What is everyone's experience with LrC's lossy DNG? Is it good enough for professional use?

Question

Hi fellow Lightroom Classic users,

I finally migrated over from the cloud-based Lightroom out of frustration with UI problems, and I am slowly discovering new features that LrC has. One of them is the ability to create lossy DNGs. I tried it out and I am impressed at how well it was able to compress DNG files, especially those produced by denoising applications such as DxO PureRaw: 90MB to 9MB. It is a significant disk space saving.

What I do not know is how well it preserves detail. I am not good at pixel peeping - anyone else here with more experience can tell me if they're able to see a significant loss in detail for professional work?

I find it kind of paradoxical that Adobe can compress raw formats smaller than the lossy raw formats offered in camera. Am I losing dynamic range or microcontrast? I have no idea how to judge.

Jesse34454291a9x6 · Answer

I'm surprised nobody has responded. I've taken the plunge and decided that it's not worth storing full (file) size DNG's, especially after they've been processed with Enhance or DxO. It's not that hard drive space is the issue necessarily, it's cloud backup storage.

So anyways as ideally the last step I'll save it in DNG lossy. I've brought both lossless and lossy into photoshop as layers, differenced them out, and I don't see any difference at all unless I go to the curves and do something extreme- bring the input highlights waaaaaaay down. Then you can see the outline of the picture. That tells me that - amazingly - the difference is very minimal and not even perceivable with the naked eye. In zooming in it's rare that I can even spot a difference. But I will say every once in a while a face shot that was taken farther away might be noticeable (not a portrait, but someone across the room in weird lighting).

It does seam mind blowing that it's that good. I almost wish there was something inbetween 90MB and 9MB just to make me feel better LOL.

Example of a different histogram:

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