Saving JPEGs from .NEFs

[marcus3468]

Hi,

I'm a newbie when it comes to Photo Mechanic, so please forgive my ignorance here...

I'm running PM version 4.5.3.1 on XP, and shoot RAW with a Nikon D300.

When I view my .NEF files in PM and try to save them I get the 'None of the selected files can be saved in high resolution' message that plenty of other people in the forum have had too.

Having read through previous posts on this topic, I'm slightly confused and hope you can clarify a few things for me:

1 - Within PM, is the only way to get a JPEG image from a .NEF file by extracting the embedded JPEG image from within the .NEF file?
2 - If so, is there any way of specifying the saved quality of this JPEG file within PM?
3 - If I can't do a .NEF > JPEG conversion within PM to get a high quality JPEG, is there any point in bringing the RAW files into the program at all, other than to view the RAW files more quickly than in Adobe Bridge for example?

It seems that with my current equipment I can only produce an extracted preview JPEG image from my RAW files, rather than a high quality version directly converted from the RAW file itself!

I hope there's some way around this because PM seems like such a great program and I don't want to have to revert back to the slow and clunky Adobe alternatives!

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Mark.

[Kirk Baker]

Mark,

I'm a newbie when it comes to Photo Mechanic, so please forgive my ignorance here...

I'm running PM version 4.5.3.1 on XP, and shoot RAW with a Nikon D300.

When I view my .NEF files in PM and try to save them I get the 'None of the selected files can be saved in high resolution' message that plenty of other people in the forum have had too.

Having read through previous posts on this topic, I'm slightly confused and hope you can clarify a few things for me:

1 - Within PM, is the only way to get a JPEG image from a .NEF file by extracting the embedded JPEG image from within the .NEF file?

Currently, yes.

2 - If so, is there any way of specifying the saved quality of this JPEG file within PM?

You're getting the exact JPEG data from the RAW file.  It does not get degraded in any way.

3 - If I can't do a .NEF > JPEG conversion within PM to get a high quality JPEG, is there any point in bringing the RAW files into the program at all, other than to view the RAW files more quickly than in Adobe Bridge for example?

Yes, for all of the other features that PM brings to one's workflow, like Ingest, renaming, IPTC/XMP captioning, structured keywording, FTP uploading.  The list really goes on and on.

It seems that with my current equipment I can only produce an extracted preview JPEG image from my RAW files, rather than a high quality version directly converted from the RAW file itself!

Photo Mechanic is not a RAW converter.  For that you need something like Adobe Camera RAW.  Photo Mechanic can directly launch your NEFs into Adobe Camera RAW where you can make your adjustments and save as a JPEG, PSD, TIFF, etc.

-Kirk

[William R Wood]

Unless I am mistaken, Kirk has indicated that a future version of PM, hopefully very soon, will allow us to use the Save As command with RAW files so that JPG files can be easily created (and adjusted for size and quality) from the embedded JPG previews.  Extract does work but it is a rather clunky work-around requiring extra steps compared to Save As.

As to your question about a high quality JPG converted from the RAW data itself......  Think about that for a second.  Do we really want PM to become another RAW converter and thus slow down?   And isn't the embedded preview in your RAWs good enough for many/most purposes?  I am not a Nikon shooter but many have said that Nikon's embedded previews are really quite good.  I think that most would agree that PM should stay fast and not become another RAW converter.  I, for one, use PM only because it is a fast image browser.  Adobe Bridge and Lightroom are too slow.  I do use LR to convert my Canon RAWs but it is much much faster to ingest and preview the images in PM before sending them to LR for conversion.

Regards

Bill Wood