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Digital Photography and Nikons NEF RAW format

I just got recently into Photography a little, changing Camera from a previously owned Fuji Finepix 6800Zoom to a Nikon D-70s.

As an added Bonus I got all the Nikkor Lenses from my mothers older Nikon 70 Analog SLR model.
The Camera is pretty steep to handle as a semi-professional model, studying the 100 pages manual and learning to handle the Camera took me about a week.

As I started shooting while on holidays, I started to get as many RAW shots on the 1GB storage card, that I could fit.
Because Marketing is probably the biggest annoyance in modern life, that ever got invented, Camera manufacturers started to deploy proprietary formats of the RAW image format.

As nice at it is and while pretty much satisfied with the quality of my shots, we also want to be able to work on these from within Photoshop CS2, so we can take advantage of the extra 4 bits per channel, which makes this the best editing workflow without too much loss in Image Quality.

Now in Nikon’s case it is called NEF File format (which probably means Nikon Electronic Image Format) and most strangely some DATA in this File format is encrypted, so you have to buy Nikons Extra Software Capture NX Software.
This is something, that I hadn’t considered, when I bought the Camera, which has some nice features by the way, like for example to be able to remote control the Camera per USB 2 from your MAC or PC.

Entering this game Adobe invented their own proprietary Image Format, Adobe Standard DNG format (which stands for Digital Negative Image Format)

I downloaded the Capture NX Software to evaluate it, which isn’t bad, but the User Interface and the way one could browse or access the Image File was not really something that I really felt happy with, for another 180 $.

It is sayd, that for Photoshop CS2 you can convert actually NEF file to DNG with Camera RAW version 3.2 for a D-70s,
so I am downloading these for PScs2 on windows to see how it works, and also how editable the NEF format really is.

Next I tried to check, if the Files open if Installing all the Updates including Camara Raw version 3.2, which worked indeed,
but Adobe Bridge on the other hand wasn’t able to browse the RAW Images, which is a Major Loss.

So what must be done then, to be able to see NEF RAW files as images, that do not have a jpeg version attached (As in my case now)
from within Adobe Bridge 1.0.4.6 ?

Would it make more sense to have a DNG conversion from NEF, prior organizing editing and resizing or not ?
The Issue seemed to be more complex then expected, so tried to dig that down at openRAW.org, which seemed to be the most reliable resource.

As clearly stated by Stuart:Undocumented Nikon RAW format (actually two formats; one for scanners and one for DSLR’s). Essentially EXIF format but inside TIF rather than JPEG headers, and again with undocumented extensions. Unlike other manufactures, Nikon keeps tweaking NEF to the point that each camera and each Nikon editor product generates different, sometimes incompatible, NEF files. With Nikon NEF the best approach is the write-protect the original NEF file and never modify it to ensure maximum compatibility. Uses two fairly clumsy techniques for compressing RAW data; e.g lossy or lossless. Where as most manufacturers don’t document their RAW format, Nikon went one step further and started encrypting crucial data in NEF files. In a curious coincidence, Mikon started encryption at the time newer Nikon cameras were released with very poor high ISO noise problems which must be removed in post processing. and concluding, I understood, that converting to DNG or editing unlocked NEF files from within CamaraRAW, would not be a solution then, at least not without keeping a default backup Set of Files.
This would not be the same, as editing a NEF RAW file with Nikon Capture NX, where the Software guarantees, that the original File never changes and any enhancement editing is just an attachment to the generated TIFF File, that can be changed or discarded at any time.

The browsing did in fact work after I closed and rebooted, which got me step closer.

As a sample, the following Image was taken in NEF RAW at a 2000 per 3000 Pixel ratio, adjusted only at minimal with Adobe Camara RAW,
then Saved as Photshop File and finally batch converted and web optimized as jpeg.

In the meanwhile, and if you didn’t have enough yet, here is a quality comparison for those File formats in different adobe color spaces.

Posted ·2006-09-10 · by · marios ·

© 2006-2008 marios buttner

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