Following on from our look at the new correction parameters added into the latest DNG specifications, senior product manager and writer of Adobe’s Lightroom blog, Tom Hogarty, spoke to us about how these correction parameters were chosen and developed:

Adobe’s DNG specifications may seem like a rather esoteric and arcane document to go digging around in, if you’ve only got experience of developing pictures, rather than software. However, the latest changes, that allow for ‘corrections and enhancements’ might be of interest, because they give something of an insight into the kinds of processing and corrections that camera manufacturers are applying to their RAW data.

In order to provide a non-proprietary way of storing RAW data, DNG files have to include all the processing instructions necessary to produce a final image the way the camera manufacturer wanted. Consequently, to act as a universal format, the DNG specification has to have the capability to define all the different types of processing that those manufacturers might want to apply to their RAW data to accurately produce a finished image.

So the addition of correction and enhancement parameters (known as ‘opcodes’) into the DNG v1.3 specification gives us some clues about the behind-the-scenes work manufacturers are doing to produce the best possible images from the RAW data their cameras are capturing.