DNG vs TIFF vs JPG

Did you know that most drone cameras will save the imagery in RAW format?

OK, why would you want to do that?

For many years I have successfully been using JPG which is a compressed image file format that has worked out great for processing in Pix4D, Metashape Pro, DroneDeploy, etc.

I recently joined Cooper Aerial who has been mapping the country for decades and has a lot of experience with large format cameras. I am advancing my drone mapping skills to the next level which means that RAW image format converted to TIFF format is my new norm.

The specialized software that Cooper Aerial uses requires lossless imagery such as TIFF which means that I need to capture drone imagery in RAW format so that it can be converted to TIFF.

Use the camera setting in the DJI app to change the default setting of JPG to RAW.

That's all there is to it.

Each image will take up to 5 secs to store in RAW format versus 3 secs for JPG. There is the option to store both formatas at the same time. Since I post process in Lightroom, I only store RAW to save some space on the SD card.

NOTE : The automated flight management app such as Ground Station Pro will change the camera setting back to JPG. Due to the software coding in GSP you cannot store RAW images using the automated flight.

To get around this obstacle, I use Litchi to manage the flight.

I go into a lot of detail on using Litchi in my book named " Litchi " (Book 8) on how to set up and fly a mapping mission with this third party app.

https://www.cc4w.net/

I was out flying this weekend to capture some images for the new ADS-B book cover. I captured the images in RAW then converted to TIFF and JPG to compare the differences.

RAW (DNG) 41.3 MB

TIFF 119.4 MB

JPG 5.9 MB

Conclusion

In the images above, the only differences I can see are some tone changes and file sizes. The sharpness is clean in all three formats.

With today's computers, the file sizes are less of an issue. Older computers will struggle handling the large TIFF files.

As noted above, it takes longer to store the RAW images which will require flying slower to get the appropriate front overlap. The flight time almost doubles when capturing RAW images versus compressed JPG.

Depending on your processing needs and software application, compressed JPG will work just fine.

Just in case you are wondering, Metashape Pro will handle all three formats.

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