"After I convert to dng, I plan to open in camera raw, make adjustments if needed and then render as jpeg or tiff. Although, I'm undecided as to which one right now. Plus, I'm undecided on which camera raw workflow options to go with. It looks like 16bit is best and/or more common. After spending time processing/correcting the raw(dng) file and rendering it to a jpeg or tiff, why keep the dng? I may process the dng and render in both tiff and jpeg. Then, discard the dng." I absolutely disagree. Why keep thousands of tiffs and jpgs? (My current collection of Raws - proprietary or dngs - is 30,000, which would probably be considered small for 20 years in digital.) If you have no immediate need for those rendered files, automatic conversions are just piling up deadwood. Once you have edited and backed up the Raws there are only a number of reasons why you might want to render RGB files; 16 bit tifs are needed if you want to do more editing in a pixel level editor and should be saved if can't or don't want to recreate that editing in the future, jpgs are needed for sharing as web postings or emails or for sending to a print lab. Once they have served that immediate purpose, the jpgs can be deleted, Should you need them again in the future, they can easily be rendered again in seconds. Moreover, the technology is still evolving, but you cannot add more editing to a rendered file without doing a certain amount of damage - lesss to a 16 bit tif, more to a jpg. You can return endless times to a Raw without loss. The Raw is your source file which must always be preserved.
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