What is Curve Surgery?

Most Nikon DSLR’s allow, through the use of Nikon Camera Control, to upload a custom curve into the camera. Unfortunately once the curve IS or ISNT embedded into your NEF file there is no way a changing that curve in Nikon Capture.

Curve Surgery allows you to extract/create/edit/embed curves to and from the NEF files.

So what?

The image that is displayed in Nikon Capture is AFTER the default curve or your in-camera curve has been applied. If your curve clips highlights badly, or you under/overexpose there is little way of reversing this effect. All other curves and levels edits in Nikon Capture are applied over the top of the default/user-defined curve.

And?

With Curve Surgery you can adjust these curves to your liking and then embed them back into a file. This means you are able to do some impressive post-editing at the most basic level of the RAW data.

Check it out here:

http://www.rawmagick.com/

If you lose the detailed RAW editor and just get RAW Adjustements dialogue, it’s most likely you have installed Nikon Capture or Picture Project.

Lose this:

And end up with this:

Pictures from: earthboundlight.com

This stupid software installs a plugin to Photoshop without your permission and overides the default RAW handling.

You can find the Nikon NEF plugin at

Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop CS\Plug-ins\Adobe Photoshop Only\File Formats

There you can delete it, after that you may get an error message such as:

could not complete your request because it is not the right kind of document

After you can go to the Adobe Camera RAW site and download the latest version (3.6 at this time).

Adobe Camera Raw and DNG Converter for Windows

After you’ve download this plugin put it in:

Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS\Plug-Ins\File Formats

And all should be well!