no other free alternative?). If the image is high resolution, the cropped image showing just the window would still be good enough quality to use in the article.
I still don't see how allowing DNG will bring us higher resolution pictures. High-resolution, 300dpi JPEG files do exist. Photo magazines usually accept TIFF and JPEG files.
As someone else said, providing the RAW format allows a reuser to optimise it for various print qualities, rather than optimising for screen (and probably smaller file size at that).
And I didn't make that quote up. :) Whether or not there is any discernible difference, (at least some) publishers feel there is. I'm inclined to trust them on that point rather than insist that JPG ought to be good enough.
cheers, Brianna
-- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/
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