[Gimp-user] dealing with Nikon NEF RAW files?

[peter kostov]

Hi!

Is there anyone here, who has a Nikon DSLR and is shooting in RAW? If 
yes - how do you deal with your .NEF images?

On a CD that came with my camera there was a program called 'Picture 
Project'.
Until recently I used it under Wine and was pretty happy with it. It 
worked slow, but it allowed me to enter IPTC information, make basic 
image changes (brightness, black point compensation, sharpen, rotate, 
crop) - almost everything I need before exporting to TIF. The exported 
files were with really good quality - one that I can not achieve with 
Ufraw or other tools. Unfortunately  I had to delete my .wine dir and 
now I can't install Picture Project anymore - it asks for a product 
key?! How is that I don't know - it used to be a free program... or was 
it a trial version?
Anyway, this product isn't maintained by Nikon any longer. Now they  
offer ViewNX, which doesn't work under Wine (installs fine, but crashes 
when you try to do anything with it). Capture NX requires .NET and is 
not working too, neither under Wine, nor under Mono or pnet. Is not free 
either and I don't like to use illegal software.

So now I am in trouble!

I know about Ufraw and I use it, but the results I am achieving with it 
are not so good as they were with the Nikon utility.

I found this too: http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/pspi.html and 
thought that I could give the Photoshop "Camera Raw" plug-in a try, but 
unfortunately this isn't working for me too - I am on Gentoo  and in 
order to compile  pspi  I need the PhotoshopAPI, which was distributed 
with Photoshop 6.0 only and as you may guess I don't have it, it is not 
available on the net anymore too.

I know I could install a virtual machine and a whole Window$ on top of 
it and and.... no thanks.

Please help!!! How do you deal with this situation?

Any help will be greatly  appreciated!!!

Greetings,

Peter