Photography Phriday: Nikon RAW (NEF) Codec for Vista, and Microsoft Photo Info for Vista, XP

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Two nice new downloads for photographers made me re-think my photo-processing pipeline today.

Nikon has released their RAW (NEF) Codec for Vista.  Follow the link to download it, or open Vista's Windows Photo Gallery and it will automatically check for updates and prompt you.  You'll get Vista Live Icons for RAW images, as well as support for NEF files in Windows Photo Gallery.

 

And Microsoft recently released Microsoft Photo Info, a free plug-in which lets you right-click to edit metadata for a number of RAW image file types.  Works with Windows XP and Windows Vista.  I played with the beta of this before its release, and it's definitely a nice-to-have for your photo processing pipeline, although admittedly I didn't use it very much.

 

Instead of shooting RAW+JPG, I am now planning to drop the JPG and:

  • Shoot RAW images, which I can now view, sort, and triage from Vista's file explorer and Windows Photo Gallery.
  • Use Nikon Capture NX for post-processing.  Its interface is growing on me, although it desperately needs keyboard shortcuts and mouse-wheel zoom.  Its functionality, however, is excellent. I found a great resource for Nikon Capture NX tips and tricks here at Nikonians.org. I am learning how to use Color Control Points.
  • Use Nikon Capture NX's batch processing to export my NEFs to JPGs for uploading to Flickr.

 

So why is the title Photography Phriday, if I only got around to posting it on Saturday?  I was distracted by experimenting with the above pipeline, of course :)