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hello,

i'm managing a friend's photo collection; he shoots with a Nikon D2X, using
the proprietary nikon NEF format.
I've been using Pixmatic Rawshooter (which is a great app, btw..!!) to
decode the NEF's.

when I decode into TIFF's, it gives me the option of 8-bit or 16-bit depth;
the 8-bit yeilds a 37 meg file, same as if my friend had been shooting in
TIFF; the 16bit yeilds a 70 meg file.

on initial inspection, the 16-bit files look pretty awesome in their screen
output, but I'm not really sure if I'm realistically gaining anything by
decoding to 16-bit per channel.

can any Nikon users tell me if the 16-bit is overkill, or if 16-bit is
actually taking advantage of some built-in color depth already in the Nikon
NEF's...?

thanks for any input...

gary

If you need to do editing like level and color adjustments on the images,
develop to 16 bit. You are throwing away color information or data when you
edit your image. 16 bit has 281 trillion of colors while 8 bit has 16.7
million of colors. Convert to 8 bit after your editing work.

"gary" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:01B6f.31800$yS6.4289@clgrps12...
> hello,
>
> i'm managing a friend's photo collection; he shoots with a Nikon D2X,
> using the proprietary nikon NEF format.
> I've been using Pixmatic Rawshooter (which is a great app, btw..!!) to
> decode the NEF's.
>
> when I decode into TIFF's, it gives me the option of 8-bit or 16-bit
> depth; the 8-bit yeilds a 37 meg file, same as if my friend had been
> shooting in TIFF; the 16bit yeilds a 70 meg file.
>
> on initial inspection, the 16-bit files look pretty awesome in their
> screen output, but I'm not really sure if I'm realistically gaining
> anything by decoding to 16-bit per channel.
>
> can any Nikon users tell me if the 16-bit is overkill, or if 16-bit is
> actually taking advantage of some built-in color depth already in the
> Nikon NEF's...?
>
> thanks for any input...
>
> gary
>