Nikon D50 and NEF formatted pictures

[glenngds2006]

I am still fairly new to Digital pictures. I managed to download to my computer some NEF or raw image format for the titled camera. The problem is that I know from the owners manual that this raw/NEF format is huge in every way(3024 X 2008) and multiple megabytes in size. Gimp says that the raw photos are 160 X 120, which might be the built in thumbnail for the picture, but not the actual picture. DigiKam tries to read the pictures and at least gets the size correct, but the output is garbage. Is there something that might read this picture format? Anyway I can email a copy of one of these photos to someone if they think they can decode it.

[markkuk]

Install the dcraw program or the ufraw GIMP plugin. Both are in standard Fedora repos.

[glenngds2006]

installed ufraw and now GIMP handles the pictures properly, thanks.

[glenngds2006]

tried to install dcraw and discovered it was already installed. Tried dcraw from the command line and everything seemed to work fine. When I actually looked at the converted pictures, it was randomly colored pixels and no true picture information. Digikam is obviously using dcraw to decode the pictures, because when I tried to load a picture into digikam, I got the same result. Thank God that ufraw plugin for GIMP works just fine!!!!!

[glenngds2006]

anyway I tried a normal photo of a cabinet and did it in raw/nef format and loaded into digikam and everything looked ok. When I tried to load a picture of Jupiter into digikam, I got randomly colored pixels and no Jupiter. I guess it cannot handle a picture that is mostly black with small amounts lit up.