Nokia posts example .DNGs from Lumia 1020

A few weeks ago, Nokia promised that its new Lumia 1520 and flagship Lumia 1020 would gain the ability to shoot Raw directly from the smartphone. Now the company has proven that these capabilities exist, posting a number of Raw .DNG files on its blog for users to download and play with.

These Raw files clock in at more than 40MB in size, and are the real deal. You can tweak and play with them to your heart's content — though you won't be able to recover as much from them as you would from a camera with a larger sensor. But still, that's a lot more than you can get out of the usual JPGs that come from a smartphone.

The Nokia Lumia 1520 will have this capability out of the box, but the Lumia 1020 will have it added via software update. In order to shoot DNG, you'll need to enable it in the "picture settings" menu — and the camera will still capture a smaller 5MP version of the image, for more immediate use.

These particular images were mostly taken by Nokia's Juha Alakarhu, who said:

“I captured some DNG images in Abu Dhabi the other evening at sunset, and after the sunset in low light. My colleague Kristina also sent me this nice picture of a cat from Thailand. I processed the DNGs in Lightroom, according to my own personal preferences. Below you find links to the processed JPEGs and their corresponding DNG files. Check them out!”

The addition of Raw files should mean that photographers are able to get a lot more out of these Lumia devices — and will hopefully lead to some pretty increidble images. Though you might want to pack some extra digital storage space — at that size, your smartphone will fill up pretty quick.

(via DPReview)