Hi all
This issue has been raised so many times in different forums and yet even though I’ve spent a year reading for solutions to improve the poor rendering of Nikon NEF files I am yet to sit at a point I can say I’m happy with the way Lightroom displays my images and it’s a constant source of frustration of me. Some suggestions made on forums have come close to making the files look more like the original camera rendered image but they are quite honestly still a far cry from what the embedded JPEG looks like. I even got hold of some presets which claim to mimic D3 and D3x but even they are far from reproducing what comes out of camera.
I’ve recently been having a lot of performance problems with my Lightroom so I did some reading and a few sites suggested deleting the previews folder and then letting Lightroom rebuild it, I did this and during the rebuilding of previews I noticed all my older Nikon D70 files rendered 100% perfectly as they came out of camera but all newer Nikon NEF formats, D3, D3x, D3s and D90 all render not so nicely. What happens is that when Lightroom reads the NEF’s it introduces a reddish tint, overexposes the image, often blows out whites and then softens the image, in most cases the colours rendered by Lightroom are not even close to what the original colours were. I’ve tried just about every develop setting available to try and get my images back to the way they originally looked and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s just not possible and I’ve seen many Nikon users raising this issue but nothing seems to have been changed or fixed with any of the LR or Camera Raw updates.
Surely there must be a way to find out what Lightroom/Camera Raw are doing to make the image look like that and then simply have a way of reversing the adjustments made by Lightroom? This is my biggest frustration in Lightroom, I can live with performance problems but not having my images look like they are supposed is just not fun anymore. Put it this way I’m stuck on Lightroom but my experience could be made a whole lot more pleasant if the software could render my images correctly.Why can it render D70 NEF’s spot on but not future NEF’s? Nikons color space has never changed … has it?
Any Nikon users out there that have managed to find out how to best get their images back to looking like the original without reverting to using Nikon Capture? I’d really like to see the back end of this.
Thanks in advance
Mike
