Is there any way i can edit a .nef (raw) photo in photoshop cs and save it as a .nef (raw)?

Question

Is there any way i can edit a .nef (raw) photo in photoshop cs and save it as a .nef (raw)

Answer 1

No.



The whole purpose of .nef (aka raw) is that it's not edited. Camera takes input directly from its sensor and stuffs it into a file. And sensors, they see the world in a very different way than we do... Once you start editing it, or even sooner, as soon as you opened it - a lot of things changed in a file. Bayer matrix is applied to convert the data from raw signal strengths captured by each sensor (which are either red, green or blue of different intensities) to the pretty colors we see, white balance is applied, sharpening and saturation may have been altered, and so on. What you see once you open the raw file is already a processed image. So there is no way to put it back to raw... It's kind of like trying to cook an omelet, then try to put the eggs back into their shells...



LEM.

Answer 2

Answering your question exactly, no, you can't save it out as a NEF.



However, the answer you are probably looking for is saving the image as a DNG. In Photoshop's RAW image editor, you bring in the NEF image. Monkey about and then save it as a DNG. This DNG image is your original RAW image with a ** list ** of changes that you applied in the RAW editor. The actual image in a DNG format is always untouched, thus, even though you apply edits to the image, those edits never touch the stored RAW image in the DNG file, just the outcome when saved to a non-DNG format like TIFF or JPEG.



Photoshop's RAW editor will apply settings from your camera like white balance and vividness, thus, when you view the image it will make the image look like how you shot it.



As an alternative, you can save your image out to a 16-bit TIFF and go from there. Using DNG for your workflow is much better than TIFF.

Answer 3

is there any reason to save a .nef as a .nef

NEF is nikon electronic format file and this can only be saved with Nikon software to nef.

Capture NX2 does this and can make a nef from any jpeg as well.

But, universal raw formats exist and the one just any software open is tiff.

Only problem, tiff is much bigger in size and adobe DNG format as well.



Only thing I do not understand is why you want to open a nef file in ACR and save it as a nef file again. The ACR settings, unless you delete them, keep stored on the computer as a sidecar file .xmp and this keep all you changed in memory. This is to prevent any change to the original file.

Answer 4

Once you edit your NEF files in camera raw it will keep those settings (white balance, saturation, contrast etc.) until it's edit again.