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Importance of Saving to DNG

Lesson 12 from: FAST CLASS: The Outdoor Photography Experience

Chris Burkard

Importance of Saving to DNG

Lesson 12 from: FAST CLASS: The Outdoor Photography Experience

Chris Burkard

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Lesson Info

12. Importance of Saving to DNG

Lesson Info

Importance of Saving to DNG

I really just want to explain to you guys the purpose of saving these images as DNGs. So now that I'm all done, let's go back. So I edited that one image. I edited this one too. I'm gonna sharpen this one right now. And sharpening... I'm gonna go into here, library. I'm gonna save this one as a DNG. Cool. So I'm saving this as a DNG, so those are done. I'm done. They're all saved as DNGs. Now I'm gonna go back into my... I'm gonna go back into my folder. And I'm gonna look at these DNGs. Okay. Where did my other one go? There we go, okay. So they would all, they should all be in one DNG folder, right? And I'm just erasing these so there's no confusion. But basically what I've done is, I would save my files inside a DNG folder, right? That is inside my... That is inside one of my existing folders, right? The folder that has these images inside of it, I would just save these inside. So these are edited, color corrected DNGs, okay? Now that I have both these in there, DNGs, they have my J...

PG overlay. I'm looking at a raw file right now. They have my JPG overlay. And they have the raw file beneath it. Okay, so... I can go back through and I can delete the images, say all of them, all of these I can delete right now. All gone, okay? I would take these DNGs, and I would replace them in their spot. So now I have no raw files, I'm only saving my DNGs. My next action, is going to be to go into Lightroom, go to this Creative Live folder, so I'm not keeping a big, busy mess in Lightroom, and I'm erasing this entire Creative Live folder. Why am I doing that? Say I've color corrected all my DNGs, they're already saved in there. Closing Lightroom. It saved us time, great. Closing Photo Mechanic, awesome, okay? They're all, they're all done. They're in there. They're all out of there. Why would I, why would I do that? To keep it clean. To keep it clean. But also, there is no need for me to keep those DNGs in there. There's no need to keep anything in there. Because now that I have these files, okay? Say I have a selection, comes up. I have a print, I have something I have to make, right? I can go into here and be like, oh cool, I have to, I have to put these in a JPEG or something like that. Great, I'll drag in this folder into Photo Mechanic. Oh cool, here's my DNG files that have my JPG overlays. I gonna, I'm gonna take both of these, I'm gonna drag them into Lightroom. So... Great, I'm gonna drag these things into Lightroom right now. Import. They're there. Ready to export as whatever I want. Because now, they have every edit I made saved on top of them. So if I want to go in here, there's nothing else I have to do. I have no more developing to do. If I want to go in here and export as a JPEG, and make a print file, or make something that I want to post on Instagram, or do whatever, all I have to do is go in here and export again, right? Rather than keeping my library in Photo, in Lightroom, just all busy with images, I'm able to simply have those edits always saved on my hard drive. Now the beauty of this is if I send these photos, or these files, to anyone, any client in raw format, they're gonna have that overlay of, they're gonna have that overlay of my color correction on there. So they know what I liked, and what I thought the image should look like, and stuff.

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