Countless warnings with Adobe DNG Converter

[Archive]

[Originally posted by uwe on 2010-02-20 12:49:54.917696-08]

Hi

I recently installed Adobe DNG Converter 5.4.0.57 and converted an Olympus *.ORF file to the DNG file format. When I now retrieve the EXIF data of this DNG image, I get countless warnings from EXIF Tool (both 8.11 and 8.10). One being "Too many warnings -- ImageProcessing parsing aborted".

Has anyone else seen this?

Thx
Uwe

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2010-02-20 13:19:28.632039-08]

Hi Uwe,

Yes, this is a known problem with the Adobe
DNG converter.  It really makes a good mess
of the ORF maker notes.

The problem is that it only stores metadata
found inside the makernotes data block, but
in ORF images this only includes the IFD
and not the value data, so any tag values
which aren't stored in the IFD are lost.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by uwe on 2010-02-20 16:57:07.065662-08]

Thank you, Phil.

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2010-02-21 03:57:46.607917-08]

I've been thinking about this and realized that ExifTool should
be able to fix this problem by copying the original makernotes
from the ORF to the DNG.  I've never tried this before, and the
current version of exiftool does not do this properly, but I will
fix this so that you can do the following with exiftool 8.12 (or later)
to properly re-generate the Olympus makernotes in the DNG image:

Code:

exiftool -tagsfromfile FILE.orf -makernotes FILE.dng

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2010-02-21 04:33:40.694945-08]

Looking into this further, there is a problem that I didn't anticipate.
Adobe (unfortunately) stores the DNG maker notes in its own proprietary
location instead of the standard EXIF location.  Due to the order of the
tags in DNG images, the ExifIFD is processed before the Adobe data,
so ExifTool will add the maker notes to the ExifIFD before it has seen that
they are also stored in the Adobe private data.  This means that while
the above command will fix the malformed Olympus makernotes
in the Adobe private data, it will also result in a duplicate copy of
the entire makernotes in the standard EXIF location.

This is not ideal, but since the Olympus makernote aren't too big
(only 14kB for the E1), the extra storage space shouldn't be much of
a concern.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2010-02-21 07:34:27.7599-08]

I'm waking up slowly this Sunday morning...  I have now figured out
how to avoid the duplication problem.  The following command will
restore only the proprietary Adobe makenotes in a DNG image
(with exiftool 8.12 or later, after I have added the ability to format the
makernotes properly for writing as a block to the Adobe data):

Code:

exiftool -tagsfromfile FILE.orf "-adobe:makernotes<makernotes" FILE.dng

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by uwe on 2010-02-21 09:24:17.737257-08]

Hi Phil

Thanks again for your great support. I will be waiting for one of the next versions then.

Uwe