Photoshop Creative

Last night I took some photos of the moon eclipse. I tried shooting a few in Raw + L so I would get both RAW and jpg files. I downloaded a few to see how I was doing and Lightroom had changed the CR RAW files into dng.

I turned the camera back to shoot only jpg because I did not want to risk loosing my photos or messing them up.
Today I took a look at the preferences and somehow since I had downloaded the newest version of Lighroom the preferences had changed and now it said to change RAW to dng.
I tried to change that in preferences and deleted the dng files and redownloaded from the card again and still it downloaded the RAW data and named and converted them to dng?

How do I get the RAW files to remain named CR and stay as RAW files not converted to dng when I download in Lightroom?

are you downloading right into LR or into another folder and then bringing them into LR

DNG is the Adobe standard for RAW. They are trying to get it adopted (much like their PDF format for documents) as a standard for handling RAW images within photo editing software. Its not hurting your images to let LR convert them, although they do end up larger. Some people aren't quite sold on DNG yet. I don't pretend to understand all the technical ins and outs of DNG, but it doesn't seem to hurt my images any.

However, if you want to keep them in the format generated by your camera, go to the Edit => Preferences -> Import tab. Check the box that says to show the Import dialog when a memory card is attached. You may also want to check the box to treat Jpeg files next to RAW files as separate photos. I don't have LR compress the files, nor do I have it embed the original file within the DNG file either. ACR does have the ability to extract the original RAW file if you do embed it.

When you attach your camera/card reader and the import box opens, there is a drop down there to tell LR how to handle the files. You can "Copy photos to new location and import", or you can have LR "Copy photos as DNG and import". The "Copy photos to new location and import" will download your images in their original format. I'm pretty sure LR will remember your last choice on the next import job, but you may want to check to make sure. And it sounds like LR defaults to the DNG setting. You can also tell LR where to download the files to in the import dialog box.

Sounds like a lot of steps, but once you've done it once or twice, you'll find its pretty easy to do.

Thank you for the suggestions and coments. I will give them a try. I was not at all familiar with dng files. I am importing directly into Lightroom and at the same time to a backup external hard drive.
This is a link to the moon eclipse photos I took last night.

http://www.sheilascorner.com/mooneclipse/index.html

the only thing I would suggest is not import into LR. I bring in all my raw files from another folder.

Your pictures of the eclipse are fantastic.