[Mister Pita]

I recently got a new K-7 and have been shooting jpeg with good results. I found however, that I have much more adjustment leeway in Aperture 2 by shooting RAW DNG. Unfortunately, once Aperture is done importing and an image is selected, it turns dark and must be adjusted for exposure etc, as if the shot was badly overexposed. I noticed that Apple Preview does the same thing. I'm running Snow Leopard. I tried Aperture 3 with similar results, but since 3 can read Pentax's PEF RAW output, the import of PEF files is perfect. (DNG still stinks). Anyone seeing this? All my hardware and software is 1 year old and up to date. Is DNG not quite as universal as I assumed? What's up?

[the swede]

Something must be wrong!

I shot RAW DNG with my K-7 and import them to Aperture 3. No dark pics here.....

In fact, the "RAW Fine Tuning" brick (the first one in adjustments) works great and saves me a lot of time, it automaticaly adjusts the image from the K-7 profile.

You could check that out, if something is wrong there....maybe the profile isnt activated.

[Marc Sabatella]

I assume you mean they look like they are *underexposed*, since you say they are dark.

I'll guess, then, that you are using one of the camera options to make the in-camera JPEG's come out with artificially fudged curves (eg, highlight compensation, D-range, hdr, whatever). In general, these work by deliberately exposing incorrectly overall then selectively correcting part of the image in the JPEG processing through the use of different exposure curves. Most RAW processing programs won't know how to reproduce that bit of fudging, so you'll have to mimic the results yourself if you wish to get that effect. Or you could just turn off those camera options.

[Mister Pita]

Thank you very much! I turned off the D-range and highlight correction in the K-7, and shot JPEG and RAW DNG images. They now import into Aperture 2 just fine!