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NEF Viewer

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Ronnie T

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I only shoot raw NEF's and I want to have my family view the pics from another PC in the network. What is the best nef viewer out there:

1. regardless of price
2. best price/performance
 
Ronnie T. said:
I only shoot raw NEF's and I want to have my family view the pics
from another PC in the network. What is the best nef viewer out
there:

1. regardless of price
2. best price/performance
Click to expand...
Assuming that the "network" is a LAN [i.e., PCs networked in your home], why not use the Nikon View [or Picture Perfect] that was bundled with the camera?

Of course, I don't recommend those for "editing", but should work just fine for viewing. And you don't have to pay for it.
 
Photo Mechanic is the fastest viewer of them all. I think I've tried them all, and PM is by far the fastest.

It has a trial, so give it a shot
--
=========
  • Jimi V
Art is where you find it.
 
Photo Mechanic is hands-down the best NEF viewer, organizer, and metadata editor. It is also the fastest.

aparat
 
Just tried it. Wow! Blazing fast!
Any downside? Features missing?
Regards
JC
 
Hi Ronnie,

I also tried Photo Mechanic bu to me it uses a tremendous amount of memory, and the thumbnails as well as previed picrures are over saturated.

You should have a look at Google Picass2, at firs I thoght it was a toy but now, I use it everyday for fas viewing. It's also fast, has a couple of really features the Photo Mechanic doesn't have and it's free.

Really deserves a try.

Dominique
Ronnie T. said:
I only shoot raw NEF's and I want to have my family view the pics
from another PC in the network. What is the best nef viewer out
there:

1. regardless of price
2. best price/performance
Click to expand...
--
Dominique
D200 -- 'Little Big Cam'
http://domino.smugmug.com
 
domino said:
Thumbnails and preview are oversaturated.
Uses too much memory.
Click to expand...
Photo Mechanic does proper Color Management. Many applications do no Color Management of any kind. This may be the first time you have seen your images Color Managed. It may be that your monitor is not properly calibrated. Color Management is essential for judging the quality of your photos. If you like the desaturated look, you can turn Color Management off. You can do this by unchecking the Color Management icon in the toolbars.

As for memory use, you can control how much memory Photo Mechanic uses on the Caching tab of the Preferences dialog. It does not use much more memory than you allow it (there is some overhead for various data structures, so if you give it 64MB for the memory cache then it might use 80 or more MB of RAM, but not by much.)

HTH,

-Kirk

Kirk A. Baker
Senior Software Engineer
Camera Bits, Inc.
 
Kirk

I am running the software on Vista and on Mac. The display of the pictures is very fast. I am impressed.

However, on Vista, the options in the drop-down menu takes a long time to be accessed. Using the Alt keys ( Alt-F ) is a little bit quicker. Is this normal on PC ( Windows XP or Windows 2000 ) as on Mac it is different?
Anyone has used the menus on PC? Is it fast or slow and sometimes hanging?
JC
 
Hi Kirk,

Thanks for your comments, however I calibrated my monitor with Adobe utility and my pictures look OK in Photoshop. Their look in Picasa is closer to Photoshop look than PM look, which really looks oversaturated. Am I missing something?
Thanks for your help.
Dominique
Kirk Baker said:
domino said:
Thumbnails and preview are oversaturated.
Uses too much memory.
Click to expand...
Photo Mechanic does proper Color Management. Many applications do
no Color Management of any kind. This may be the first time you
have seen your images Color Managed. It may be that your monitor
is not properly calibrated. Color Management is essential for
judging the quality of your photos. If you like the desaturated
look, you can turn Color Management off. You can do this by
unchecking the Color Management icon in the toolbars.

As for memory use, you can control how much memory Photo Mechanic
uses on the Caching tab of the Preferences dialog. It does not use
much more memory than you allow it (there is some overhead for
various data structures, so if you give it 64MB for the memory
cache then it might use 80 or more MB of RAM, but not by much.)

HTH,

-Kirk

Kirk A. Baker
Senior Software Engineer
Camera Bits, Inc.
Click to expand...
--
Dominique
D200 -- 'Little Big Cam'
http://domino.smugmug.com
 
If you shoot Raw + jpeg basic, others will be able to view the jpegs with any viewer including MS Office Picture Mgr that's bundled with Windows.
 
JC,
jcnjcn said:
Kirk
I am running the software on Vista and on Mac. The display of the
pictures is very fast. I am impressed.
However, on Vista, the options in the drop-down menu takes a long
time to be accessed. Using the Alt keys ( Alt-F ) is a little
bit quicker. Is this normal on PC ( Windows XP or Windows 2000 )
as on Mac it is different?
Anyone has used the menus on PC? Is it fast or slow and sometimes
hanging?
Click to expand...
The GUI code that we use (Ultimate Toolbox) is incompatible with Vista. They are supposedly working on a compatible release. When it is available we will upgrade to the compatible version.

The menus are quite speedy on Windows XP and Windows 2000.

-Kirk
 
Dominique,
domino said:
Thanks for your comments, however I calibrated my monitor with
Adobe utility and my pictures look OK in Photoshop. Their look in
Picasa is closer to Photoshop look than PM look, which really looks
oversaturated. Am I missing something?
Click to expand...
You need to use a high-quality Colorimeter in order to properly calibrate your monitor, and you should re-calibrate your monitor monthly on CRTs and every few months on an LCD. Adobe's color utility is not nearly as accurate as a colorimeter.

We have a lot of users who use both Photo Mechanic and Photoshop CS2 and do not notice much difference between Photo Mechanic's color and Photoshop CS2's color once calibrated.

Gretag-Macbeth makes a nice one for less than$100.00. I picked up their last generation hardware a few months ago for about $50.00...

HTH,

-Kirk

Kirk A. Baker
Senior Software Engineer
Camera Bits, Inc.
 
I found Picassa is too bloody smart - it tries to take over my PC. All I want is to be able to view the folder I pick of NEFs. I do NOT want my PC scanned (I have 4 million files), I do not want a databse built (I use iMatch for that) and I certainly don't want something else to monitor insertion of camera or USB device.

I would like an Irfanview lookalike that handles NEFs and does it fast.

Any alternatives?
--
paul szilard
http://www.remektek.com.au
 
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