Friday, January 23, 2009

"View" to the Rescue

A man making a living in the Monterey Fisherman's Wharf, doint street portraits (D700, AF-S 24-70 f2.8). 

Animal prints in my yard.  The temperature out there was pretty low (same gear)... 

Frozen doorknob inside of a garage (same gear)


Against my better judgment, I will purchase Nikon Capture, after all, just not right now.

Why?  Nikon View came to the rescue!

While I am able to open RAW files with Photoshop Elements 6 (the latest one for Macs), I cannot save them as regular JPGs, but only as a format called JPEG2000, which has a strange extension: .jpf.  I don't know how valid and useful it is for web purposes.  Of course, I can also save files as TIFFs, but frankly, I don't know what advantage these ones have over JPGs.

In any event, at some point, recently, I opened a RAW file with Nikon View, and was able to save it as JPEG.

The truth is that since View seems to be one more image editing program, along with PS and Nikon Capture, I wonder about the real need to use Capture and add it to my computer.  However, once I buy it, I may be able to remove it or keep it...

And, of course, I'll have to add memory to my machine. 

Now, I'm taking a look at a serious book about PSE in the Mac, and hope it'll show me how to save better jpegs.  

BTW, more about the D700 next time.  I have some mildly interesting experiments with WB, and I intend to apply the results later.  Who knows?  I may have it all ready very soon.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

convert the RAW file to 8bit in PS elements to have the option of saving as JPG.

JPG2000 is a 16 bit JPG format that never really caught on.

Francisco Solares-Larrave said...

Thanks a lot! Your advice did work, and now I open my NEF files with PSE and do as you suggested.