Processing RAW files from a Nikon Z6lll

My Z8 is rather older, and its High Efficiency NEF format is also not supported. But its not really a problem for me at all. See this:

Digital camera RAW formats supported by iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and visionOS 2 - Apple Support

Look at how many just Nikon cameras are on this list! Every camera model and sub-model has its very own RAW format that's different from all the others. Apple doesn't seem interested in writing new code to support them all, and I find it hard to blame them for that.

You can use Adobe's free Digital Negative (DNG) converter to make a universally acceptable RAW picture file. This is the format that Lightroom uses when it creates a new (edited) RAW file, and Apple and Photos supports it. 

I have my Z 8 save jpgs on the SD card and NEF files on the CFexpress card, and I import the jpgs to Photos. I use those jpgs to curate my pictures, rejecting most of them. Many of the jpgs are lovely on their own, but for the ones that seem like they could benefit from their RAW information, I edit them with either Nikon's NX studio (free!) or Adobe's Lightroom classic (subscription--bah!) I get the best results I can for these selected images with these RAW editors, and I export a jpg version that I can import to Photos. I sometimes find that I can further improve the image some with Photos own editor. 

Honestly, I don't see that Photos offers much advantage to editing RAW files, anyway.

It was released 9 months ago, to be specific. Support for a free app, generally comes slower than a paid or subscribed app such as Adobe Lightroom.

Are you using full size or compressed NEF files? Support for compressed files is many times limited. Have you tried full size NEF files? If so, what happens? Is your device updated to latest iOS, Mac OS etc.?

andrewgoodmanwa wrote: …The Adobe converter seems to have done the trick.

Cool!