Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, mostly in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC. I am currently a Senior Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Hotmail Frontdoor team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for the User Interface of Hotmail as well as some of the Infrastructure and Architecture. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2008, Omar Shahine
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Wohoo! At long last there is now a DNG Codec for Vista! Thanks Trevin for the pointer.
What does this even mean Omar?
Glad you asked.
Vista supports a "pluggable" system for Camera Vendors to produce codecs (code that understands a proprietary file) and represents it inside Windows Vista like a file that Vista understands (Jpeg, PNG, Tiff, BMP).
Why is this important?
Digital SLR cameras have a superior method of capturing photos called RAW format. Think of this as a sort of digital negative. It is usually a Lossless (no compression) and unprocessed version of the Photo which allows you to make significant changes to the image (think developing) without any loss in the original image after the changes are made. With JPEG (the typical format most digital cameras take) you are in a compressed format already and any changes typically result in information being thrown away.
Shooting RAW has some big advantages over JPEG (and some drawbacks). Mainly:
DNG is a format Adobe invented to create a sort of universal RAW format. You can convert images from many camera vendors into DNG. The benefits are that DNGs can often be compressed more than the native RAW files (my Panasonic Point and Shoot created 16MB RAW file and in DNG format they were under 7 MB) and you can alter the images in programs like Lightroom, Photoshop without the need for "sidecar" files (I'm not even going to go into that).
The benefits of having a Vista Codec are that any applications written to support the Windows Imaging Component (WIC) can no read/edit those files. Examples of this are:
This is great news. Thanks Adobe for finally doing something useful . Now if you would just fix Adobe Reader so that thumbnails consistently render in the Vista Shell.
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