Ever since I started taking photos digitally, I’ve been meaning to investigate the use of raw image capture as it offers much more flexibility for off-camera editing. Basically, a raw image is the unprocessed data from the camera sensor which most cameras then process to produce a JPEG image; however because image sensors vary, so do raw image formats. Thankfully, Nikon’s .NEF format is one of the common ones.

I wrote a post last year about the Microsoft raw image thumbnailer and viewer for Windows XP but I’m still shooting JPEGs as most of my photography these days is family snapshots. Meanwhile, I encouraged Stuart to buy a Nikon D50 digital SLR and he recently posted some information about digital camera raw support for .NEF files in Adobe Photoshop CS 2 that may come in handy one day.