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

[Andrew]

peter kostov wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
>   
Rawstudio and Rawtherapee are two more options for converting raw files 
under Linux. I've tried both and personally prefer the latter (2.4). I 
assume they have support for .NEFs.

HTH

Andrew