The "new" Nikon RAW in older software

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but a quick search didn't show up anything. I made a little discovery that I wanted to share in case it helps anyone.

I purchased a D500 10 days ago (New Aquatica Housing this week!) only to discover that I couldn't open Nikon's new (to me) RAW format. After a few minutes of Googling, I got a knot in my stomach. I am using a 4 year old MacBook Pro, and I own Adobe Creative Suite 5.5. In a nutshell, "everybody" said I had to get the free DNG converter from Adobe. Problem was, to get the most current DNG wizard, I'd need to update my Mac OS to (cringe) Catalina, which is getting lukewarm reviews. More importantly, if I updated the OS, none of my CS 5.5 software would work (nor my MS Office, but who cares.)

So that meant "renting forever" LR and PS... not a huge expense, but the kicker was, I use InDesign for publication stuff, so suddenly I'm looking at about $75 CDN a month,... forever. Not cool.

Anyway, after searching for some workaround, I was convinced I was screwed. But it seems a modified solution was right in front of me, and it was dirt simple. And free!

It seems that the Mac "Preview" application will open the NEF files. From there, it's a simple step to export as a TIFF, which if uncompressed is about 150 MB file. That opens beautifully in LR and PS and while it may not be the true RAW, it's a glorious hi res file.

So there you go.. saved me a fortune.

Happy shooting.

(PS I'll be listing my D7000 housing and camera shortly. It' being overhauled this week at Aquatica!)

There's various ways around this - you can run PS inside a virtual machine if ever you are forced into an upgrade.  This basically runs the application in the older OS inside a virtual box - not perfect but gets you out of a hole.  There are also other solutions floating around.  You can purchase capture one pro for Nikon for around $200 - that's price in my region, it's about half of what Capture one pro for any camera is.  They also had a popup to get 25% off when I looked at their website.  It's a full featured raw converter and image processing software.  Affinity software is also improving and very cheap .   Capture one has a free 30 day trial and will run back as far as Puma OS.