Mastering the Nikon D850

NEF (RAW) Recording

(User’s Manual: Page 252, Menu Guide: Page 48)

NEF (RAW) recording is composed of two menu choices—NEF (RAW) compression, which affects image file size, and NEF (RAW) bit depth, which affects color quality. Let’s examine each choice.

NEF (RAW) Compression

In previous sections, we discussed how JPEG files have different levels of compression that vary the size of a finished image file. NEF (RAW) also has compression choices, though not as many. The nice thing about the RAW compression methods is that they don’t throw away massive amounts of image data like JPEG compression does. NEF (RAW) is not considered a lossy format because the file stays complete, with virtually all the image data your camera captured.

One of the compression ...