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I've been stepping through a slew of photos taken with a Nikon D300, and stored in NEF format.

Some of them are duplicated with JPG copies (most likely due to setting JPG+RAW on the camera) and the colour-balance is identical across the two formats.

I've been trying to batch convert the RAW files that do not have accompanying JPGs using ImageMagick, but every time I try with a few cherry-picked images, the resulting image has a different colour composition (brightness, contrast and whitebalance).

I effectively want a pure 'pass through' from RAW to JPG without any additional processing, adding only data compression (fully aware that RAW is lossless and JPG is lossy, so there's no such thing, but I'm sure someone with a higher degree of pedantry will attempt to point that out).

Is there any flag/setting (or combination thereof) within convert or any other CLI tools that will address this?

What have I tried so far?

  • CLI flags:

    -define dng:use-camera-wb=true

    And:

    -auto-level

  • Google-fu: GPT reverse-engineering the Nikon's JPG settings, but this doesn't seem right as the RAW image is identical, I don't think any 'settings' are being applied.

Giacomo1968
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Craig Watson
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1 Answers1

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I effectively want a pure 'pass through' from RAW to JPG

No, probably not. What you see in most (all?) image viewers is the JPG image that's stored as part of the RAW data (otherwise, a dump of sensor data and probably assorted other settings info).

There are any number of free or $$ programs that will convert RAW to JPG/TIFF etc, many in batch mode.

Have a look at Nikon's own software for starters (free) https://www.nikonusa.com/content/nx-studio

Steve Rindsberg
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