Raw NEF file, conversion. H.264? Photoshop. After Effects

Didn't know how to ask the question in just a simple sentence.

The problem is: I took some pictures for a family in RAW format on my Nikon, they are saved as an NEF file. While I was taking the pictures I did not know that after effects is unable to deal with raw photos… (I'm a video editor and so I do not know how to use photoshop, just AE and premiere.) I could be mistaken on this as I know for sure I have edited raw 'footage' in AE and Premiere, so I don't know why it couldn't handle an image. Anyways, at this point I think I have to sacrifice that raw quality and throw it into a JPEG so that I can edit it using AE instead of Photoshop. -Not only do I not have time to learn Photoshop right now but I have a plugin in AE that I would like to use for this. However, from what I've seen briefly with PS I may be able to figure out how to do some color correcting before the convert.

So my question then is what should I do to preserve the most quality from that Raw image? Would it be best to do 'color correction' on the raw image in PS and then export it as h.264 so I can further grade it in AE? Or should I just skip working in PS all together and just use it to convert? I'm trying to preserve the most detail here (obviously) so if there's another option I missed I'm up for anything!

Sorry if I'm being confusing here… I know this is probably a dumb question, any help would really be appreciated though!

All you need is a program like Adobe Lightroom 5 and you can process all the RAW images in batches, exporting them as JPEG image files when you are finished processing them.

If you don't want to spend the $150 for Lightroom, you can download the free RAW to DNG converter from Adobe and then convert all your RAW files to DNG files. At that point just about any photo program can process those files, which you can then export as JPEG images.

In any case, you will have to process the RAW images before you can use them. How you export the processed images, either as JPEG or TIFF files is up to you. As you know, TIFF files are uncompressed and provide the highest resolution image files.

You don't say which version of Photoshop you have access to and the model number of the camera.So, you'll get a confusing generic answer. To covert your raw file, use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) if you have a CS version of Photoshop. Just drag the raw image on Photoshop and it might open if your camera is supported by ACR. This all depends on model of camera and version of ACR.

If that doesn't work, then you can download a free program from Adobe called Adobe DNG Converter. This will convert your raw image to DNG format which any version of Photoshop CS can open (be sure to set the DNG version level properly in DNG Converter). Save your images as 16-bit per color.

If your video program can handle TIFF images, In Photoshop, convert the DNG image to 16-bit TIFF. If your video program can't handle 16-bit, then use 8-bit TIFF. If your video program can't handle TIFF, then a high quality JPEG will more than suffice.

Side note - You do not export still images as. H264.H264 is only for video. You generally import JPEG, perhaps TIFF images in to your video time line.

Since you're editing. H264, why worry about raw quality. Your. H264 is compressed video which means it's already compromised, so JPEG images will be just fine. Plus, a still image has way more resolution than a 1080p frame.

One other thing you can do is extract the JPEG thumbnail image from your raw image. Easy to do with a command line program like dcraw.exe (from the command line, dcraw -e *.nef will extract all thumbnail images from the directory).

There are few raw video formats. There are hundreds of raw formats for still images. Raw formats are slightly different for each camera model in the Nikon lineup. Adobe assumes that you know how to handle raw images in ACR or Lightroom, thus won't put that functionality for raw still images in a program used to edit video.