Nikon Z9 and Nikon Z8 High Efficiency* and High Efficiency compressed RAW support

[Ro2023]

It was great to see Photomator recently expand RAW support to include Fujifilm compressed RAW formats. With Apple increasingly dropping the ball on RAW support, products such as RAW Power and Photomator taking things into their own hands is extremely valuable.

Is there any plan / timeline to also support Nikon Z9 and Nikon Z8 compressed RAW (aka High Efficiency* and High Efficiency)?

The Nikon Z9 was released in October 2019. Apple has chosen to support the older-style Lossless Compressed RAW for the Nikon Z9 (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213267), but for almost two years haven’t moved on the compressed format. It stands to reason that the Nikon Z8 Lossless Compressed RAW will also be supported by Apple at some stage but I’m not optimistic about the High Efficiency* and High Efficiency compressed formats. There’s quite a strong incentive on owners of these cameras (and likely future Nikon cameras) to use these compressed formats, and I certainly do. A standard Lossless Compressed RAW image from the Z9 and Z8 (both use the same 45MP sensor) is approximately 50MB, while a High Efficiency* equivalent is approximately 30MB and High Efficiency equivalent is approximately 20MB, in each case with no to very little difference compared to the Lossless Compressed RAW (https://www.dpreview.com/articles/36773 ... ittle-cost).

Nikon seem to have based their High Efficiency* and High Efficiency RAW format on IntoPIX’s TicoRAW technology (https://nikonrumors.com/2021/12/07/tico ... ding.aspx/). I’m not sure if it makes decoding the Nikon format easier, but IntoPIX also publish a SDK for decoding (and encoding) their compressed file formats (intoPIX Fast TicoRAW SDK for CPU & GPU | TicoRAW).

So far, I’m aware that, among others, Lightroom, Capture One, Mylio, ON1, DxO and (obviously) NX Studio support all RAW formats from the Z9 and Z8. It would be great to also have this support with Photomator.

[Cory Crook]

I second this request as well…

[Paul Zammit]

I third this, it's unfortunately Jun 2024 and my hopes are slowly diminishing that my dream to fully switch to Photomator workflow is diminishing.

I'm hoping it's on Apple's plans to introduce this hopefully with iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, but if not, maybe Pixelmator team comes to the rescue just like they did with Fuji.

[Ro2023]

The disappointing thing is that it’s a fairly straightforward process to obtain the necessary IntoPIX SDK from Nikon and integrate into your software. Having been through the process, I offered to help the Pixelmator team with this in October last year but was told that “we'll keep it in mind as we proceed”. I haven’t heard anything since, even as the number of popular cameras using HE and HE* continues to grow - Z9, Z8, Zf, Z6III and counting.

In the meanwhile, others developers have shown a more serious commitment to extending raw support. Nitro from Gentlemen Coders is really great.

[Albertas]

This has definitely been a long time coming, but with our latest extended RAW support update, we focused on adding support for compressed Nikon RAWs, now letting you work with photos shot using High Efficiency (HE) and High Efficiency Star (HE*) compression algorithms, plus some other new and highly requested camera models.

You'll find our blog post with some more details here! - https://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2024/07 ... -and-more/