DNG's in Lightroom without demosaicing

To get the most out of my E-500_Panchromat, I had to develop each image with DCRAW.

=> ../olympus-e-500-panchromat-umbau-auf-monochrom/index_en.gmi | ../e-500-panchromat-raw-dateien-entwickeln/index_en.gmi

That left me with an additional 16MB TIFF file for every 13MB RAW file, which is not especially space efficient really. Using the Adobe DNG Converter instead yields a nice, losslessly compressed DNG around 8MB each.

=> http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=106&platform=Windows

After some hours of fiddling I finally managed to convince Lightroom into treating them like files from the Leica Monochrom, so that there is no demosaicing taking place anymore! Here's what you have to do:

• Take your favourite camera raw file and run it through the Adobe DNG Converter. If it's a DNG already, like from Leica or Ricoh, you can skip this step.
• Open the file with your favourite TIFF tag editor and do the following:

- Set the value of the Tag 262 (PhotometricInterpretation) to 34892. It's supposedly 32803; if not, you're probably looking in the wrong IFD.

- Remove the Tags 50721 (ColorMatrix1) and 50722 (ColorMatrix2) altogether. They're in the other IFD ;)

• And that's it! Now open the file in Lightroom and admire the beautiful picture.

Big question is where to get a decent TIFF tag editor? I didn't find one and eventually stopped searching. Since the TIFF spec's are open and downloadable from Adobe, I finally put together a little tool for myself. Not pretty, but gets the job done.

=> https://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/tiff/TIFF6.pdf

=> Here's such a modified file for your personal enjoyment.

2015-05-18 created

2021-12-26 on gemini