support for edited NEFs

[Michael Coffey]

I have many photos taken from 2008-2016 with Capture NX-2 and Color Efex Pro 3 filters. These are all kept as NEFs - no sidecar files and 12-20MB each file (12 megapixel sensor) so light files.

CNXD, the replacement to CNX2 does not recognise my edits done with CEP3 (Nik Software that has gone to the wall). I would like to access my edited photos rather than original-state version NEFs in the future.

Photomechanic 5 does a great job exporting my edited NEFs as and when I need to jpeg or tif format, for the web or for printing. At full resolution I cannot tell a difference between a PM5-outputted TIF and a CNX2-outputted TIF from the edited raw files.

My understanding is CEP5 reads the embedded jpeg data in the raws. How come I get 36MB TIFs from them, identical in size to the Capture NX2 ones?

I am looking to understand the process to decide whether to use PM5 to access older NEFs for another 8 years (say) or if it is best I export all old raws to TIFs now that I am leaving CNX2.

Cheers.

Michael

[Hayo Baan]

Hi Michael,

I too was a (heavy) user of NX2 but since it was clear that that was a dead end and NXD would never live up to it, I have fully switched to DNG and adobe camera raw. Like you, I found that the NX2 embedded jpgs are of good enough quality for almost anything, even printing. So I have not bothered to convert them to tiff, and will not either.

I still have nx2 around (as long as it works, it works), but if I ever need to edit an existing photo, I will edit it with ACR, anew. The results are different, but at least as good and mostly even better I'd say (but that is likely also to my advancement in editing skills). Sure it is some extra work, but I only need to do this occasionally, so it isn't really an issue.

Hope this helps,
Hayo