Aperture to DNG to Adobe Camera Raw Workflow

I’ve just made a really useful Automator workflow for fans of Aperture. The workflow allows me to select any number of .NEF raw files (either managed or as referenced masters) and with a single click perform the following actions:

• Generate XMP sidecar files with all Aperture metadata and export them with the .NEF to a working folder
• Combine the .XMP and the .NEF into a .DNG using the latest DNG converter from Adobe
• Remove the temporary .NEF and .XMP files leaving only the DNG files
• Open a finder dialog, allow me to select one or all of the DNG files
• Opens my selection for editing in Adobe Camera Raw

This is important to me as it allows me to use all the power and flexibility of Apertures photo management and retain the use of ALL the brilliant non-destructive editing tools of Lightroom (which are all available in the ACR interface). Further heavy pixel pushing from ACR straight to Photoshop is a further button click away.

There is a little basic setup required.

• Go to this site, download and install the DNG Automator action.
• If you don’t have it yet, go to Adobe and download their free DNG converter. Install it.
• Go to my Skydrive and download my workflow (or application if you prefer), unzip it and run it.

You should see something like this:

The workflow should open in Automator. Replace the areas in the image above which say Adobe Photoshop CS4 with the version you have (if you don’t have CS4).

You can now either run the workflow directly from Automator or (from Automator) click: File > Save as plugin. Select ‘Script menu’ under the plug-in for section and choose a name. The script is added to your scripts folder in your taskbar and you can access it really easily when you’re in Aperture.

Done! The best of Aperture goodness with the heavy lifting of ACR and Photoshop for when you want it.

Enable DNG thumbnails in Windows XP

Here is a wonderful little registry hack for windows XP to allow you to see thumbnails of your DNG images in Windows Explorer. 

Download the file and run it (at your own risk); I now have thumbnail happiness where before I had only icons.

Download here

DNG – My long term archival strategy

I have settled on Lightroom Aperture (update) as my photo management software of choice and Adobe’s DNG format as my long term photographic archive of choice.

My Nikon shoots raw NEF files but those waiting for the recent versions of Adobe and Apple camera raw to support the D700 NEF files showed me that not all NEF’s are created equal.  Combine this with the fact that my Fujifilm shoots it’s own bizarre propriety RAW format (thankfully still understood by Lightroom) and I reckon there is an impending disaster lurking somewhere down the line.

Enter the Digital Negative (DNG) and it’s groundswell of support by software vendors (Apple, Extensis) and camera manufacturers (Leica, Hasselblad, Ricoh and Samsung) amongst others.

DNG is a RAW container format designed to hold RAW data and, more importantly for me, the file metadata.  This eliminates the need for me to have separate sidecar metadata files and it means that all my non-destructive adjustments, keywords and other metadata are available across all the tools I use.  The DNG conversion process, either through Lightroom or the free converter, is very user friendly and the original RAW file and the sidecar updates are combined into the one DNG file.

As DNG employs more sophisticated compression algorithms there is invariably a space saving when converting from a RAW format like NEF to DNG.   If you’re concerned about being able to open your original RAW image in the future in the proprietary camera software (like the dreadful Capture NX) then you can embed a bit-for-bit copy of your RAW data into the DNG which you can extract later.

I am in the process of converting all my NEF files (and other RAW formats) to DNG; this gives me some level of comfort that in 15 years time the files will still be accessible and relevant to the software of the time.

Read more about DNG on the Adobe website.