There are not many times I would shout 'TAKE MY MONEY!!!' at someone.

The first was when I discovered JPEGmini, I have saved 396 gigs so far because of that application and the other was when I saw the excellent black Friday deal which secured me a Sony A73. Since purchasing the A73 I have noticed my storage space being decimated. Each shot I keep is 24 meg in size. There is no ability for the A73 to produce a medium or small raw file like the Canon 6dmk2 could do for me. I could use lossy DNG compression but that really hits the quality of the image. So I am looking at either expanding my storage space or deleting images that didn't make the cut. I don't like deleting images in case I need them later. Technology and RAW editors will improve so maybe the raw files can be edited again.

So enter DotPhoton, this tool promises lossless raw image compression. Considering the fantastic result from JPEGmini I could not jump onto the web page to take a look fast enough. Using knowledge of the cameras sensor and some fancy quantum computing it will convert a raw file to DNG format and reduce the file down by 80% which is just insane. It retains the versatility of the RAW file and preserves metadata. It is also not a lossy format so full quality is retained. However, I was sad to see there is not a Windows version of the software yet and no online conversion service so as of yet I cannot use it.

However, I did get talking to an online chat called Boris. These chatbots are usually Ai that can answer basic questions but it out Boris is real as I could not imagine an Ai being that articulate. I mentioned that it looked an amazing product but was unwilling to commit the images without a test first. Even the free version is MAC only. However, Boris offered to convert a couple of images for me to test out. I haven't moved so quick in ages. I dropped a couple of images into a zip file, one from a recent photoshoot and the other from a music gig and sent the link via Dropbox to Boris.

It wasn't long till Boris had a link for me which I immediately downloaded and unpacked. I opened the photo-shoot raw and the new converted version as layers in Photoshop and set the new version as a different layer to see any changes, a sort of digital spot the difference. There wasn't any on both images. This was when I typed in the chat 'TAKE MY MONEY!!!' but with the caveat of when the Windows version arrives.

I did notice a slight difference in the colour of the paper background of the when viewing the new file in Capture 1, only slightly though and mentioned this to Boris. This is due to the way that Capture 1 reads and displays DNG files which hopefully can be resolved. The colour change was easily corrected though so I am not worried about it yet. So on to the file size reduction. Both files were 24 meg in size yet they came down to 7 an 9 meg a saving of 60-70%... A recent photo-shoot topped out at 18 gigs, if all the files came down by 70% the resulting folder would be only 5.6 gigs.

I know storage space is cheap but to me, this is no contest. Time will tell though as more testing on various shots will be needed but if successful I will be one of the first to kick the door down and throw money at DotPhoton.

Photo: Roman Ackley / DOUBLE GUINNESS WORLD RECORD HOLDER INTERNATIONAL CABARET & CIRCUS PERFORMER