As usual when new Leica cameras come out, I took a quick look inside a DNG from one of Leica's new Leica CL  cameras:

  1. The camera name shows as "LEICA CL"
  2. The image data is 14-bit. There is no compression used in the DNG I looked at. 
  3. The DNG version is 1.4, with a "backward version" of 1.3. There is a reason for this - DNG 1.3 allows for opcodes, which Leica use for lens correction.
  4. In the DNG I looked at, which was shot with a "Summicron TL 1:2 23 ASPH." lens, lens correction is done by a single "WarpRectilinear" operation in the DNG. 
  5. In addition to the lens correction op code, there is also a "FixBadPixelsConstant" opcode, whose function is exactly as the name states. This is the same as in the Leica Q, SL, etc.
  6. Unusually, the DNGs all contain 2 different JPEG preview images in addition to the main raw image, one of 1620x1080, and finally a full sized preview of 6000x4000. Having the full sized preview is particularly odd, as it takes up a lot of space. In the approximately 45 MB files I've seen, the full size preview typically takes up about 1.8 MB. 
So in summary, the DNGs appear to be a bit of a hybrid of the "SL", "Q", etc style of DNG, with a single lens correction opcode, and a bad pixels correction opcode, and of the "M10" style of DNG, with a full sized preview. As I noted in my analysis of the M10 DNG, the full size preview is probably there to support viewing on mobile devices that often don't have raw decoding capability built in. 

Finally, it's notable that the DNGs don't contain the bizarre Lightroom XMP metadata that the M10 DNGs have embedded in them. 
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Good news in a difficult year - all the macOS apps that I support - AccuRaw EXR, AccuRaw Monochrome, pcdMagic, CornerFix, dcpTool (both the GUI and command line version), DNG cleaner and pcdtojpeg - now are all available with native Apple Silicon versions for blazing fast performance on Apple's new "M1" processor. Download are in all the usual places.

Enjoy.

There's a whole slew of new camera support, including for Canon's new CR3 format.

Updates of AccuRaw EXR, AccuRaw Monochrome, PhotoRaw are now available on the Apple App Store.

pcdMagic for Windows - the only currently available app that can convert Kodak Photo CD images with correct color and at full resolution - is now available on the Microsoft Windows Store.

This great news for users:

The Windows Store version has a free trial mode that allows the app to be tested without any commitment. The Windows store handles all updates automatically. There's no need to keep track of license codes. The Windows store only supports the latest versions of Windows 10.
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As usual when new Leica cameras come out, I took a quick look inside a DNG from one of Leica's new Leica CL  cameras:

The camera name shows as "LEICA CL" The image data is 14-bit. There is no compression used in the DNG I looked at.  The DNG version is 1.4, with a "backward version" of 1.3. There is a reason for this - DNG 1.3 allows for opcodes, which Leica use for lens correction.
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So finally, after many years of searching, I have an answer to the question that torments all who go down the digital color rabbit hole.

This is from XKCD, brought to my attention via an article on the Digital Transitions website about the Phase One IQ3 100mp Trichromatic.

Back in January, when the new Leica M10 was introduced, there were claims that the improvement in dynamic range from the Leica M240 to the M10 was of the order of 1.5 to 2 stops.  At the time, I wrote that just by eyeballing the published images, I believed the improvement to be "closer to 0.5 stops than 1.5-2".

Much to my surprise, given what I had thought to be just a basic explanation of why dynamic range is a tricky concept, the post generated a lot of push-back. And I mean a LOT.

dcpTool has been available for quite a while as a command line application for Windows and the Mac. But now it available in the form of an easy to use Mac app, with powerful batch processing capabilities. dcpTool for the Mac is available from the App Store.

dcpTool allows you to:

Decompile DNG Camera Profile (DCP) files in XML. The XML can then be read and edited with a simple text editor. Recompile edited XML into DCP files Remove "Hue twists" from camera profiles.
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Many cameras embed lens corrections into raw the raw files that they produce. Generally, that's a good thing - straight lines stay straight, etc. For an example of lens corrections in practice, take a look at this post about the Leica SL.

But, as the saying goes, "there is no free lunch". Lens corrections also have some downsides:

Lens corrections result in a small reduction in sharpness.

Those of you that have read the Leica M10 raw file analysis post will know that M10 DNGs have more baggage in them that is typically the case for a Leica DNG. I've put together a little app to clean them up, called DNG Cleaner (Mac only for the moment).

AccuRaw users might have gotten a bit of a surprise recently - AccuRaw has turned into AccuRaw EXR, and is now at version 3.

The reason for the name change is that the focus of the AccuRaw product has changed a bit, based on what users were actually doing with it. AccuRaw has always been focussed on having highly linear color response, with no "hue twists" or other surprises in the color rendering.
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