RAW update for Nikon d7200 and d5500 on Lightroom.

[Seventen]

Just so excited I needed to tell everyone, though I have been very impressed with the images straight from the camera I have noticed my white balance being slightly off and a few other things that would take a few seconds to fix in lightroom.

Also with the update came lightroom HDR and Panorama merging. Quite excited for these features. I don't really like the look of over done HDR but I do like to merge a few images together when taking pictures of Sunsets so can get everything exposed.
When I have done Panoramas in the past it has been quite slow sending from lightroom to photoshop hoping using just the one program will speed things up a little.

 

[Derrel]

Adobe products often guess wrongly on setting the As-Shot value for white balance on Nikon .NEF files...Nikon's WB settings are encrypted, and have been since the D2-generation back in 2004...only Nikon software can read the actual WB settings. But Adobe does a decent job of guessing/estimating/extrapolating--most of the time. This is a good example of Nikon's corporate arrogance. Years ago, Nikon Capture used to be an almost-reliable, but crash-prone piece of s/w, that made great raw conversions slowly, but beautifully, but over the years, Nikon Capture has become...horrible...and Lightroom has come along, and been developed to a wonderful level. Tweaking some WB settings is a small price to pay for the power and reliability of Adobe processing.

 

[Seventen]

Before I made the switch to Adobe Lightroom almost two years ago I enjoyed the Nikon software quite a lot. Since the arrival of the d7200 I was still thinking I would shoot RAW and go back to the Nikon software that I used to like, it was just so clunky feeling making small adjustments left me feeling annoyed (I do photography to feel happy and somewhat normal) I am sure when I used this Nikon software in the past it did not feel this bad, I even said to the wife it feels Nikon really not caring about the software sides of things (At least in my three years of using them feels this way)
Fixing white balance in camera would be more useful and need to work on this much more but I have to admit I got lazy using the auto white balance and changing what needed changing. The only times I would change it manually was for Astrophotography, night shots and when using a flash, otherwise left in auto.

 

[photoguy67]

I thought that "raw" had no white balance settings. Am I remembering wrong? I am a newbie to digital so I don't know, just thought I read that somewhere.

 

[Derrel]

I thought that "raw" had no white balance settings. Am I remembering wrong? I am a newbie to digital so I don't know, just thought I read that somewhere.

Well, yes, and no...raw has no permanently assigned WB value assigned to it, and the WB can easily be varied, but there "is" an actual "As-Shot" WB value, and knowing that value can make the JPEG conversion look pretty close to "right", while if the As-Shot value is way,way off, the colors will often look wonky. When a raw file is adjusted and readied for export to .TIF or .JPG format, the user will usually have set a white balance that gives the desired creative effect, so at some point, a WB needs to be assigned, and then that value implemented....so...it's handy if the raw conversion software can arrive at a close-enough WB value; my experience is that Lightroom is often 700 to 1,000 degrees Kelvin "off" from where I want the images to be on my camera's .NEF files.

 

[KmH]

Yep. A Raw file has no WB value.

Each Raw converter will have a somewhat different As-Shot value because each uses somewhat different algorithms to render a Raw file.

Adobe Camera Raw (Photoshop Camera Raw, LR Develop module, Elements Camera Raw) will look a bit different from IrFanView, Aperture, Raw Therapee, Phase One Media Pro (Expressions Media), and all the other Raw converters available.