These RAW converters have come to do a pretty impressive job in recent times, however there’s nothing that beats Nikon’s own RAW converter.

However the truth is that their conversion process tries to guess the image levels, curves, saturation, color-representation.

There are so many RAW converters available in the market which have support for the Nikon NEF RAW format. And thus others don’t exactly know how to read the NEF RAW format - it’s a guess-work at it’s best. This means it’s Nikons secret RAW format. The trouble starts once you realize that NEF is a proprietary format. The RAW files are thus rightly referred to as digital “negatives”, which can be processed and developed by the photographer as per the requirements. The RAW file retains the in-camera settings for white-balance, sharpness, hues, etc. Thus without a RAW converter, a RAW file is pretty much useless. To see the image you need a RAW converter which can read the NEF files and convert / show them as images. But when shooting in RAW, Nikon NEF format preserves the raw data as a 12 bit / 14 bit information (depending on your camera features) in a lossy/loss-less/uncompressed/compressed form This data is not the image, just the RAW capture. If you chose to shoot JPEG, then in the process of conversion, the raw data is converted and compressed to result in 8-bit JPGs and the raw data used to process the image is embedded in the EXIF. The camera records the light reaching to the sensor in form of raw data, stores in-camera settings as metadata and saves it as an NEF file. Just like any other RAW file, Nikon NEF is the data file which preserves the image information as collected by the camera sensor. While the RAW files have their merits, let’s check out what Nikon NEF is all about and how to make the most of it.

Really the only thing you cannot control in the post-processing phase is the light so given that you have taken care of the aperture, shutter speed, ISO, perspective and composition, all the rest can be adjusted when you work with the RAW file. The choice to shoot in RAW has given digital photographers the freedom to focus on photographing than to worry about white-balance, sharpness, colors, saturation in-camera and the likes. As a RAW format, NEF files allow you to take care and change most of the camera settings in the post-processing phase. Check out our article on RAW image format. Referred to as the digital negatives, these raw files contain all the image information along with image’s metadata in form of camera identification, it’s settings, EXIF data, lens used and other information. Nikon Electronic Format or NEF for short is Nikon’s RAW image format.

Best nikon nef converter