LR4 export as DNG: what does that mean?

[ymc226]

Thinking about having 2 Mac systems, one at work and one at home with LR4 loaded.  I don't want to get into Photoshop yet as I'm relatively new to digital.  Likely going to use a flash drive to transfer selected files between the home/office systems.

Work late at the office often but have time in between to "play" with my photos.  Usually too busy at home with kids to devote the weekend to post processing.

Rather than exporting as a TIFF format which limits white balance and other PP options, will exporting as DNG be the same as if I downloaded the files from the camera but with the latest adjustments saved?  I want to export files post-processed at work that I want to continue to work on further in my home system.  In other words,  will exporting as DNG save my LR adjustments (which can be further adjusted) or will exporting as DNG just export the unprocessed file?

My raw files would be from: Nikon D800 (NEF), Leica M9-P (DNG) and Leica M Monochrome (DNG)

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

Exporting as DNG will keep all your processing instructions.

You could also export as catalog. The problem is more with reimporting.

Best regards
Erik

Thinking about having 2 Mac systems, one at work and one at home with LR4 loaded.  I don't want to get into Photoshop yet as I'm relatively new to digital.  Likely going to use a flash drive to transfer selected files between the home/office systems.

Work late at the office often but have time in between to "play" with my photos.  Usually too busy at home with kids to devote the weekend to post processing.

Rather than exporting as a TIFF format which limits white balance and other PP options, will exporting as DNG be the same as if I downloaded the files from the camera but with the latest adjustments saved?  I want to export files post-processed at work that I want to continue to work on further in my home system.  In other words,  will exporting as DNG save my LR adjustments (which can be further adjusted) or will exporting as DNG just export the unprocessed file?

My raw files would be from: Nikon D800 (NEF), Leica M9-P (DNG) and Leica M Monochrome (DNG)

[digitaldog]

Rather than exporting as a TIFF format which limits white balance and other PP options, will exporting as DNG be the same as if I downloaded the files from the camera but with the latest adjustments saved?

Here's what I'd do (and do): get yourself a nice, big external FireWire drive. Put everything LR needs on that drive and nothing more. All images, the LR catalog and associated files and set the preferences for storing presets with catalog. Use DNG for all the raws. No sidecar files, DNG profiles embedded with instructions etc.

Now you have a drive you can clone quickly (after the first backup) that you can take with you back and forth. You can of course clone that to other drives as a back up. Use something that quickly clone's only new changes to the drive (on the Mac I use SuperDuper). Now you have a drive you can take anywhere that is always up to date. You can even run it on a different person's machine with a different OS and since everything is on the drive, you're fine. Just as long as the machine has a current copy of Lightroom. You end up with a good backup schema and you always have the latest data with you. The backup will not take that long (certainly not much longer than saving out DNG's to a thumb drive).