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You don't say which camera(s) you have. Many cameras come with Raw converters, such as:
- Canon, it's DPP, which gets upgraded for free.
- Nikon provides Capture NX-D (I think it's free, but it may not be).
- Sony includes Capture One for Sony, which is worth upgrading to the "Pro for Sony" version (I'm amazed that none of my Sony clients has even looked at Capture One). The "free" version does excellent conversion, but provides limited other tools, while the "Pro for Sony" version has all the Capture One Pro bells & whistles, but limited to processing Sony Raw images.
I don't know about Pentax, Olympus or others, but so far every camera manufacturer I've looked into offers a Raw converter, so I'd look at that route first.
The manufacturer supplied converters I'm aware of are able to export TIFF, JPEG and perhaps other formats that other editors understand.
Converting to DNG has issues, such as:
- DNG may not include all of the EXIF data your camera embeds in the Raw file. I know I lost several bits during the brief time I used DNG with my 7D Mark II files.
- DNG color profile is not universally understood by other software, so you may encounter color interpretation problems. For example, older versions of Capture One Pro had a disclaimer that they didn't read DNG ICC profile.
IF you decide to go with DNG conversion, I'd encourage you to use the "Embed Raw" option, which includes the original Raw file in a way that can be extracted later. Of course this approximately doubles the file size.
Another option: consider weening yourself of CS6. Take a look at Affinity Photo, Acorn, Pixelmator and other editing programs that understand newer cameras than CS6 does.
Depending on the editing you do, even something like Sylum Luminar 2018 or OnOne Photo may work. I've been using Luminar 2018 on a Mac since it came out, and it works well, although I've read a number of negative comments from Windows users, so you'll want to investigate further.
Or [I hesitate to suggest this] look at PS Elements, which is very inexpensive, and there's a third party add-on (http://elementsplus.net) that can unlock many of the features CS6 has. What I don't like about Elements, though, is that it's mostly 8-bit, its UI isn't very nice (IMO), and it requires you to install a lot of Adobe "stuff" and makes lots of connections to Adobe servers in the course of installation and possibly during use. I'm really tired of all the outgoing connections I find Adobe software making to their servers, especially since I don't know what data is being transmitted.
Edited on Dec 01, 2017 at 01:19 PM · View previous versions
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