Has anyone had Big Sur 11.2 open a Nikon Z6 II lossless compressed raw file?

I see that the Nikon Z6 II (and Z7 II) camera just popped up on the supported Big Sur (11.2) camera raw listing. They weren't there this morning. There is no footnote associated with the camera entry.

I am running macOS 11.2, and though the Finder is not showing an icon image, Quick Look and Preview now display a Z6 II RAW image. According to ExifTool, the RAW image is Nikon NEF compressed.

Shane,

No one here can fix the Finder's visual limitation on the Nikon Z6 II NEF image icons. I can set the default opening application to Affinity Photo, and that does not help the Finder show the icon. The Finder's Show Preview window does show these images.

You can tell Preview to select the containing folder of these Z6 II NEF images and it will open all of them. Then use Preview > View menu > Contact sheet to create your own light table of these images.

Likewise, if you change the directory into the Z6 folder, and Quick Look the first image, you can use your arrow keys to advance to the other images.

FWIW, if you go to Nikon Z6 II Sample Gallery and click on RAW to download an image, although I don't see a thumbnail image, I do see a preview image in the Finder. Also, Preview does open the image for me.

SMB ACT wrote:

Looks like a whole heap of Nikon shooters will have to wait for Big Sur 11.2.1!

I don't think so. I'm on Big Sur 11.2 and I can open all the RAW files from that gallery. Apparently VikingOSX can open at least one. I think it's a problem local to your Mac..

I think Apple uses their Install system data files and security updates part of Software Update to push these changes without a formal update. The fact that Raw support comes and goes may be proof of this, just as if by magic, the Finder may eventually start displaying these raw images in icons when the support is finally resolved.

Right now at 10:04 EST, I am seeing Nikon Z 6 2 and Nikon Z 7 2 in System Info's Raw Support.

VikingOSX wrote:

Right now at 10:04 EST, I am seeing Nikon Z 6 2 and Nikon Z 7 2 in System Info's Raw Support.

Interesting. Neither is listed on my Intel Macs but they are on my M1 MBA.

VikingOSX wrote:

I think Apple uses their Install system data files and security updates part of Software Update to push these changes without a formal update. The fact that Raw support comes and goes may be proof of this, just as if by magic, the Finder may eventually start displaying these raw images in icons when the support is finally resolved.

Perhaps that is my problem. I had disabled those updates for testing an EtreCheck update. I have re-enabled and attempted to force a background update. No change yet.

Just checked my M1 MBA. They open there also.

My principal desktop is my M1 mini running the released 11.2, and I only downloaded that one compressed RAW image from DPReview.

Apple's own Cocoa frameworks can extract all of the metadata from that RAW file, just as can ExifTool. If the image was unsupported those frameworks would return nothing. An excerpt from my PyObjC program:

I am not certain that compressed = 0 or some lower integer value, means uncompressed, though it might make one more curious to use other tools. When I run ExifTool v12.16 on that Nikon NEF image:

exiftool -compression DSC_0344.NEF
Compression : Nikon NEF Compressed

and when I run the UNIX file command on the same file:

DSC_0344.NEF: TIFF image data, little-endian, direntries=28, height=120, bps=352, compression=none, PhotometricIntepretation=RGB, manufacturer=NIKON CORPORATION, model=NIKON Z 6_2, orientation=upper-left, width=160

I am inclined to believe ExifTool and my own tool before the file result above.

VikingOSX wrote:

I am inclined to believe ExifTool and my own tool before the file result above.

Thanks. I guess the proof of the pudding would be to compare known compressed vs uncompressed files.

I just noticed something, yesterday when I looked at …Software > Raw Support, I saw "Nikon Z 6 2 & Z 7 2". Today both are missing.

SMB ACT wrote:

Well, I'm confused! I would swear that yesterday, Preview couldn't open these files, but it can today. Probably my error, but weird!

Also, Finder still can't handle Z6II raw, despite System Information on my Intel iMac listing "Nikon Z 6 2" under raw support.

I'm confused - but that doesn't take much.

For what it's worth, I can't open the RAW samples from that referenced Nikon Z6 II review either. I'm running 11.2.

Furthermore, I'm currently working on some imagery software and I have a tool that uses Apple's low-level Image I/O framework to open images. I don't actually have any camera that can create RAW images, so I've been using samples downloaded from this site (https://rawsamples.ch/index.php/en/). I can open most of them, but not all.

One thing I have noticed is that RAW images often have a TIFF preview embedded inside them. The software I'm using can find those previews. So if I haven't built the software properly and RAW is not working for some reason, it runs really fast and treats the image as a really low-resolution TIFF file, obviously the preview. That may be why you could see them before and not today.

Unfortunately, said software is currently in a state of having not been built properly. I will try again in a couple of hours. If I should be able to open these files, then I want to investigate what is going on.

Also, one of my tools just spits out metadata for the file. Just because you can read the metadata, doesn't mean you can read the imagery.