There are so many benefits to shooting your digital photographs in RAW format that these days even some compacts will give you the option to choose how your images are saved.

RAW images are minimally processed in-camera (or in-scanner) so that you have all of the image information present in the picture when you open it in your post-production, image-editing software. This means you have much more flexibility when it comes to the way that your images look, and you don’t have to worry that you’ve made the wrong decisions when shooting – things like the white balance can be adjusted afterwards, rather than committed to at the time of shooting. They are much like the negative in film photography and are often referred to as a ‘digital negative’.

Using RAW has some major benefits for photographers, including better image quality and better control over the look of your images, plus they don’t apply any compression, as is the case when you’re shooting with JPEGs. However, the files are a lot bigger than if you shoot a JPEG, and as a result it takes longer to write a RAW image to your memory card, which is no good if you need to take many shots one after the other. The biggest problem, however, is that there is no universal RAW standard.
Every camera manufacturer uses their own RAW format, which means you have to ensure software support for these formats if you want to edit your pictures. Software like Photoshop’s Camera Raw needs to be updated with the latest specifications on a regular basis to ensure support, or you will need to use the camera manufacturer’s own conversion software.

Camera Raw: RAW files can be edited precisely using the same sort of controls you’d use in-camera, such as selecting White Balance

Adobe’s DNG is one solution to this problem. Introduced in 2004, the Digital Negative file format is a royalty-free, universal format. The idea is that software need only support DNG rather than lots of different RAW file formats, and these formats can be easily converted to DNG using Adobe’s free DNG Converter program. All of Adobe’s editing software (Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Lightroom) supports DNG files, as does some software from other companies, such as The GIMP, ACDSee Photo Manager and Apple Aperture. The Converter program supports lossless data compression when converting, so you keep the high quality expected from a RAW file.

More and more cameras are starting to support DNG natively, meaning that in many cases you won’t even need the Converter program to edit them. Samsung, Casio, Pentax and Leica are all notable brands that now produce some cameras with DNG support. By having all RAW files in the same format, you are future-proofing your image collection, meaning that the file format won’t become obsolete over time, as many of the older formats might.

So now we’ve convinced you of the benefits, how do you actually use the DNG file format? First you need to round up all your RAW files from different sources and convert them. The Converter is a very quick download and incredibly simple to use.

From the opening dialog box, select the location of the images you want to convert and the location of where you want to save them (you can choose either the same location or select another folder). Choose a name for your new images and set the Preferences as needed (more often than not, the default Preferences will be fine). You can, for example, opt to embed the original RAW file inside the DNG file (which means larger file sizes) or remove the Compression. Then you simply hit Convert. A new window will open showing you the status of conversion on each of the files you selected. We converted 12 files in around 30 seconds.

The newly created DNG files can now be opened in Photoshop where Camera Raw will automatically open for you to make your edits. When you’re done, hit Open and you can then continue working on your image just as you normally would.

The pic above shows a RAW image as it was shot (inset), and after some basic tweaking (main) in Camera Raw before any proper editing in Photoshop