Aperture 3 Nikon NEF Presets

RB | 19 March 2010 | Apple Aperture, Articles | Aperture 3, Apple Aperture, NEF, Nikon, nx2, Presets | 8 Comments

Believe it or not the most popular topic on this site has been NEF presets for the last two weeks. Who would have ever guessed? Hey maybe I will start charging for them and get rich. Actually most of them are quick and dirty versions for cameras that I do not own. I am still working on my own presets for cameras that I do own. Nikon cameras. Treat these as starting points that will probably need to be tweaked in order to match NX2 colors and picture control contrast curves.

I will work on other cameras as time permits but until then I made a new category for all of the Nikon related Aperture 3 stuff – it is under the series block. This is to make it easier to find your camera or info you are interested in since nobody used the search box.

Consider this a lame first step to the Nikon Aperture 3 user community that I put out the little survey on.

Ps. If you have any Nikon/Aperture presets or observations feel free to comment or shoot me an email and I will be glad to share them with the billions of other Nikon shooters out there on this site.

8 Comments

Simone R. says

21 March 10 at 5:14pm

Hi. I didn’t find the D60 presets. Is the camera too old?
Rick Holliday says

22 March 10 at 9:38am

Thanks for providing the presets for my D300. If you need more files for the D700 and you have any interest in doing the same for that body, I would certainly be interested. If you need any raw files for the D700 please let me know and I can provide some. Thanks for you great site. I follow it regularly.
Chris Mielke says

22 March 10 at 7:43pm

I’ thinking the one on the left is the Aperture version. How did I do?
RB says

22 March 10 at 9:00pm

Chris – guess again. It should be a give away because the one of the right is highlighted and you can see that it is NOT a RAW file in the adjustments that are displayed – it is a TIFF that was Processed w/ NX2. The one one the left is the Aperture processed RAW with my NX2 simulation tweaks.

RB
DiploStrat says

23 March 10 at 4:25am

??? But he guessed the one on the left, didn’t he.

Interesting; the one on the right seems to have a healthy dose of noise reduction/skin smoothing.

I have enjoyed using your D200 “Landscape” preset and done my best to contribute to the overloading of your website by fanatic Nikon shooters. As for the others, ironically, I tend to prefer my own random efforts. I guess I am less addicted to the Nikon “look” than are some others.

Would you be willing to post a simple block diagram of the methodology you use to set up your presets? I have been doing mental gymnastics of things like shooting RAW+JPEG pairs and wondering if there isn’t some way to use the color eye droppers to lift the colors from a Nikon JPEG, photograph a color chart, etc., etc. I could imagine that there is tremendous scope for the use of the levels/curve tool in this. I really like the idea of being able to make my own.

All the best and many thanks!
Raehan Farrukh says

23 March 10 at 1:27pm

I am importing NEFs from D90 and using my own presets and setting it as default but for somehow A3 is not taking my presets, rather its default ones. BTW would you mind sharing some presets for D90?
Richard says

06 April 10 at 9:26am

Are there any Nikon D80 presets?
Fabio Sirna says

08 April 10 at 2:14pm

I’m interested in the D80 presets too. Can you explain how to build these presets for a specific camera? Thanks.