Seeking advice; NEF to RAW

[Rangefinder 35]

So, I splurged a little and got myself used Nikon D810. My main interest is shooting some RAW images and importing them into Photoshop. I understand that PS doesn’t recognize Nikon’s NEF format, and I have to convert them first in some other converter. If you have any experience in this I’m open to suggestions.

 

[f16sunshine]

ACR used to be part of the photoshop bundle (Adobe Camera Raw).
It’s been a few years since I used it (or nikon) last but it seemed to be great with older NEF files.

 

[Corran]

I understand that PS doesn’t recognize Nikon’s NEF format,

Wrong, you can just open them up in Photoshop and edit the RAW parameters, and then it renders and opens up the converted image and you can save it as a jpeg. This is what you save as your edited file. You may need to upgrade to the latest ACR software, which is utilized for this. Also, a sidecar file is created to go with your NEF image which remembers the RAW settings you used, if you want to change them later.

Lightroom is a better tool for this job though if you need to work with numerous files.

 

[x-ray]

I use a D800, Df and Fuji XE-1 and use both Lightroom 6 and CS4 photoshop. My Lightroom opens all with no issue but CS4 won't open any. The latest cloud based CS6 photoshop will open them though.

I edit my raw NEF and RAF in Lightroom but occasionally I'll need to open a raw file in PS so I use the latest ACR Adobe Camera Raw which is a free download from Adobe. You can convert any of these files to a universal DNG raw file that your Photoshop should open. Also there's no apparent loss of quality in the conversion.

I agree with the above that Lightroom is a fantastic tool.