Shooting Raw-MacGuy

[rocknrollsailor]

I have a Nikon D40 x and am rather new to the digital world. I have been shooting raw and editing with I photo. I've seen what photoshop can do and I will be getting educated in it.
In the meantime I have images some people love and want them bigger than 8x10 .
It seems when I edit in I photo my images drop from around 8 megs to 2.4 megs.
Any hints to what I can do in the meantime,. Should I stick to highest quality J-Peg?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Jordo

[jdepould]

Are you editing jpegs? If you don't have something that can edit your NEFs, then convert to TIFF for editing, so you aren't compressing needlessly. Then, when you're all finished, save as a jpeg at maximum quality.

[EddieNikon]

I have a D60 and shoot in RAW. I use Adobe DNG converter to convert my NEFs to DNG and edit the DNG files in Lightroom and Photoshop, then convert it to JPEG at maximum quality.

[jdepould]

If you have Lightroom, you don't need the DNG converter. You might need to update your Lightroom, but it can handle NEFs natively, and even convert to DNG on import if you want.

[rocknrollsailor]

Thanx, sounds like the other formats are needed. Any I-photo types out there with an idea converting raw,editing and keeping higher megs?

[OsmosisStudios]

When you convert the RAW file to jpg, you dont LOSE anything. Filesize has very little to do with quality.

A 2.4-4mb JPG is big for the format, and appropriate for the D40x. Megapixels and megabytes are not the same thing.

You CAN make larger prints with the D40x. Up to 11x14 in 300dpi guise. But you can go very very high, provided your viewer is far enough away. I've had 24x36 and 20x30 inch prints made of my photos and there was no problem