Converting Nikon RAW files

For some time now, in fact since I owned my D70, I almost always capture in RAW+JPEG. Of course on the D300 this means each exposure consumes ~20Mb, but hey storage is cheap!

Anyway, I do this for three basic reasons:

- most of the time the JPEG is fine

- if the JPEG is not fine for some reason eg compression artifacts, colour balance etc, I can use the RAW

- using the Nikon software, currently NX, you can convert from NEF to TIF or 16 bit, with the settings the camera used to make the JPEG.

So since most of the time I am happy with the white balance and profile etc used by the camera to make the JPEG, this works really well.

No other RAW converter can do this even Bibble, Adobe etc.

Even better, you can adjust the following parameters in the NEF file without changing the underlying data:

white balance
color space
EV
sharpening
contrast
saturation

Nice!