Fresh-Out-the-Box!

Nikon 4500 (Coolpix) has a hidden secret July 22, 2005

When the majority of digital cameras save their images to your memory card as a JPEG file, they have already carried out all manner of adjustments to optimise the image quality. These include sharpening, white-balance, contrast and others.
This is great for the majority of users and the majority of images, but for photographers that want to do their own processing to their images, either for special effects, or to optimise the image it is best to have the raw data from the digital camera’s sensor chip. That way none of the automatic adjustments will lose any of the original information that the camera has recorded. This is equivalent to the way that a skilled photo printer works in the dark room, using techniques during the developing of the negatives, and later when printing the images under the enlarger.

RAW file is a type *without* white balance, interpolation, sharping and anti-aliasing, and exposure compensation. If you choose to shoot RAW, generally this means you want to do post-processing on it instead of let camera to all the things.

Why you can do better than camera? because the CPU of your computer is much faster than the camera, and with the software on your computer you can have more fexibility to processing your image just like negative film.

What is more, RAW file has 12-bit color depth so the dynamic range is 16 times more than the 8-bit jpeg file. you can pull details from RAW file, which in 8-bit jpeg will be “white out overexposed” or “black out underexposed”, this kind of EV compensation is the most important reason to choose RAW
-Shizhu Pan on dp Review

I have a Nikon 4500. I love the camera and have taken many thousands of photos with it over the last couple of years. As well as a number of JPEG modes of different size and compression, it has a high quality mode that saves the image as an uncompressed TIF image, but this is interpolated and still not the raw data. Worst of all is the speed that the TIFF files are saved, previewed and transferred at. I won’t go into the reasons here, but TIFF files are also three times larger than they need to be. It’s a crazy situation, but one that I guess Nikon chose to use for the convenience of its users.

One guy here in Russia has been analyzing a CP2500 firmware update (SPARCLite RISC processor instructions set) and an uploader software and found this along with some other information (such as deadpixel maps, graphics etc).
The mode can be switched on and off.

I think the best way is to set an option for the smallest jepeg with the highest compression. This way the second file will take less space but can be treated as a thumbnail for preview, also it contains EXIFF data. Though the camera creates two files in this mode the space they take together is less than for TIFF and still RAW contains more data than tiff (12 bits per pixel vs 8 bits). This is because TIFF contains interpolated data.

Recent digital cameras of a decent quality have allowed the user to download a “raw” file. This is the equivalent of a film camera’s negative; the raw information, just as the camera’s sensor saw it, without any meddling of the camera’s onboard computer.

So I was amazed when I happened to find that my Nikon camera has an undocumented feature- it can save raw files. Here’s the information I found:

It has been found out that Nikon has a diagnostic mode called DIAG RAW in CP2500, CP4300, CP4500 (tested) and possibly E775, E885, E990, E995, E5000 that allows for RAW file output. This mode can be turned on by a diagnostic program such as Opencam or Rawenabler. The rawenabler is pretty straightforward - you can connect the camera to the PC via USB, turn it on so it looks as a removable device, launch a programm - it should identify the camera and then you can switch raw mode on and off, turn the camera off, disconnect it and use wherever you please.
You can find it here (along with the sources)
http://e2500.narod.ru/cpixraw.zip
According to the author the program runs under Win 2000 and XP.

In RAW DIAG mode the camera writes two files for each shot - one is a RAW file (though it has an extension .jpg or .tif) and the second one is a normal picture. The RAW file is NOT in the .nef format. I have contacted David Coffin (http://www2.primushost.com/~dcoffin/) and he has added CP4500 RAW file support to his beta version of CRW converter:
http://alexmld.narod.ru/crw.rar

He will also include CP4300 and CP2500 RAW file support in his next version of CRW.
Also the RAW->nef converter is under development.

Alex Molodozhenov

So here’s the lowdown:

First off, you have to turn on the Raw mode of the camera. To do this you have to have the camera plugged in to the computer via USB. You then use the cpixraw program to turn it on. I had problems with this at first, but eventually found it was due to my camera being in PTP mode for its USB connection. To change this, go to the Set-UP menu (in A, P, M or S modes), go to the USB option on the third menu page and make sure you’re on “Mass Storage” and not “PTP”.
You’ll then need a program to convert the RAW files into a usable format, NEF. NEF is Nikon’s RAW format, as used on the Coolpix 5700. The same great programmer is also making this program available to the world.
When you download the raw2nef zip file, there are 3 files inside. The 2 .exes are the ones you need. Firstly, extract both the .exes to a place on your computer that’s safe to leave them (I made a new folder for them inside my Digicam folder in My Documents). Then double-click the “raw2nef_setup.exe” file. This is going to add a right click menu item for dealing with the new raw files from the camera. In this I left the top 2 items as default (you would need to change .JPG to .TIF if you’re shooting in HI quality mode on the camera, altough I wouldn’t see why you would want to do this- you’re already saving in the highest quality possible with raw mode enabled). I then changed the “Camera:” option to 4500 from Auto, and ticked the “Full E5700/E8700 compatability” box. This ensures that programs like PhotoShop CS2 will know what to do with the images, unfortunately it also adds a couple of Meg to the filesize (NEF files created are over 7 Meg). Click “Add” to add the entry to your computer’s registry. Your firewall or other security program may pop up a warning about this (as my PREVX did), but it’s fine- allow any changes.
.

That’s it. Now all you have to do to create the NEF files that will open in PhotoShop, is to right click on the raw files. They will be 5,728KB in size, but named as JPEGs (as long as your camera’s set to anything but HI mode).

In the above image, you can see the 3 raw files that I’ve saved to my hard-drive. They are all 5,728KB. Underneath them you can see I’ve created a NEF file: DSCN0870.NEF if you have CS2 installed, you can double click this NEF file to open it in Photoshop, or open it in Adobe’s new Bridge program that’s part of CS2. Bridge will preview the images, you can then edit the images in the RAW dialogue by right clicking any of the NEF files, then choosing “Open in Camera Raw”. See this Quicktime demo on Adobe’s site for a quick run-through of what you can do in there.

I saw it suggested that users select the lowest quality setting image setting on the camera (Image Quality: Basic, Image Size 640×480)- as it will now save 2 images, one in RAW format and one at the quality setting that you choose. this JPEG image will be shown on the camera’s LCD and will allow you to preview images on the PC. (I’ll see how this goes- it may turn out to be too much of a pain to run everything through PhotoShop, so as I have a 1GB card I might just save hi-res JPEGs along with the RAW images, and only use the RAW files on images that justify the extra effort).