Opening RAW in Adobe Photoshop

The Situation

Recently I encountered a problem with my office's D60. I was assigned to shoot a group photo of every department for our annual office report. A habit, I always try to shoot in RAW mode (for Nikon, a RAW file is known as NEF) as it offers great flexibility later in the post-processing stage.

I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS2 at the office and home. The plug-in it supports to process RAW files is only ACR (Adobe Camera RAW) version 3 and above but until version 4 as the version 4 is only compatible for Adobe Photoshop CS3 and above.

The Problem

The problem was that when I wanted to open the NEF files produced direct from the D60 in CS2. It just can't open. I thought something must have gone wrong with my plug-in. After few re-installations, I thought why don't I try open up another NEF file from my own collection (which is from my own camera - D80) to see whether it works or not and it worked just fine. Then, something surely is not right with these particular NEF files and the only difference I managed to figure out was the make of both cameras.

So, I started googling.

The Research

To my surprise, for CS2 and the ACR it's using does not support the RAW (or NEF) that came out from D60, despite having D40 & D80 in the list. By looking at the list, I assume that the recently released model would probably going to have a problem when opening their RAW file with CS2 or earlier version.

Looking for a solution, I saw common suggestions like upgrading your Photoshop to the newer version or use Nikon's own software - Nikon Capture NX2 which at first I thought is bundled together with the camera's packaging.

It's not.

Analysis and Solution

Upgrading my Photoshop is not a choice while Nikon Capture NX2 is not a bundled software which means it has its own price. Searching for another alternative, I found Adobe DNG Converter. The software converts RAW files under different extensions (example NEF is for Nikon and for Canon, I'm not pretty sure what is its RAW file named after) based on their maker and model into the version of a RAW that Photoshop of any version could universally understand and it is called a DNG file.

So, the problem is solved.

That is after few days of research and download. I hope this might be useful for someone who might encounter similar problems by understanding the concept of what is RAW file and how it works based from its maker, model and the version of post-processing software you are using.