Taking pictures for HDR

To work with HDR one needs pictures that are almost identical. Each pixel needs to match, even though their values may be different.

To achieve this one needs a) a tripod, b) a good camera.

I have not figured out if this is possible with my D40X, so the following just describes how to do it with my D300.

The task is to take a series of pictures of exactly the same motive but with varying exposure - bracketing. The D300 has different kinds of bracketing, but here we talk just about exposure bracketing.

• Make sure the Custom Setting e5 in the camera is set to "AE only".

• Press the lower button next to the lens and turn the small command dial (away from you on the camera) to select the bracketing exposure increment. Possible values are 0.3, 0.7 and 1. Check the LCD display to see the values.

• Press the lower button next to the lens and turn the main command dial (closest to you) to select the number of shots in the bracketing sequence.

Values to the left of "Off", toggle between positive and negative. For example "-3" means that 3 frames will be taken that are increasingly underexposed. "+2" means that 2 frames will be taken that are increasingly overexposed.

Values to the right of "Off" increase the number of frames on both sides of the current setting. Check the LCD screen to visualise the settings.
The lower button next to the lens is called "Fn button" in the manual.

To launch the shooting of images

1. Attach the camera to a tripod.
2. Go to the Shooting menu > Interval timer shooting > right arrow (to enter the Interval shooting panel).
3. Highlight Now and press left arrow. (Not right arrow, unless you have modifications to make.)
4. Press up arrow to highlight "On".
5. Press "OK".

The images will be taken with a start after about 3 seconds.

The number of images entered in the Interval timer shooting panel does not matter. What matters is what you selected with the Fn button and the command dials. Neither does it matter what start time you enter, unless you really use the start time option. "Now" means "in three seconds".

Self-Timer mode and the time set for it in Custom setting C3 is not used. It even prevents the Interval timer shooting from working.

Do not bother with the camera setting "Multiple exposure". That is just a setting to make one picture of several shots inside the camera - something we do not intend to do now.

(The explanation above may not be simple, but the usability in this particular area is confusing and incomprehensible without several trials and errors. Try and err. You may soon understand it.)

HDR with the gimp

Basic HDR can be handled in for example the gimp.

We start off with this image:



The areas where the leaves are in the shadow are underexposed, so no details are visible. The sand in the foreground is overexposed, so hardly any details are visible. It would be very difficult to find a setting where the camera captured everything correctly.

Luckily two other pictures were taken at the same time. One was had a longer shutter speed, so it is even more overexposed:



The other picture had a shorter shutter speed, so it was more underexposed:



The trick is to use the good parts of the overexposed pictures and the good ones from the underexposed picture and put them together with the good bits of the original picture.

1. Open all three pictures in the gimp.
2. Copy the underexposed picture, and paste it as a new layer on top of the original. (Click on the underexposed picture > ctrl+A > ctrl+C > click on original > ctrl-L to display the layers > click on the New layer icon.)
3. Copy the overexposed picture, and paste it as a new layer on top of the original. (Click on the overexposed picture > ctrl+A > ctrl+C > click on original > display the layers > click on the New layer icon.)
4. Save the original image in a new xcf file, in case something goes wrong.



In the image above I have also renamed the two pasted layers.

We now want to hide the overexposed areas of the overexposed picture. To do this we use a layer mask.

5. Highlight the overexposed layer.
6. Go to the menu Layer > Mask > Add Layer Mask.
7. Select "Grayscale copy of layer" and "Invert mask".

We now want to hide the underexposed areas of the underexposed picture with another layer mask.

8. Highlight the underexposed layer.
9. Go to the menu Layer > Mask > Add Layer Mask.
10. Select "Grayscale copy of layer" but not "Invert mask".

We now have a picture where the sand no longer is overexposed and the leaves no longer are underexposed.



To change it further, we can apply curves to the layer masks, to fine tune which parts of the picture are hidden by the layer.

11. Click on a layer mask.
12. Menu Colors > curves.



Of course other changes, like increasing saturation can also be applied.

HDR? What is that?

HDR or High Dynamic Range, is a way to get more into a picture than the camera can capture in one shot.

Let's take a metaphor to see the need for this. You sit at a sunny beach with almost white sand. Next to the beach is a dark cave, where you put your Perrier to keep it cool. You can look into the cave and see the water bottles. You can move your eyes and watch the sunlit sand next to it, and you will clearly see it - perhaps after having adjusted your eyes for a few seconds.

The camera, however, cannot be adjusted at the same time to capture both the cave and the sand. Everything has to go into the same picture.

With HDR one takes several pictures of the same motive with different settings. One then mixes them to cover a larger range of exposures than the camera was able to handle.

The result often looks unnatural and strange - sometimes natural and sometimes enchanting.

There are different programs in the market to handle HDR. To get a really good dedicated program, you need to pay quite a lot. However, some basic HDR can be done in Photoshop (which you already may have) or the gimp, which is free.

Wikipedia has more information of course.

The Abbreviations

In the world of photography, like in most worlds, there are abbreviations people use assuming that everyone else knows them. Of course, we all saw each abbreviation for the first time at least once, and then we may probably were confused. These are some of the common ones.

ACR - Adobe Camera Raw.
ADC - Analogue to Digital Conversion.
ADL - Active D-Lighting.
AF - Auto Focus.
AF-S - Auto Focus lens with SWM.
AI - Automatic Indexing. Used to describe a lens technology from Nikon that was introduced in 1977.
CCD - Charge-Coupled Device - A type of camera light sensor. Not CMOS.
CMOS - Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor. Not CCD.
CMYK - Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK. A colour space used mainly for printing.
CNX - Capture NX. Nikon's program to edit raw NEF files.
CR2 - Canon's current raw file format.
CRW - Canon's old raw file format.
DAM - Digital Asset Management. Storing, cataloguing and finding digital documents like digital images.
DNG - Digital NeGative. Adobe's attempt at a standardized raw file format.
DOF - Depth Of Field. A long or deep DOF means that objects both close to the camera and further away are sharp. A short DOF means that only objects at a particular distance are sharp, something that makes them stand out against the blurry background and foreground.
DPP - Digital Photo Professional. Canon's program to edit raw CR2 and CRW files.
DSLR - Digital SLR.
DX - Abbreviation for the digital format used by sensors in most Nikon SLR cameras and in DX lenses. Not FX.
DR - Dynamic Range.
ED - Extra-low Dispersion. Nikon's special glass to avoid chromatic aberration with tele lenses.
EV - Exposure Value.
EXIF - Exchangeable Image file Format.
fps - Frames per second. The number of images a camera can take per second.
f-stop - Predefined values for Focal number.
FX - Full size.
HDR - High Dynamic Range.
HSM - Hyper Sonic Motor. Sigma's name for an ultrasonic motor.
HUD - Head-Up Display.
IF - Internal Focusing.
IPTC - International Press Telecommunications Council.
IQ - Image Quality.
ISO - Hardly even an abbreviation but a setting to control how much light the camera will need to produce a picture that is not underexposed. High values mean that the camera does not need much light, but at the same time, one will lose colour and increase noise in the picture. It is an abbreviation, anyhow, and it stands for International Organization for Standardization.
JPEG - The arguably most common format for digital photographs. The abbreviation means Joint Photographic Experts Group.
NAS - Nikon Acquisition Syndrome. A state of mind where you cannot help but buy more and more Nikon gear.
NEF - Nikon Electronic image Format. Nikon's format for raw files.
NR - Noise Reduction.
OOC - Out Of Camera
OVF - Optical View Finder
PP - Post Processing. Any change to a photo after it has been imported to a computer.
PS - Adobe PhotoShop
P&S - Point and Shoot (compact camera). Not a DSLR
RAW - Not an abbreviation, even though it usually is written with upper case letters. It means raw data, as in unmodified data directly from the camera.
RGB - Red Green Blue. The most common colour space for digital images.
SLR - Single Lens Reflex. Originally used to differentiate from a twin-lens reflex cameras. Now used to differentiate high end cameras from Bridge and Compact cameras.
SWM - Silent Wave Motor. Nikon's name for an ultrasonic motor.
TIFF - Tagged Image File Format. The arguably most versatile non-compressed image format. (There are also compressed variants.)
TTL - Through The Lens.
USM - UnSharp Mask. A filter in Photoshop. Also UltraSonic Motor, Canon's name for an ultrasonic motor.
VR - Vibration Reduction in Nikon lenses.
WB - White Balance.
XMP - Extensible Metadata Platform.

How many pixels do I need?

If you want to take normal holiday snaps and family photos, the number of pixels in a modern digital camera is irrelevant.

You can stop reading there, if you want to, but if you want more details, you can go on.

All modern digital cameras have more pixels than you will need. The lowest number of pixels of any camera in the 2008 catalogue of fnac is 6 million, and that is a DSLR. Among the compact cameras that fit in your pocket, you do not find anything below 7 million pixels. With 6 million pixels you can print on A4 size without much problem. You can stretch it to about A2 format (42 × 59.4 cm) with acceptable quality.

With 12 million pixels, like the D300, one has enough to easily print out a high quality picture the size of an A4. Stretching it and accepting lower detail, one can get a decent print out the size of an A1 (59.4 × 84.1 cm). One can, of course, ask oneself how many A1-size pictures one will ever print out, and where one would put them.

Usually one says that high quality print is 300 dpi (dots per inch). To see how big a picture you can print with a certain image size, just divide the dimensions by 300. (And then multiply by 2.54 to get it in centimetres.)

(Width of image file in pixels) / 300 * 2.54 = (Width of high quality print out)

As a comparison, and A4 printed at 300 dpi contains 8,739,900 pixel, and a North American Letter size photo contains 8,415,000 pixel.

And what if you you do not want to print your pictures? If you just want to show them on computer screens?

Let's say you buy Apple's biggest Cinema Display that is 30 inches. To fill out every pixel of that screen you need no more than 4 million pixels - that is less than the worst digital camera you can buy today.


What is much more important than the number of pixels is the quality of the camera, the lens, the autofocus, the sensor and all that. If you compare the specifications of a DSLR with a digital compact camera, it is very possible that the compact camera has better specifications. However, when it comes to clarity and picture quality, the DSLR is almost always far superior.


A higher number of pixels may even make the picture worse. Let's say, that 6 million pixel sensors fit on a certain space in your camera. If you buy another camera the same space for sensors, but the number of sensors is 12 million, clearly each sensor is smaller in the 12 million pixel camera. Unfortunately a smaller sensor is also more sensitive to electric noise in the camera, so they are slightly more likely to register wrong values. This is especially visible with low light conditions and high ISO values. The result is noise, lighter dots, on the image. All cameras show noise under some conditions, but high pixel cameras have more noise than low pixel cameras.


Is there then no reason for a multitude of pixels? Oh, yes there is.

One is obviously if one really does want to print large highly detailed photos.

Another is if one crops a lot. In some conditions, like if one takes pictures of flying birds or fast cars, it may be difficult to target the camera right at the subject. One solution may be to use less zoom, take a picture of a larger area, and then crop it afterwards. If one does not have enough pixels to start with, this may turn out quite difficult.


There is just one main device one should avoid when taking holiday pictures, and that is the camera in a mobile phone. Currently none of them has any acceptable quality. It is very convenient to have a camera in one's phone. One always carries it around anyhow. However, in most cases the pictures that come out of it are not pictures one will be happy to look at in the future.

Why is the size in pixels wrong in Aperture?

If you open a RAW file in Aperture and compare the size of the picture with another application, it is very possible that the size is different.

This is not a bug. In contrast to tiff or jpeg, RAW files do not necessarily have the exact number of pixels defined, but small variations can take place.

I did some tests on one particular nef file from a Nikon D300.

First I converted the file to DNG, so I could open it in Photoshop CS2.

I then opened both DNG and NEF in the gimp with UCRaw. Result for both files: 4320*2868 pixels.

I then opened both DNG and NEF in Aperture. Result for both: 4304*2852 pixels.

I then opened the NEF in Capture NX. Result: 4288*2848 pixels.

And finally I opened the DNG in Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop. Result: 4288*2848 pixels.

As you can see, out of four unrelated applications with different development teams, only two agreed on the number of pixels. And the applications that agreed, opened two different files (the dng and the nef).

Why is the sea red?

Sometimes you may encounter images that look like complete inversions of the original colours. They may be on web pages, embedded in PDF or MS Word documents or in about any location. The picture may for example turn all blue to red and vice versa, so the sea looks red.

The reason for this "corruption" may be that the document reader or the original document generator was not able to handle CMYK colours. If the image uses CMYK and the document reader tries to interpret the picture as RGB, that gives inverted colours.

The solution may be to open the document in another reader, or extract the image and open it in a better image reader, that correctly interprets the colours.



The problem may not have anything to do with CMYK of course. A similar problem with red sea water appears in Picasa 2.7, when you try to read compressed NEF files from a D300.

LAB colour

LAB is a colour space, like RGB or CMYK. RGB is used to describe colours on a computer screen. CMYK is often used to describe colours for printed material. LAB's main advantage is that it is very easy to adjust colours using it.

The secret trick is to keep all lightness information in L.

If you have an RGB picture and you use curves to adjust the values for R (red), you inevitably make parts of the picture lighter or darker, and you will probably have to adjust G (green) and B (blue) as well to get the lightness of the original back. In LAB you have no such problem.

The L value (channel) goes from 0 to 100 and indicates Lightness:

This is more or less a black and white version of the image.

The a channel is the axis green-magenta. "A" is admittedly not a good abbreviation for green magenta, but that's the way things are.

Negative values, from -128, indicate green while positive values, up to 128, indicate magenta. In the image above, the dark areas are negative, so they will turn out greenish. The light areas are positive, so they will be more red. Note that the shadow on the flower is almost entirely invisible. A shadow is lightness, not colour, so it should not be visible in the a-channel, and it is not.


The b channel is the axis blue-yellow.


Negative values, from -128, indicate blue and positive values, up to 128, are yellow.


If we add the three channels we get this picture:


A typical modification in the lab colour space is to emphasize the colours using curves, like this for the b cannel:


The values that seem to be cut off at the edges here are unlikely to actually be used in the picture. The extreme values of Lab describe colours that the human eye cannot see or that do not exist. The modification to the curve is basically just to make it steeper.

Below is a stone that at first may seem mostly grey, but looking a little closer one can see that parts of it have a shift towards red. With LAB colour adjustment, one can emphasise the red, so a casual onlooker will see it much quicker. At the same time the moss got a little more intense green, and the image becomes more interesting.

Before LAB colour adjustment.


After LAB colour adjustment.

Clearly, this is not the only way to increase the colours of a picture. Often, it is quicker to simply increase the saturation. But LAB adds a different kind of flexibility, which may be just what you need.

Why does not Aperture read my DNG file?

If you have a DNG file that Aperture refuses to open, is it possible that the DNG file is from a camera which has a strange format. Aperture 2.1 has support for DNGs from many cameras, but not all.

In some cases Aperture opens some DNG from a particular, camera, but not all. It then may depend on the lens, like in the case of an Olympus E-P2 ORF file.


Another possible explanation is that the DNG was generated with the "Convert to Linear Image" option turned on in Adobe DNG Converter. It has to be turned off. This is not obvious. The Linear Image option is there to increase compatibility compared to "Preserve Raw Image", but it is increased in a way that Aperture cannot handle.


Wrong setting in Adobe DNG converter.


Then, there is of course also the possibility that you cannot import the file, because you do not have any project, or because you highlight the wrong part of the screen, when you do the import. But in this case no files can be imported, DNG or not.

What's that... eh... thing, in Capture NX?

The documentation of Capture NX is not perfect and the usability of the product is far from perfect. Here are a few things I have not found in the documentation.

Sometimes you see a yellow warning triangle in the window title bar.

This triangle stays as long as the the text "updating image" stays in the title bar, so it probably means the same thing. In other words, it does not mean the file is corrupted or contains bad data or too much highlight or that anything else is wrong. It simply means "wait".


When you display the white balance settings for a file in Base Adjustments > RAW Adjustments > White Balance, you may see numbers and letters after the Camera WB. It may be something like "Auto, A3, G2" or "Incandescent, 0,0" or "6000K, A2, G3".

The first information is the white balance type or the colour temperature expressed in Kelvin. The following two numbers are the adjustments you may have done in your D300, under Shooting Menu > White Balance > right arrow.

The first adjustment is the value on the Amber (A) - Blue (B) axis, and the second one is the value on the Green (G) - Magenta (M) axis. Coincidentally, this corresponds to the LAB colour model. The amber-blue axis confusingly corresponds to colour temperature as well, with each step equivalent to about 5 mired. The green-magenta axis is simply an adjustment of green-magenta, like a cc filter (colour compensation/colour correction filter).

The Lure of DNG

DNG, Digital NeGative, is Adobe's attempt at a unified RAW file format for all cameras world wide. Some people are all worked up about this and list numerous advantages.

I am not one of them.

There is nothing wrong with dng, it just so happens that it is not much better than other things either. Some people duly convert all their Nikon nef files to dng, but that may be a waste of time and a loss of some data.

However, if your camera produces dng files, by all means, keep them. They are not worse than other raw formats.

Let's look at some of the alleged benefits.

Archiving is one of the often quoted arguments for dng. As dng is supposed to be a universal standard, it seems reasonable to assume that support for it will be around for ever, right?

The answer is perhaps. A standard does not become a standard by someone calling it a standard. The internationally defined format for writing dates is year-month-day, like 080619 for today. However, apart from Finland and Sweden hardly any country uses that date format in daily life.

Adobe supports dng, and a few camera makers support it, but most camera makers do not see much advantage. The by far biggest SLR camera makers, Nikon and Canon, do not support it. That means that most raw pictures that are taken today use other formats than dng.

It is very possible that there will be dng readers in 50 years time, but it is equally likely that there will be readers for Nikon's nef files and Canon's cr2 files.


And it seems reasonable to assume that a program that can read one dng can read all, right?

But that is not the case. Just like for tiff or psd files, there are many flavours and extensions. If a program cannot read the native raw file from a particular camera, it is quite possible that the program cannot read dng files from that camera either. It is also possible that it can read some files but not all, depending on the lens used.

In some ways, a dng is simply a wrapper around some other file format. A dng can even embed the full original of another raw file. If the program cannot read the original, it cannot read the dng.


One claimed benefit for dng is the file size. The story is that raw files for early cameras were only lightly compressed. The nef file of a Nikon D1X from 2001, for example, weighed in 7.8 Megabyte, while an equivalent dng file only was 4.8 Megabyte. A Canon 300D from 2003 had a crw file of 6.0 Megabyte, while the equivalent dng was just 4.2 Megabyte.

However, there is nothing inherently large with Nikon or Canon files. The companies can modify the formats, and they compress them more and more. A lossless compressed 14 bit nef of 14.4 MB from a new Nikon D300, for example, is converted into a 13.3 MB lossless compressed dng file, which hardly is any significant gain. A non-compressed dng with embedded jpeg preview turns out to be 25.4 MB - much bigger than the original.

There are still cameras that have huge raw files, and in these cases a conversion to dng has a certain sense. However, often it may be as useful to convert the raw to tiff or even jpeg - formats that are easier to manipulate for other purposes.

If you convert a raw file to dng, you may not lose any information - at least not unless you use the "Linear Image" option. However, there may be camera specific information in the raw file, like the Picture Control data in a NEF file, that no program can interpret correctly when it hides in a dng. The information is definitely there, but it may in practice be impossible to actually use it.


But then, as said before, there is nothing wrong with a dng. If you see any use for dng, by all means use it. I for example convert my nef files from my D300 to dng in order to open them in Photoshop CS2. It is either that or upgrade to Photoshop CS3 or use Aperture. Most often I actually use Aperture, as I prefer to work on the original file.

D50 vs. D40X & D300

There are two things I consider incredibly important in a camera:

1. It should be good.
2. It should be light.

My first Single Reflex Camera was a Nikon D50, which was a good compromise. It was fairly good and fairly light. However, this year I decided to upgrade in both directions. Therefore I got a D40X, which is incredibly light as SLRs go, and then a D300, which is really good.

The D40X I use when I travel or go on hikes, and the D300 I use when I want to actually take good pictures.


D40X with AF-S DX VR 18-200 f/3.5-5.6G lens. Light and powerful.

For a comparison between these and other Nikon DSLRs check for example Nikonians' comparison chart and Imaging Resources' reviews, which have some interesting performance information regarding auto-focus speed.

Image Authentication

There is a menu item in the Nikon D300 to switch on "Image Authentication". This applies to several old professional Nikon cameras like the D3, D700 and all the way back to the D200.

Forget it. It is only of any use if you are willing to invest even more time and money, and even then the use is limited.

This is how it works. If you have the option activated, when you take a picture in nef, tiff or jpeg format, then a flag is stored in the file which can be read to check if the file has been changed.

The files can still be modified without any problem using for example Capture NX or Photoshop.

To read the flag, you need to invest in Nikon's Image Authentication Software. The software costs a few hundred dollars/euro.

This is clearly interesting for legal purposes. But if you just want to prove that the neighbours' cat really walked through your living room, it is probably overkill.

Besides the system was cracked in 2011, so there is no certainty left that the images were not modified. The new professional cameras, D4 and D800 do not seem to have the feature.

Updated 7 July 2012.

Should I use RAW or JPEG?

The disappointing answer to that question, is that it is up to you to choose.

Raw (Nikon's nef) files contain more information.

Jpeg pictures are quicker to load and quicker to save. Many more of them fit on a memory card, and they can be sent straight to all your friends without more ado.

If you try to send a nef file to a computer illiterate person, or even an experienced Windows user, he will probably have problems opening it. It is even possible that his or your mail system does not allow the file to be sent, as it is too big. A 14-bit uncompressed nef file from a Nikon D300 weighs in at around 25 Mb.

If you try to take the ultimate perfect picture, then nef is probably the format for you. However, you may want to consider the number of small jpeg pictures you quickly could have taken and processed in the same time.

What a NEF contains

As a raw nef file is a dump of camera information and not an actual image, it is very different how the nef file is displayed in different applications.

Let's for example assume that you take a black-and-white picture with your Nikon. FastStone, IrfanView and xnview all display the image as black-and-white. However, the gimp, Picasa, Aperture 2.1 and Mac OS X' Preview ignore the tag that says that the image should be black-and-white, so they display the image in colour.

Nikon's Capture NX keeps the camera information, so it appears black-and-white, but one can also go back to the original colours.

1. Go to Base Adjustments > Camera Adjustments > Picture Control.
2. In the dialogue that comes up, change "Non-Picture Control" to "Picture control".
3. Change the settings to what you prefer.

Sometimes it is not obvious to see what changes have taken place in the camera. I for example had a picture where the White Balance was far off. There is no indication in the adjustment panel of Capture NX, that the White Balance had an unusual setting in the camera, so I had to look around for some time, before I found where it was.

White balance is, by the way, one camera setting that Aperture takes into account.

This may appear confusing for a simple reason: it is confusing. Not only are the names for the features sometimes confusing, but the concept itself is confusing.

There are a couple of metaphors one can use.

Think of the raw data from the camera as a Word document. If you switch on Track Changes in Word (or Record Changes in OpenOffice) you can make as much modifications you want. Add text. Remove formatting. Change pictures. You can always select Reject All Changes to go back to the original. You can also reject some changes and keep others. In the same way, you can always go back to the original camera raw data in a nef file, no matter how many changes you have made. You can also revert some changes, even if they were made in the camera, but keep others.

A more real life metaphor is a dinner table. Let's say you change the tablecloth every day. You use different kinds of china and put different dishes on the table every day, so it looks very different from one day to the next. No matter what things you add, you can always remove them at the end of the day. What you are left with is the original naked wooden table. In the same way, you can add effects to a nef file - sharpening, blur, white balance, noise reduction. But at the end of the day, you can remove them all, and what you are left with is the original camera raw data.

Many applications open nef files, but they almost never save to nef format. If you make a modification, you will have to save the image as tiff, jpeg or some other more mainstream format.

Capture NX is an exception, as it saves the modifications in the nef file itself. However, it does not touch the actual raw data in the nef file.

Some of the data that can be stored in a nef without touching the actual raw data.

TIFF vs. PSD

A few years ago it was a much clearer difference between the file formats tiff and psd.

Tiff (Tagged Image File Format) was a widely accepted standard but limited in implemented features. As it is tagged, it could of course be extended, but hardly any applications supported for example layers in tiff files.

Psd was a proprietary format for Adobe Photoshop, and it supported all Photoshop's features.

Today both tiff and psd are owned by Adobe, and they support the same feature set. Tiff may still be more of a generic standard, but it allows such a lot of specific tags and additions, that you rarely can be sure that your program can read a tiff file from an unknown source. However, you can happily use Photoshop without ever opening one single psd file.

An 8-bit version of an image is often slightly bigger in tiff than psd, but the difference is not that big.

The 16-bit versions are about the same size.

Both psd and tiff file formats are lossless.

The only real reason to choose one over the other is what other applications you will use to read them. For example Preview in Mac OS X does not see transparency in tiff files, but it sees it in psd files. Nikon's Capture NX reads tiff files but it does not read psd files. And the gimp handles layers in psd files but not in tiff files.

Editing your NEF in Photoshop and Camera Raw

If you want to edit your nef in Photoshop, you will have to pass through Camera Raw - directly or indirectly. You double-click on the nef in Finder, Explorer or Bridge, and Camera Raw will open. You make the adjustments you want and can then edit the file in Photoshop. When you save the file, you will have to choose a standard format, like psd, tiff or jpeg.

If you do not want to see the Camera Raw dialogue, you can shift-doubleclick on the file in Bridge, and it will go straight to Photoshop, applying the Camera Raw conversion in the background.

You can also save directly from Camera Raw, but you cannot save to the original raw file. You will have to choose a new name and the raw extension dng or another file format. From each file, you can always go back to the "original" by choosing "Camera Raw Defaults" as Setting. Talking about an "original" is a little awkward, as the original just is a dump of camera data. You have to display it in some way, and that way is through the Settings.

If your nef files are not supported directly by Photoshop and Camera Raw and Bridge, you may be able to convert them to dng, which is Adobe's attempt at a unified raw file format. Version 4.4.1 of the free Adobe DNG Converter handles both D60's and D300's nef files.

In case you wonder, the raw conversion in Adobe Lightroom uses the same engine as Adobe Bridge, so there is no advantage trying to edit a file in both tools.

RAW

Digital photographers use some fairly understandable formats like jpeg (used by everyone), psd (used by Photoshop users), tiff (used by people with big harddisks) and so on.

Then there is the mystical raw format which only high end cameras have.

Raw is not even really an image format. Raw is a dump of exactly what the camera sees when you press the shutter-release button.

Different cameras are made in different ways, so they see different things, of course, and therefore there are different RAW formats. My Nikon cameras call their raw files nef (Nikon Electronic Format). The format of these files is not the same as raw files from a Canon or a Pentax. It is not even the same format in my D40X and my D300. A program that can open one of them may not open the other.

Photoshop CS2 does not open my D300 nef files, so I have to convert them in some way to process them in Photoshop.

Some people claim that you never need raw files. They say that you can use jpeg for all your photos. That is clearly a lie. Any conversion from what the camera sees to any other format makes you lose some information. If you convert to small jpeg pictures you lose a lot of information. If you convert to big tiff pictures you hardly lose anything at all, but you do lose some things.

A tiff is lossless, that is, it does not lose any information in a picture. However, the raw file contains more information than just pixel by pixel image information. When you convert to tiff, this additional information is lost or distorted. And that may be just the information you needed.

Now, it is true that for most users most pictures are perfectly fine as jpeg. Nevertheless, for some users in some situations raw files are life savers.

Adobe Camera Raw

First post

I cannot count the number of times I have seen sentences like "this page will be about..." or "here I will post...." - text full of ambitions that then disappear in the void, as the page owner runs out of things to say.

This blog is the same. I have plenty of high ambitions and plenty of things I want to express (I filled a post-it with them). Let's see for how long they will last.

The main purpose... or one purpose, at least, is to collect things I found out about cameras and computers. I am no expert, but I think I know much more than many a self assured web writer, who bluntly states that he or she possesses the ultimate truth.

Please, read everything with a grain of salt. That applies to every other site on the web, but save some grains for this blog. I'm sure I am wrong sometimes, but hopefully you can verify most of the interesting things yourself.

The ingredients for it all are:

• a Nikon D300
• a Nikon D40x
• a Canon Digital IXUS 970 IS
• Adobe Photoshop CS4
  
• the Gimp
• Aperture 2.1
• Nikon Capture NX 1.3
• A few computers with Mac OS X, Linux and Windows in different flavours
  

Let's see if I can come up with anything useful - starting... Now!