Nikon NEF raw development quality loss, Affinity Photo v.2.3.0. on Mac

[Zoli1989]

Hello, 

I just faced a situation which makes me worry, and I'd like to understand whether I do something wrong or it is a real issue. 

I just bought a Nikon Z8, and I dowloaded all the Nikon softwares (NX tether, NX studio) for tethering. For developing and editing I wanted to keep using Affinity Photo, but when I sent to raw file from NX Studio to Affinity photo I realised that they are different. 
Please have a look at the attached pictures: 1. back of the camera, 2. in NX STUDIO 3. Affinity Photo develop persona.

The histogram in the camera and NX studio is the same, but different in Photo and the overall, sharpness, and image quality as well. If I choose don't apply cone curve, the histogram is just even more different, and goes tot he darker side. If I change RAW Engine to Apple it's quite the same. 

My question is, whether this is something that can be fixed by some settings, or Affinity just can't process the NEF files equally well? 

Thank you very much in advance for your kind answer. I would love to be able to continue working in Photo. 

Zoltán

[v_kyr]

Well the difference is due to the fact that Nikon knows very well how to showup and interpret all of it's camera settings inside/from NEF files, like Active D-Lighting, Picture Control, Scene modes, ... etc. Even all of the difficult for other vendors to interpret specific Nikon EXIF Maker Notes. So what a cams internal screen and Nikon Studio do as default show here is pretty identical, as they can and know to deal with the same NEF & JPG data.

Affinity Photo on the other side in contrast here, doesn't apply any default presettings like brightness/contrast, sharpening, ... etc. It also doesn't have any clue about interpreting any Active D-Lighting, Picture Control settings and the like. Thus it's default image looks much more dull, flatter and unsharp here. - For APh you would have to setup some own presettings which deal with those things here, in order to get similar looking results.

Some of the big guys in the commercial field of RAW-Converters (Lightroom/ACR, C1, DxO, ...) can and do interpret more out of NEF settings here, they do apply some more cam presettings here so the images come closer to what Nikon Studio would as default show up.

IN SHORT: that's normal for Affinity Photo here.

[firstdefence]

Which one looks closer to the actual product and which one do you prefer?

[Zoli1989]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Well the difference is due to the fact that Nikon knows very well how to showup and interpret all of it's camera settings inside/from NEF files, like Active D-Lighting, Picture Control, Scene modes, ... etc. Even all of the difficult for other vendors to interpret specific Nikon EXIF Maker Notes. So what a cams internal screen and Nikon Studio do as default show here is pretty identical, as they can and know to deal with the same NEF & JPG data.

Affinity Photo on the other side in contrast here, doesn't apply any default presettings like brightness/contrast, sharpening, ... etc. It also doesn't have any clue about interpreting any Active D-Lighting, Picture Control settings and the like. Thus it's default image looks much more dull, flatter and unsharp here. - For APh you would have to setup some own presettings which deal with those things here, in order to get similar looking results.

Some of the big guys in the commercial field of RAW-Converters (Lightroom/ACR, C1, DxO, ...) can and do interpret more out of NEF settings here, they do apply some more cam presettings here so the images come closer to what Nikon Studio would as default show up.

IN SHORT: that's normal for Affinity Photo here.

Thank you very much! I really appreciate the detailed answer! I guess if I wanna stick with Photo, I'll just have to try and get close to the Nikon look with presets as you suggested. 

[Zoli1989]

52 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Which one looks closer to the actual product and which one do you prefer?

I prefer the one which gives back what I can see through and on the camera, so the Nikon in this case. 

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, Zoli1989 said:

I prefer the one which gives back what I can see through and on the camera, so the Nikon in this case. 

You should be able to create the same appearance using Affinity Photo, but it will involve more manual work and a learning curve of what changes you need to make.

 

[Zoli1989]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

You should be able to create the same appearance using Affinity Photo, but it will involve more manual work and a learning curve of what changes you need to make.

 

Thank you! I'll make a nice and "easy" reference picture, so I'll be able to check all the details and values I need to compare the looks, then I'll play with the settings

 

[v_kyr]

Note further that the Nikon Z8 is not yet officially supported by the Serif RAW engine (and it's underlayed Libraw) and also not by the actual Apple RAW engine, thus it has not yet been listed in/among the list of supported camera formats there. The latter for the Serif RAW engine is more due to the LibRaw support, which underlies APh and which is used by APh to read the Nikon NEF RAW files.

However, it seems that Nikon Z8 NEFs (without hi compression) can still be opened in APh, as the uncompressed Nikon Z8 NEFs are similar to those of the Z9 (the latter is supported for uncompressed NEFs by APh/Libraw/Apple's latest RAW engine).

For Nikon's high effency raw recording (compression) of Nikon Z9/Z8/Zf cams, the TicoRaw RAW codec engine is used by Nikon, which is only supported by few RAW-Converters so far (Nikon Studio, Lightroom/ACR, C1, ...). So only few RAW-Converters can deal with such high effency compressed NEFs.

[Zoli1989]

2 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Note further that the Nikon Z8 is not yet officially supported by the Serif RAW engine (and it's underlayed Libraw) and also not by the actual Apple RAW engine, thus it has not yet been listed in/among the list of supported camera formats there. The latter for the Serif RAW engine is more due to the LibRaw support, which underlies APh and which is used by APh to read the Nikon NEF RAW files.

However, it seems that Nikon Z8 NEFs (without hi compression) can still be opened in APh, as the uncompressed Nikon Z8 NEFs are similar to those of the Z9 (the latter is supported for uncompressed NEFs by APh/Libraw).

For Nikon's high effency raw recording (compression) of Nikon Z9/Z8/Zf cams, the TicoRaw RAW codec engine is used by Nikon, which is only supported by few RAW-Converters so far (Nikon Studio, Lightroom/ACR, C1, ...). So only few RAW-Converters can deal with such high effency compressed NEFs.

In fact, I checked some raw compression settings in the camera, and only uncompressed could be opened in APh. I'll wait and see what will happen once it's supported. In the meantime I can play with presets, or just develop in NX Studio and do further edits in Photo. 

[Yair]

Thank you so much for posting this. Yeah, I want to cry when I open my beautiful raw images in Affinity. I cannot get the Developement Persona to match what I see on NX Studio. So until Z8 is included in Affinity, I will shoot HE* and change my workflow to do all the corrections/enhancements in NX studio (which is not too bad) and if I need any additional edits I will convert to Tiff/JPEG and use Affinity.

[Zoli1989]

1 hour ago, Yair said:

Thank you so much for posting this. Yeah, I want to cry when I open my beautiful raw images in Affinity. I cannot get the Developement Persona to match what I see on NX Studio. So until Z8 is included in Affinity, I will shoot HE* and change my workflow to do all the corrections/enhancements in NX studio (which is not too bad) and if I need any additional edits I will convert to Tiff/JPEG and use Affinity.

Well, until I don't have time to make presets for the raw development in affinity I think I just do the same. Raw development if needed I do in NX Studio, then 16 bit Tiff exported in Affinity if retouching or other things are needed. 
But once I have time, I'd do the presets cause I like working in Photo and NX Studio is dull in many other ways after Photo. 

[Yair]

I love working with Photo but I love my images more. Good luck with creating presets that will give you the same images look coming out of NX. For me it was impossible because photo couldn't read the colors correctly, maybe my knowledge is limited and that is why I couldn't create a good preset to get me to where I need.

 

[GreenSWOhio]

This is not a Mac issue, no one suggested it was. But I have a similar situation on Windows.

And there was a discovery process for me. I knew AP could not process high efficiency NEF files. But I did not know it was doing such a poor job on uncompressed NEFs. 

Does anyone have experience with Lightroom or Photoshop? Do they also miss the mark on processing NEFs? 

How does AP perform on raw files from other manufactures?

AP should drop the DEVELOP persona; at least for NEF files. It is a disservice.

[GreenSWOhio]

This morning I read that Mac users can now process Z8 / Z9 NEF files. Details were scant. 

Does anyone know if Macs learned how to process the High Efficiency NEFs? 

[Alfred]

35 minutes ago, GreenSWOhio said:

This morning I read that Mac users can now process Z8 / Z9 NEF files. Details were scant. 

Does anyone know if Macs learned how to process the High Efficiency NEFs? 

Support for Z8 NEFs is coming in the next update, but unfortunately not for ‘High Efficiency’ NEFs.

 

[v_kyr]

As I often mentioned in this forum for ‘High Efficiency’ NEFs ...

On 1/14/2024 at 1:48 PM, v_kyr said:

For Nikon's high effency raw recording (compression) of Nikon Z9/Z8/Zf cams, the TicoRaw RAW codec engine is used by Nikon, which is only supported by few RAW-Converters so far (Nikon Studio, Lightroom/ACR, C1, ...)...

So in order to support ‘High Efficiency’ NEFs, any RAW Converter vendor has to use either Nikon's own development SDK or probably the TicoRAW SDK (...the later costs them additional money).

3 hours ago, GreenSWOhio said:

Does anyone know if Macs learned how to process the High Efficiency NEFs? 

Of course, by using one of the RAW converters which do support to decode Nikon he* NEFs, so some software (NX Studio, ACR/LG, C1, DxO, ...) which makes use of above named SDKs. - Apple's RAW Engine itself, AFAIK actually doesn't (according to their list from 26 September 2023).