NEF Files and Shooting in Raw

[Flip]

To all the photographers out there:
I just started shooting in raw because I'm told you can do more with your pictures this way. I went to uplaod them to my computer and the camera software doesn't recognize the NEF format. I know i can grab them from the memory card but photoshop doesn't recognize it either. What is the process for converting/editing/using NEF files? Can you give me some hints on the uses of shooting in RAW? Anything would be helpful. Thanks!

[dean]

In order to edit raw pictures, you need Nikon Capture, which is a $100 software. You can download it free from Nikon's webiste, but it only has a 30 day time limit before you have to buy it. If you own PS CS2, there is a free Nikon raw plugin that you can download from Adobe's site. I am not sure if there is a Nikon raw plugin for PS CS. There probably is one for CS.

You can do a lot more with raw, but don't think it's easy to create magical pictures when you edit in raw mode. I don't normally use raw mode. There is a time and place to use raw. If you are having to take quick, action pictures, the raw format is a lot slower to shoot a picture and write it to the card. Your shooting speed will go down since the .nef file format is about 5 megs per pic when the Jpeg Fine/Large setting is around 3 megs. With raw, you can fix and change all of the white balance settings if you feel you used the wrong one, and you are able to fix under/overexposed pictures from the raw format to a certain degree just like if you were there to re-shoot the picture. My take is if you are good and familiar with your camera and know how to use the histogram/ highlights on the back of the Nikon camera using raw mode really isn't beneficial if you take a good shot the first time. Any kind of cool manipulation will have to be done in photoshop anyways. This is what raw is good for. If you want to take a cool pic of a landscap scene. And you want to capture the scene and expose one shot for the sky and another for the ground/landscape. At times, you can't really get a proper exposed picture where the mountains come out perfect and the sky comes out perfect. With raw, you take one raw pic. Go into Nikon Capture and manually change the exposure of the picture and properly expose the mountian if it is too dark. But then the sky gets blown out/ too bright. You save the file as mountain.tiff/jpeg. Then change your settings of the landscape raw pic back to the original setting and change the exposure within the Nikon Capture software to properly expose the sky and darken it to look cool but then the mountains end up getting to dark. Save the fine as sky.tiff/jpeg. You would then open up PS and you would merge the two pics together and mask out each section of the picture that didn't come out right. Now you have a perfectly exposed picture that could be never possible with a regular camera. Stuff like that the raw formats rocks, or if you want to take cool single pics of whatever you can always go into the picture within the raw format and change the white balance of the pic to change the look of the picture.


Nikon Capture
http://nikonimaging.com/global/products/software/capture4/download/nsa/trial.htm

PS CS2 raw plug-in
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3364

[Flip]

In order to edit raw pictures, you need Nikon Capture, which is a $100 software. You can download it free from Nikon's webiste, but it only has a 30 day time limit before you have to buy it. If you own PS CS2, there is a free Nikon raw plugin that you can download from Adobe's site. I am not sure if there is a Nikon raw plugin for PS CS. There probably is one for CS.

You can do a lot more with raw, but don't think it's easy to create magical pictures when you edit in raw mode. I don't normally use raw mode. There is a time and place to use raw. If you are having to take quick, action pictures, the raw format is a lot slower to shoot a picture and write it to the card. Your shooting speed will go down since the .nef file format is about 5 megs per pic when the Jpeg Fine/Large setting is around 3 megs. With raw, you can fix and change all of the white balance settings if you feel you used the wrong one, and you are able to fix under/overexposed pictures from the raw format to a certain degree just like if you were there to re-shoot the picture. My take is if you are good and familiar with your camera and know how to use the histogram/ highlights on the back of the Nikon camera using raw mode really isn't beneficial if you take a good shot the first time. Any kind of cool manipulation will have to be done in photoshop anyways. This is what raw is good for. If you want to take a cool pic of a landscap scene. And you want to capture the scene and expose one shot for the sky and another for the ground/landscape. At times, you can't really get a proper exposed picture where the mountains come out perfect and the sky comes out perfect. With raw, you take one raw pic. Go into Nikon Capture and manually change the exposure of the picture and properly expose the mountian if it is too dark. But then the sky gets blown out/ too bright. You save the file as mountain.tiff/jpeg. Then change your settings of the landscape raw pic back to the original setting and change the exposure within the Nikon Capture software to properly expose the sky and darken it to look cool but then the mountains end up getting to dark. Save the fine as sky.tiff/jpeg. You would then open up PS and you would merge the two pics together and mask out each section of the picture that didn't come out right. Now you have a perfectly exposed picture that could be never possible with a regular camera. Stuff like that the raw formats rocks, or if you want to take cool single pics of whatever you can always go into the picture within the raw format and change the white balance of the pic to change the look of the picture.


Nikon Capture
http://nikonimaging.com/global/products/software/capture4/download/nsa/trial.htm

PS CS2 raw plug-in
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3364


Thats some great info! now I gotta either get cs2 or find a plugin for cs...

[Nemesis]

You guys take a pic and let me know.


Ive got Nikon Capture 4.4 (or 4.0 whichever is newer). The fully unlocked version.

Ive got a FULL Copy of CS2 with the Adobe plugin.

Ive got a copy of ACDSee (which is an awesome subsitute for Photoshop work)

Let me know and I can bring a full disc to a meet- minus a fresh cd. You bring me a fresh blank cd, I give you the cd with all the software :D

[dean]

I also got the newest version of Acdsee 8 pro which supports Nikon NEF's. It's tight. Hey flipture, just go to a torrent site and download all of that shit. Thats where I jack all of my software.

[Nemesis]

Am I wrong in assuming that NEF is only a Nikon thing?

[dean]

Am I wrong in assuming that NEF is only a Nikon thing?

Yea, NEF is a Nikon thing only. Nikon Electronic Format

[dean]

NEF (Nikon Electronic Format) RAW file
The NEF file format is unique to Nikon and provides considerable benefits over the other file formats. Files can be saved in camera as uncompressed or compressed at approximately 50-60% of the original file size using Nikon's advanced compression algorithm. NEF files saved in camera are referred to as NEF RAW files. NEF files are not processed in camera to RGB data like JPEG and TIFF images using the cameras image processor. Image processing instructions are left with the file, then processing can be executed with more accuracy by Nikon software installed on a computer rather than in the camera.

Images saved in NEF format maintain the high quality of the original photograph, adjustments to settings such as White Balance, Advanced Raw, Curves, Colour Balance, Unsharp Mask and Size/Resolution are not applied to the original image data, but are instead saved separately in the same file as a separate set of instructions. These instructions can be changed by the user in Nikon software but can be reverted back to the original set at any time as long as the file remains a NEF file.

The instructions are only applied to the original image data when the image is saved in another file format (JPEG, TIFF etc), this minimizes any loss of image quality that may be produced when the image is edited. Save images in NEF whenever you are unsure of how they will be used or when you want to process the original image in a number of different ways.

NEF images can be opened in the following software applications, Nikon View 5, 6, PictureProject or Nikon Capture 3, 4 (available separately). It is also possible to open NEF files in Adobe Photoshop 5.0 or later (Photoshop LE excluded) and Photoshop Elements using the Nikon NEF filter suppiled with Nikon View 5 or 6 and PictureProject.

The advantages of the NEF (RAW) file format
- As the images are constructed of 12bit data they have many times the tonal range of 8bit images, allowing for finer adjustment of colour and improved detail in shadow areas.

- The Nikon software only ever stores the users image edit instructions as a second set of instructions within the NEF file adding to the camera’s own original instructions which were saved at the time of image capture. Editing an image does not affect the original instructions in the NEF file.

The advantages of this are:
A) the original data is never lost, it is always possible to “undo” any image manipulation as the original image is never altered.

B) Each time a image variation is produced by editing, only a new set of processing instructions is saved within the NEF file, a few KB rather than several MB.

- Alternatively image edit instructions can be saved separately in a Settings file, loading of Settings files takes a few seconds compared to a few minutes to load and display the same high resolution data multiple times in other image editing programs. This advantage alone results in major savings in disk space and speed.

Saving Converted NEF files in Nikon Capture
When NEF (RAW) is selected as the chosen file format in camera, images are saved as 12bit NEF files, the advantages of saving images in this file format are clear above. When a TIFF or JPEG file is open in Nikon Capture it is possible to save those files as NEF files with an Instruction Set so that they can be returned to their original state at any time. The new NEF file created will still have the same bit depth as the original JPEG or TIFF file. This type of file is called a NEF file (as opposed to NEF (RAW) file) because only NEF images saved in camera are created from RAW data.