Although the actual Digital Negative (DNG) raw camera plug-in for Photoshop remains at 4.4.1, Adobe on Tuesday offered up details about an update to the DNG specification itself. Information on the spec, published as version 1.2.0.0, is now available for download.
Many digital cameras write “raw” files to their storage cards — the equivalent of a film exposure in a traditional camera, and the highest quality image you can get. But there’s no uniform specification for how those files are written, so the raw files produced by one camera may be different from another.
Adobe sought to address this issue by developing the DNG specification, a publicly available archive format. The update address several industry requirements, according to Adobe, such as the formalization of the concept of a “camera profile,” and the ability to profile multiple cameras in a single DNG file. New metadata tags have been defined, such as a field to indicate the integrity of the raw data within the file.