21 March 2008
DNG Phone Camera (J2ME)
RAW files or Digital Negatives for your phone!
 Wow, that’s all I can say about; finally we got a tool for the real photography enthusiast in mobile phones world, application capable to get the most from the CMOS sensor, capable to take the control over the camera hardware, to get, to process and to save photos in RAW format.
Really excited to see what Mr. Bigley, our photography expert will say about but I am pretty sure that he’ll be more than impressed because with this piece of soft we are a step closer to the real digital cameras.
I always have a little disbelief to hear from the users that their phone make a photos that don’t requires post processing in a “digital darkroom program” such as Photoshop or some mobile application equivalent. Such statements usually come from the users that are not that much in photography and don’t really understand what their phone camera is capable to do and they’ll always rather choose the jpg instead of the RAW format.
Raw image files are sometimes called digital negatives, as they fulfill the same role as film negatives in traditional chemical photography: that is, the negative is not directly usable as an image, but has all of the information needed to create an image. In addition to raw files from cameras, raw data from film scanners can also be referred to as digital negatives. Likewise, the process of converting a raw image file into a viewable format is sometimes called developing a raw image, by analogy with the film development.
Like a photographic negative, a digital negative may have a wider dynamic range or color gamut than the eventual final image format. The selection of the final choice of image rendering is part of the process of white balancing and color grading.
Of course, don't get me wrong, there is really nothing wrong with a JPGs, with taking photos and then sharing, printing, or storing the results with no intermediate editing but if you are some kind of the power user and or photography enthusiast than you’ll know that you’ll loose a little bit of the power of digital photography by saving shots in JPG format.
4 years in the waiting, Digital Negative (DNG) - first introduced by Adobe in 2004 as a universal format for the RAW image files generated by digital cameras - has finally arrived on the mobile phone!
Previously, cameras that provide direct DNG support are only available on high-end models from camera manufacturers like Hasselblad, Leica, Pentax (K10D), Ricoh, and Samsung. But now, with Tea Vui Huang's free DNG Phone Camera, you can capture photos directly to the DNG RAW image format from your humble Nokia camera phone.
The DNG images will be saved to the "Images" folder of the microSD card using the default Nokia image file naming format. DNG is supported by Adobe Photoshop CS2, Photoshop CS, Photoshop Elements 3.0/4.0 and DNG Converter software. DNG raw files must first be processed before it can be used to generate a final JPEG or TIFF image.
DNG Phone Camera is designed for Nokia phones minimally supporting CLDC 1.0, MIDP 2.0, JSR 135 (Mobile Media) and JSR 75. This product includes DNG technology under license by Adobe Systems Incorporated.
A raw image file (sometimes written RAW image file) contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of a digital camera or image scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and ready to be used with a bitmap graphics editor or printed. Normally, the image will be processed by a raw converter in a wide-gamut internal colorspace where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to an RGB file format such as TIFF or JPEG for storage, printing, or further manipulation.
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