I recently purchased a Nikon D80. The format closest to a digital negative is their RAW or .NEF format. I can open these files with Picture Project or NikonView but when I try to export them to Adobe Photoshop 6.0, I get a “disc error”.

Any advice would be welcome. I’m tempted to pony up to Adobe Photoshop CS but would be frustrated if this didn’t solve my issues.

Are there any good programs for conversion of Nikon RAW or .NEF format to BMP?

Adobe Elements 5 has RAW ability and it's cheaper than CS

I downloaded a trial of CS last night but couldn't get it to open RAW files that I have on an external USB 2.0 HDD.

I tried Xnview which was free but the conversion from NEF to BMP loses a lot!!!!!

Maybe there is something wrong with my files on the external HDD. I copied them from the camera to the drive

If you get a disc error while trying to read RAW files, then it is not Photoshop having the problem. Photoshop will give you a "Format not recognized" or "Invalid Format" error when it can't read RAW or other files it can't decode. Try moving the files your you internal drive and see what happens.

Photoshop CS wouldn't read my RAW files from my Konica Minolta 7D but CS2 would read them. You will probably need CS2 as well to read your Nikon RAW files.

Thanks Kurt S.

I tried opening them with Photoshop 6.0 and my trial version of Photoshop CS2 and got disc read error.

I moved the files to my hard drive and get the same.

I'm thinking that this may be a property of RAW files from a Nikon D80. I'm going to try Nikon Tech support. Even though I bought the camera from Newegg, my serial number may be grey market!

Microsoft has a free raw image viewer:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...

that opens these files allows conversion to TIFF or JPEG.

Nikon Capture NX and Adobe Photoshop CS3 open and convert these files to TIFF format in 8 or 16 bit color. MS viewer only does 8 bit color and the image lacks the resolution that I see with Capture NX and Photoshop CS3.

But .... MS viewer is free and Capture NX costs about $180 and PS CS3 mmay be $650.

It is not clear why Nikon NEF files will not load on the latest version of Nikon's PictureProject software either. They will load but indicate "disk error" which means data format error. I wonder if Nikon has some very clever way of disabling our cameras if they think the serial numbers are what they call grey market? The tell me my D40 is grey market, even though purchased on-line in the US for full price.

Johann1

I've found that Adobe Photoshop CS3 does a great job of converting the NEF (RAW) files to PSD format so I'm using that.

Now I only save RAW files on my 2GB card and tha gives me more images per card and probably saves the battery.

An excellent program for handling and editing RAW files is "s7raw" (Google it). And it's free!

Thanks Alphawave. Unfortunately, s7raw doesn't recognize NEF files from my Nikon D80.

I was able to get Photoshop CS2 to open these files after I installed Camera RAW plugin 3.7.