Don't leave development firmware on you camera...

It shouldn’t need to be said, but “Don’t leave development firmware on you camera“ in late December I was trying to fix the Lossless NEF file corruption problem on my D5100. I loaded a firmware, found it didn’t fix the problem, and then went back to studying the code. I few hours later, as a family we went off to a New Years eve party, and I picked up my camera, and snapped some real keepers.

Next day, I plugged the SD card in and found that Lightroom was

Lightroom has encountered problems reading this photo. You will not be able to make adjustments to the photo.

Arrg.

There is a good example of how to pull the preview jpeg’s, but when I did that, the preview pictures were 570x375, and thus not worth keeping, so some reading of the help file and this command pulled the embedded 4928x3264 jpegs.

exiftool.exe -b -JpgFromRaw -w _jpgfromraw.jpg -ext nef -r .

Which is better sized albeit a little over compressed. But better than nothing.

Now to solve the lossless NEF problem once and for all, and try resolve if the raw files can truly be recovered…