Code, Camera, Action

Aperture 3 upgrade has given lots of folks reason to shout -- Nondestructive editing everywhere, yay! Grouped preset powers, yay! Lumix support, yay! But its first-release bugs have also given lots of us reason to curse and kick.

In an earlier post I talked about how to avoid some of the frustrations upgrading your library from Aperture 2 to 3 http://elstudio.us/upgrading-to-aperture-3-for-lumix-and-micro-4. Now that's done, let's look at some work-arounds for DNGs.

The problem seems to be that Aperture 3, like Aperture 2 before it, lacks support for lens corrections in Adobe DNG files. This is odd because for many cameras -- the Lumix G1, GH1 and LX-3 -- Aperture supports those same corrections in the native RW2 format. Let's hope it's a bug that the same corrections don't work in DNG.

Even stranger, Aperture 3 seems to bail out on DNGs from any camera that *can* do lens correction -- whether or not there's actually lens correction in a particular DNG. On micro 4/3 cameras like the G1, legacy lenses don't provide lens correction, and thus DNGs may not have it. If only Aperture 3 was clever enough to check.

If you had DNGs in your Aperture 2 library from Panasonic Lumix G1 or GH1 or GF1, or maybe an LX3, you'll find they convert just fine. But you can't adjust them at all. To make any changes, you must upgrade to the latest rendering engine, which renders garbage on the screen (and eventually crashes Aperture).

Here's what you can do to work around this problem.

1. Wait for RW2 support for your camera. For the GF1, or if you've shot with Panasonic micro 4/3 lenses, this is your best option. And save those RW2 files! Extract your original RW2 files from the DNGs or pull them from a backup (you did embed the the RW2, right?). It seems that Apple views DNG support in Aperture as a secondary priority, so the original raws are the way to go.
2. If your DNGs were shot with legacy lenses, there is a good work-around. Only native Panasonic (and maybe Olympus) micro 4/3 lenses add the lens metadata. If you haven't shot with those, the only thing keeping Aperture from recognizing your photos is the camera model name embedded in the DNGs. You can use something like exiftool to change it to one that doesn't do lens correction. Here's what I use to get my G1's legacy lens DNGs to work in Aperture 3. (This is not terribly dangerous, as exiftool can just as easily undo this change.)
   exiftool -Model=DMC-L10 blah.dng
3. If your DNGs do have lens correction (as they must with the LX3) you could use a tool like DNGSanitize http://punainenkala.livejournal.com/588.html, which purports to strip the lens correction from the DNGs. This is a last-resort sort of thing to do, as you will lose that lens correction data. You would probably also have to change the camera model name, as in option 2 (try DMC-FZ50 for the LX3). Do keep backups. And, really, don't do this -- wait until the next release of Aperture when we'll find out if Apple intends to fix DNG support.

Whatever you do, test this with your DNGs. And keep backup copies. Just because option 2 works for me, that doesn't mean it will for you. And I've not had to try option 3. Also, pray you don't have linear DNGs, as only Adobe can help you then.

I can't believe that Apple would mess up DNG support this badly on purpose. In the meantime, please file a bug report to let Apple know that losing DNG support for these cameras is a big deal. You can do this from inside Aperture itself. Choose Aperture > Provide Aperture Feedback from the menu.

Good luck! And let us know how it works out.