adobe camera raw - Is there any way of achieving cross-application non-destructive RAW editing? (Maybe xmp files?)

Is there some way of saving (basic) non-destructive RAW developing/adjustments that is not limited to a particular app ecosystem (eg Adobe)? Understandably some transformations are proprietary (eg. some cool denoise algorithm, or a spot removal tool) but others are rather generic that I think could easily be standardized (eg. crop, exposure, white balance) and be read by other applications.

At first I thought sidecar xmp files could be useful in that respect, since Camera RAW/Lightroom and darktable save their adjustments inside such files, but seems that adjustments created by Camera RAW/Lightroom can not be previewed/edited by darktable and vice versa.

Any solution that has worked for you?

This question is mostly about creating a futureproof way of storing the original camera data, but also the edit history (adjustments in a non-destructive way)

Answer

After a few days of research, I've concluded that at the time of writing there is no holy grail. But as for futureproofing I'd go the following route:

• keep the original RAW file


• work with Adobe products for the adjustments (either inside Lightroom or with sidecar xmp files produced by adobe camera RAW)

This probably is as futureproof and cross-platform as it gets. Which is, not a lot, but not totally bleak either.

As a second layer of future-proofing, I would retain

• a 16-bit TIFF of the original RAW (in case a day comes that nobody wants to create a RAW decoder for my particular camera)



• a high quality jpg export of every variant/version of a particular image (in case I need reference to reproduce this exact look)


• and a 16bit TIFF of all the final products (eg. Edits that made it in print, exhibitions, or in general were used someplace beyond my light table)

DNG Files? No thanks

While I have not looked deeply into DNG files (so please correct me if I'm mistaken somewhere) I understand that

1. 
   

   they cannot replace RAW files, because

   
   

   a. there is a level of interpretation of the sensor data, which means they are already slightly away from the original RAW

   
   

   b. It's not one universal file format; it's a container. Which means that in the distant future someone will have to write software that reads the particular flavor of DNG that your camera files got converted into. Not much different fate to that of RAW files, is it?

   
   
   


2. 
   

   DNG files are probably not any better at future-proofing the adjustments:

   
   

   a. the xmp adjustments embedded in the DNG file, are not any more universal than the adjustments inside the sidecar xmp. They are still software-specific. On the contrary, I've seen a few 3rd party programs (see below) that read ACR/Lightroom adjustments from .xmp files, but I'm not aware of any that can read them out of DNG files.

   
   

Reasoning behind choosing Lightroom and Camera Raw

Futureproofing

Adobe products have become pretty much the industry standard and as such:

1. Competitors will have to lure existing Adobe customers into their own ecosystems. A few are already attempting reproducing (subset of) the adjustments that ACR stores inside the .xmp files. For instance the open source project Darktable is claiming accurate reproduction of crop,rotation,flip and tags, and mostly accurate reproduction of exposure/blacks, grain, tone curve (only lightness supported), color zones local contrast - as seen here and here. Others imply that you can migrate whole lightroom libraries including the adjustments (Capture One Pro claims that it "allows import of other 3rd party application catalogs to make migration easier than ever, maintaining folder structures and most adjustments on your images" accompanied by a picture showing Aperture, Lightroom and Media Pro as seen here. On1 Photo RAW supposedly will be adding support for that in March 2017 - for more read here, here and the timeline here). While these attempts can never be 100% accurate, they are accurate enough to give a starting point for further image manipulation and/or at the very least underline an interest by 3rd parties to figuratively-speaking reverse engineer Lightroom's and ACRs ways of storing adjustments.


2. For better or for worse, Adobe is rather successful so this means that there is no reason in the foreseeable future to go out of business


3. Even then, due to the large Adobe user base, it's quite possible that future engineers will probably be interested in recovering Lightroom and ACR generated data.

Cross-platform

While adobe products do not run on Linux, they run on macOS, Windows, Android and iOS. As of July 2017 Lightroom mobile, supports raw editing (read here). For linux, one could use darkroom which however is a one way trip since Darkroom does not sync it's own adjustments back in adobe's .xmp format.