Digital BW, The Print

Paul,

Here is some info that supports that:

"NEF files are often referred as a proprietary format, but this is not 
completely true: indeed they are

compliant with the TIFF 6.0 specifications. Basically TIFF files are 
composed by a set of Image File

Directories (IFD), which are small data blocks describing the contents of 
the file (not only graphics

information such as resolution, size and so on but even photographic 
information such as shutter

speed, aperture, comments, copyright notices and so on). They usually 
contain a single image, but

they can hold more than one (most of times the secondary images are 
thumbnails, reduced-size

copies of the main image which can be previewed quickly). Manufacturers can 
add proprietary tags,

which Nikon did, so the proprietary part in NEF files is actually a small 
part."



- from http://www.tidalwave.it/projects/nefio/NEF.pdfage



So they are 'tiff' files, which is presumably why Canon called them so to 
start with.



Bob Frost



From: "Paul D. DeRocco" <pderocco@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>

Actually, they probably are TIFF files, just not the kind most software
expects. TIFF is a packaging format for image data, and can encapsulate
anything including proprietary data. In that respect, it's like AVI for
video files. You can wrap JPEG compressed data in a TIFF file if you want.
And indeed, the new Adobe DNG format is a TIFF file. It's just that the most
common use of TIFF is to wrap uncompressed or losslessly compressed image
data, so that's all most software supports.