[Cross-posted from Lightroom forum...]

Folks, I was hoping someone might be able to help me with a frustrating White Balance issue. Specifically, I have found that my photos often have very different White Balance values -- for both Color Temperature as well as Tint -- when comparing the original NEF and a DNG created by Adobe DNG Converter. (And the images' appearance is reflected by the difference.) If I proceed to correct the White Balance values in the DNG, so that they exactly match the NEF, the images are identical.

You might ask, "Why do you want to convert your images to DNG?" The key reason is that DNG provides lossless compression, which makes a HUGE difference on storage requirements. (Unfortunately, Nikon's RAW compression is lossy, and I cannot afford any image quality degradation -- no matter how slight.)

As far as pertinent info: Camera: Nikon D2X. Platform: Mac OS X 10.4.8, with all updates installed (including the Camera RAW update released a month or so ago). Hardware: MacBook Pro 17" 2.16 (CoreDuo) and PowerMac G5 2.7. Software: Lightroom 1.0 and Adobe DNG Converter 3.7. (DNG Converter 3.6 provides same results.)

In terms of the NEFs, they are uncompressed. (I also took a couple of test shots with compressed NEF, but the results are the same.) In terms of color settings on my camera: Color Mode II, Color Space AdobeRGB. (I know these things theoretically have no impact on RAW files, but I thought I should mention it anyway.)

When searching the Adobe forums, the only directly-comparable issue I found was related to Sony's Alpha camera, using a much older version of the DNG Converter. However, this issue was corrected in later versions. URL of message thread: <http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bbf7680/7>

Has anyone else encountered an issue like this? And please tell me that what I am experiencing is not a "feature" of either Lightroom and/or DNG? :-P

There is a bug in the Macintosh version of the DNG Conveter 3.6 and 3.7 in the handling of the white balance from these Nikon cameras. Either go back to version 3.5, or wait for 4.0.

Or save the DNG files directly from the Camera Raw plug-in.

There is a bug in the Macintosh version of the DNG Converter 3.6 and 3.7
in the handling of the white balance from these Nikon cameras. Either
go back to version 3.5, or wait for 4.0.




Thomas, I tried version 3.5, and found that the issue still exists in that version as well. Version 3.4, however, did the trick.

Thank you very much for the help!

Thomas, which Nikon cameras does this apply to please? (that you are aware of !!)

If you are brave, you can try to fix this yourself. Open the package (control click and pick "Show Package Contents") for the both DNG Converter 3.7 application and the Camera Raw 3.7 plug-in. Navagate inside each package into the Contents/MacOS folder. Copy the file "NkMiniLib.dylib" from the Camera Raw package into the DNG Converter package.