FixNEF

- Changing White Balance in Nikon Capture Hurts Your Pictures! -

Screen Shot

What it Does

Why You Need FixNEF

Why do we shoot in raw? We want to concentrate only on subject, composition, exposure, depth of field...etc. We don't want to waste our valuable time and effort on white balancing with gray card every time we take a picture, and we don't want to keep guessing which camera setting will make a better picture, either. We want to be able to override every signle camera setting later when we process our pictures with a raw converter.

When you take a picture in raw, all of the camera settings, including white balance setting, are stored in raw file header. White balance setting is stored as blue and red gain values. No matter what white balance setting you use in camera, the actual raw data will never be affected (D2X is an exception.). Therefore, you should be able to fix any badly white balanced shot as long as you shoot in raw, theoretically. However, Nikon Capture does not allow you to override the camera WB setting completely!

I'm not 100% sure as I didn't write Nikon Capture, but it seems that Nikon Capture adjusts the WB of a picture in two phases: The WB settings read from an NEF file are applied first, then the settings in Nikon Capture's WB tool are applied on top of that. The latter may or may not immediately follow the former. I do not know the inside detail of Nikon Capture but it seems that the first WB adjustment works well, but the second one doesn't, especially when you try to fix a badly white balanced picture.

Some examples here,

This shot was taken at the University of Toronto, Canada. I used my D70's auto white balance as I thought that I would be able to correct the white balance later.

I opened up the picture in Nikon Capture and tried to fix white balance using "Set Gray Point". However this is the best Nikon Capture could do.

I used the same red and blue gain values in Nikon Capture's WB tool for R2 and B2 in FixNEF. Huge improvement, eh? :)

This issue is not limited only to badly white balanced pictures. For high contrast pictures, even a small change of WB in Nikon Capture will seriously destroy color balance near highlight areas. I have also seen many examples how white balance change in Nikon Capture can easily damage overall color balance of a picture. You probably wouldn't believe what I say here because you have never seen what your pictures are supposed to look if processed properly.

FixNEF solves this issue by modifying WB setting in an NEF file so that no further WB change is needed in Nikon Capture. If used as instructed, FixNEF will merge two white balance settings: one from NEF file, the other from Nikon Capture's Gray point tool. And it will create a copy of your NEF file and write a merged WB setting into it. This newly generated NEF will be perfectly white balanced, so you will not need any WB change in Nikon Capture.

Comment on Encrypted D2X White Balance Information

As we all know, David Coffin revealed how to decrypt white balance info in dcraw.c. So it seems to me that it will take less than an hour to make FixNEF to work with D2X raws by using his algorithm. However, I do not intend to make FixNEF support D2X NEF, because I don't want to take the risk of getting sued by Nikon. (I highly doubt that they will actually sue me.) I will not make FixNEF work with any camera raws that has encrypted white balance info.

Nikon, you seem to sound like you are protecting your customers from getting wrong outputs by using wrong converters or wrong programs like FixNEF. You are totally misleading and fooling your customers. There are evidences that Nikon Capture prevents people from getting the most of raw format. Here, I have proven that Nikon Capture sometimes produces miserable outputs. According to Raw Magick, Nikon Capture does not allow that the embedded custom curve be changed. (For those who do not know, actually embedding a custom curve in NEF format produces different results from applying curve in Nikon Capture.) It also seems that the Nikon SDK is not good or suitable enough to be used in real applications and Adobe is not willing to use it. (See what Thomas Knoll said) Is there any real applications which use Nikon SDK? Let me know if there is any, except for Nikon Capture. What are you trying to do Nikon? Sell more Nikon Capture?

See what nikon responded to encrypted WB concerns

More Examples

White balanced in Nikon Capture (used gray point)

Corrected by FixNEF

Original picture (in-camera preset WB)

White balanced in Nikon Capture (used gray point)

Corrected by FixNEF

Original picture

White balanced in Nikon Capture (used set gray point tool)

Corrected by FixNEF. I know the difference is very subtle and it is hard to observe it in this small size. But there IS a difference. Prints make it evident. In Photoshop CS, I stacked the two pictures as layers, set "difference" blending mode, merged, and applied "auto level". See the picture below...

Does Nikon Capture compromise a little quality in exchange for better speed and/or memory management?

This is a cropped part of a picture. I slightly overexposed and blew out some details in this shot. (I didn't care about white balance when I shot this picture.) I tried my best to cover up this blown highlight part in Nikon Capture, but I couldn't do any better than this because adjusting the white balance in Nikon Capture left this ugly color at clipped highlight. Well, I could simply push this blown part to pure white - (255,255,255), but I didn't do it because it would have clipped other part of the image. Moreover, pure white surface is a very evil thing for inkjet print especially on a glossy surface. Pure white means "no ink" and it causes gloss differential problem for most pigment based printers, except for Epson R800 and R1800.

I let FixNEF to correct this problem and turned off Nikon Captures White Balance Tool. The blown part is pretty neutral now! The difference is not subtle. It is actually a significant difference to me because I'm a print fanatic. Note: prints can signify whatever defects your pictures may have. (If you don't see the difference, then your monitor is incapable of showing it.)

Recently, I have found that FixNEF is extremely useful for IR photography, because IR photos usually need significant white balance change. Some examples how FixNEF can help IR photography will soon be added to this page.

How to use FixNEF

• 1. Execute FixNEF.
• 2. Follow the instruction.
• 3. Open the modified NEF file in Nikon Capture.
• 4. Make sure that you turn off White Balance tool in Nikon Capture.

Known Issues

Bug Report

Download

• Download FixNEF v1.0.2 (Now Supports D70s!)

Other Useful Software and Links for Nikon DSLRs

Thank You for Your Support!