I wonder if anyone else out there has experienced the same corruption problems that I have had in my lightroom setup with DNG files. I have been using lightroom version 1 and now version 2 for about a year and a half. I have had 2 DSLR’s during this time, a canon 400D and now the 40D. At some point I decided to select the option that converts your canon Raw file to their own proprietery .dng (digital negative) file on import because I was persuaded that it was a robust and futureproof version of Raw. I even did this with my “100portraits” files which as you can imagine were very precious to me. Around the time of the 1.4 update (from memory) I suddenly noticed that my files in the library of lightroom over a period of a few days suddenly showed corruption on the previews. Importing the files into a fresh machine with lightroom or photoshop elements still showed the same corruption artefacts; they seem to be at file level. Disaster! This has affected at least a few hundred of my files, and generally when a folder is affected at all, most of the files will be corrupted.

On the help area of the Adobe forums card reading or writing errors were mentioned, but my files were in the system and working for a few months before this appeared. I had routinely produced prints for people from my portrait project, and burned CD’s of the jpeg exports; I find it hard to imagine that this was an importing issue. Thankfully with my portrait project I exported all the .dng files to jpeg in their unprocessed state so I have something, even if it won’t give me the processing latitude I would like.

You might be saying now, “why didn’t you backup”? Fool that I am, I did back up to a Netgear network attached drive using automated file synchronisation. Overnight it synchronised all the newly corrupted files overwriting the older uncorrupted ones. Please learn from me on this one, synchronising backups just synchronises faults as well, so configure backup wisely!

Anyway, I now refuse to convert to .dng keeping the original Canon Raw in preference. My corruptions only happened to .dng’s for some reason.

Has anyone out there had the same problem. Has anyone found any repair utilities. Have Adobe got a repair tool I wonder?

Anyway, some samples:

Note: Sample pictures are .dng conversions from Canon 400D and 40D

The two things I want to highlight are that I had a major file corruption issue with a lot of my precious files over the end of 2007 and the start of 2008, in which I have lost a lot of data. (More about this in a  posting soon). So I was sad on naming this folder of otherwise uninteresting files to note the corruption that you will see in the next picture. I realised that I could clone it out because it was in easy areas of the sky to deal with. My second point is one to which I will certainly return later, not only is the picture corrupted, but it was far from a great picture in terms of exposure. Gerry and Elisabeth are slightly backlit and underexposed, perhaps exposure compensation or fill-in flash (my then 400D had no spot metering) would have helped, but I used none of them. I did take the picture in RAW file format, so look how easy it was for me a year on to:

• warm it up with the colour temp slider.
• Increase the vibrance/colour saturation
• Increase the clarity/ midrange definition
• Use a virtual grad filter on the sky to darken it
• Use a virtual grad filter on the foreground to brighten it
• Change the curves to brighten faces
• Use the spot repair tool to clone the corruption out of the sky

And all of this without going into photoshop elements even once. I love lightroom. (Corruption issue aside).

The original (I’m embarrassed to show you).

If you can use RAW format, and can be bothered with a little tweaking, you should!