D70s RAW files

Erin -

I have a Nikon D70 (firmwae A&B 2.0) and often shoot in NEF (Raw)+ JPEG basic, and have no trouble looking at both images in iPhoto (v.5.0.4). With the D70s I would assume you have the latest firmware, but you might want to check (go into Menu/Tools/Firmware Ver).

Although a little rich for my blood, the soon to be released Apple product "Aperture" looks like a wonderful program to use with iPhoto, and it fully supports Nikon NEF files.

Erin -

If you end up trying Aperture, I would appreciate learning what you think of it, esptecially concerning its editing capabilities.

Grant

Erin,

Did you ever locate a link for a D70s Firmware upgrade? I too have a brand new D70s which indicates firmware A&B at 1.0 - and of course cannot read raw format into iPhoto.

I looked around alittle and all I found were links to the D70 Firmware upgrade.

I agree - unfortunately I don't believe that either company has a real interest to do so. They both have products which they want to sell - and I understand that. Nikon wants you to purchase their software, and Apple obviously feels that at this level, if you are shooting raw, you need a pro level program - thus Aperture.

So here are my delimas. As a student, I notice that Aperture is available for a student discount, but that its listed as APERTURE - ACADEMIC part MA155Z/A as opposed to the product purchased without student discount (part MA154Z/A). I've been burned on ACADEMIC versions before. I spend the money, to buy some program, to use for education (and beyond) only to end up paying again (full price) later. One program for the price of 2. Not much of a deal. Of course I understand the thought process of deep student discounts as well. Get you hooked on our product, then reel you in on the full version and subsequent upgrades. Fine. But.....

It would be a much better deal if they (OEMs) provided the deep discounts for a limited time (say 1 year max) and at any time during that year allowed you to upgrade to the complete (non-academic) version for the delta. Assuming that the AE is crippled in some way.

I guess what it gets down to is this - sure it looks nice, but before I buy a program that's more than half the price of my camera, I'd like to see it in action. See if it will do the things I am looking to do. For example - does it handle locatonal metadata (lat / long) manually entered through an Aperture AUI? Does it handle locatonal data (lat / long) read in from the EXIF data? Then, see if I can convince my creditor (the wife) that it would be a well spent $500 - especially since (in her mind) I already have a photo program (iPhoto). And of course, I want all that to happen, uhm, sometime in the next hour would be good 😉

I guess in the end it will be 8 weeks of waiting, then weekly trips to the Apple store to try and see it in action. 😟

Now, all that being said - I just noticed a post about raw format nikon images being able to be seen in finder after the latest update. Hmm. Here's a thought. Import the RAW photo from the Nikon software directory - sure enough the photo imported.

Could Apple have resolved this with an OS patch? I'm off to shoot a couple quick RAW images to see.

More to follow.

According to the "geniuses" at the Apple support, Academic is no different from the regular version- nice discount though, huh. Secondly, check out the systems reqs. for Aperture, if they are to be believed, Apple expect to sell some CPUs with Aperture.
Terry

Hmm, well then convincing my wife $250 student cost won't be so bad then.... Where is that checkbook?

Oh, and I shot some RAW on the D70s just now. The clouds parted, angels wept and the images imported into iPhoto just fine.

Thanks Apple! I'm assuming it was the OS X 10.4.3 upgrade, not the iTunes or Backup upgrade I downloaded tonight.

Performed another test - ingest the photos into Nikon Picture Project off the hard drive (iPhoto path) as raw files for access to all the metadata. Some of the data doesn't make the transfer - so....

If you want the full metadata that Picture Project provides you, then you might want to ingest into Picture Project FIRST, then import from Picture Project (or from the camera) into iPhoto.

In any case - it's all good at this point.

I understand that Aperture is built for and around RAW files and I can see the great advantages of non-distructive RAW editing. But I'm wondering if it can also be used for legacy TIFF or JPEG files. Probably not for editing (color and tonal corrections) of those older file formats - but can I use the light table features, which sound fantastic, with my existing files?
Thomas

If you go and look at the Aperture specs page, it supports and file type supported by QuickTime, and appears to do non-destructive editing on them as well as on RAW. Not sure about editing on PDFs, though!

wow, got home this morning after using my new d70s to find the new tiger update 10.4.3. Shot some test on raw Low and behold, they are recognized! more work to do but it looks like they fixes the "s" prob with this! thanks apple.