OpenRAW

Next spring will mark my 30th anniversary as a professional Nikon user. In all of those years I’ve always believed that the company’s prime motivation was to create profit by offering products which, without exception, were the best money could buy. I believed Nikon had my best interests at heart because they would be in the company’s best interests.

When I bought my two D2x bodies less than a month ago, it was with this same thought. However, the performance of the current version of Nikon Capture with D2x raw NEF files exemplifies all that is wrong with a proprietary raw file standard, and all that is wrong with Nikon.

In my experience over the past 30 days with third party NEF conversion software, none will produce as fine an image as will Nikon Capture. However, I am unable to use Nikon Capture due to its erratic operation and terminal slowness. I believe it is simply a flawed product.

Here I sit with $10,000 USD worth of new state of the art cameras. From a technical perspective I should be producing the best pure digital images of my life. I’m using third party NEF conversion software on my other computer to take about an hour to produce a set of optimized TIFF files from several hundred images from today’s shoot, which in my estimation would take Nikon Capture at least six hours to do, not counting time lost for expected crashes and general weirdness.

When the process finishes, I will have a set of photos which look good, but which I firmly believe would look better had either Nikon Capture been a viable alternative and usable for the job. Had the third party product developers been privy to the full and complete raw NEF file spec so that they could further optimize their own software, they may well have produced results on a par if not superior to what I‘m getting from a third party product.

Nikon should release the full and complete raw NEF file spec, and Nikon should do it today.
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http://www.holterphoto.com