Last update : January 7, 2016

Digital Negative

Digital Negative (DNG) is an public archival open raw image format owned by Adobe used for digital photography. It was launched in 2004. DNG is based on the TIFF/EP standard format, and mandates significant use of metadata. Exploitation of the file format is royalty free.

Adobe provides the Digital Negative Specification, a free Adobe DNG Converter (version 6.3), which easily translates raw files from many of today’s popular cameras, an SDK (Software Development Kit) and an DNG Profile Editor.

DNG is supported by various camera providers  and photographic software developers (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, …). DNG is also supported by ExifTool, a platform-independent Perl library plus a command-line application for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files, developed by Phil Harvey. ExifTool is also available as a stand-alone Windows executable and a Macintosh OS X package. The current version is 10.09 published on January 4, 2016.