I LOVE Shooting in RAW! RAW is much more forgiving than JPEG of things like White Balance and Exposure which can be easily adjusted after the shot was taken.

As you may know each camera manufacture has their own proprietary RAW format and to make matters worse some camera manufacture change little things in their format on EACH new camera they come out with. While my Nikon D70's RAW (.NEF) is supported in Photoshop CS2 with the latest Camera RAW from Adobe, my Nikon D80's RAW (.NEF) isn't yet. Sure Nikon sells software that allows you to open their format and convert it to TIFF or JPEG, but the software is just so foreign to me that I don't want to invest a lot of time learning it. The big reason is that I know my camera will be supported in Adobe's next Camera RAW update.

In the meantime I've found a workaround! Adobe just released Beta 4 of Lightroom which has a hidden little feature. It has preliminary support for the D80's .NEF file (and the Canon Rebel XTi)! That's right! You can import them right into Lightroom. But what if I want to work on them in Photoshop? Here's the first tip. Lightroom can convert proprietary RAW formats into DNG (Digital Negative - an open standard). Photoshop can of course work with DNG files natively. So I simply import my D80's .NEF files into Lightroom, converting them to .DNG on import and then either I can open them from there into Photoshop with a right click or I can Export them back out of Lightroom as DNG files and put them wherever I like.

Here's the second tip for those of you on older versions of Photoshop. I hear people complain all the time that they bought a newer camera with a RAW format that's supported in Adobe Camera RAW 3.5 for example, but 3.5 doesn't work with Photoshop CS or 7. Here's the tip - Go upgrade to CS2 - Kidding! Here's the tip - Go download the Adobe DNG converter (it's FREE), Convert your RAW format into DNG. Photoshop 7, CS and Elements can open DNG files and it doesn't matter that those original RAW files aren't supported by your older version of Photoshop. That's one of the beauties of DNG!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Terry White,

You know I tried for about 10 mins to resist this but I crumbled.

When I frist read Terry's post I had to read it twice. I then said, wow how funny this post would be if the word "the" was included between the words "in" and "RAW" in the first sentence.

Okay ... now I am going back to the corner and stand.

quote:

Originally posted by Calvin:
You know I tried for about 10 mins to resist this but I crumbled.

When I frist read Terry's post I had to read it twice. I then said, wow how funny this post would be if the word "the" was included between the words "in" and "RAW" in the first sentence.

Okay ... now I am going back to the corner and stand.

Don't EVEN start with the words "balance", "exposure" and "shot" Calvin....

You are corrupting us....

Anyhoo,

I always shoot RAW and have been meaning to start converting my files to DNG. I just watched Terry's Podcast last Friday, called "Bridge - Camera Workflow" and saw the benefits to the DNG format. This will now be my 1st step when processing my RAW files.