Yahoo! News - Adobe Plans New Format for Digital Photos
SAN JOSE, Calif. - Adobe Systems Inc. plans to introduce a new format for digital photos on Monday in an attempt to create an industry public standard to make the archiving and editing process compatible across all types of cameras and photo software.

Most consumer digital cameras today capture images in the JPEG format, but a higher-quality raw photo format is gaining in popularity among higher-end and professional camera models.

Now, Adobe, which dominates the photo editing market with its Photoshop products, is proposing that its new Digital Negative Specification, or DNG, becomes a universal standard for the raw format. The San Jose-based company is also launching a free software tool that will allow users to convert the raw formats from more than 65 cameras into the DNG format.

Raw photo files contain all the original information captured by a digital camera sensor before any in-camera processing occurs and thus gives users truer images and more flexibility when editing. By comparison, JPEG photo files are compressed images that suffer some data loss.