Yesterday turned out to be quite an eventful day. And today started more or less where yesterday left off, so earlier today I went out and bought a Nikkor 24-70 ƒ2.8G ED lens, would you believe.

So now it was time to test this thing, the D700 and the 24-70mm together. So I've configured my D700 to shoot 14bit RAW files, and the time of day being close to sunset I thought it would give me a chance to test how this lens and the D700 RAW files would perform. Well, to say the least I'm shocked at how good this 14bit RAW thingy on the D700 is.

In my original shot the darkest areas are almost black, the values Lightroom  reported for the RGB channels where 0.1%, 0.0% and 0.0%; that is black in my book. So I thought, I can't possibly restore these values considering my experience with earlier cameras from Nikon, this was a throw-away image.

Well, not quite so at all. I started to adjust the image in Lightroom 2 (currently 2.2 Release 1), and I'm baffled that I was able to restore the RGB values to something that the human eye actually can see. But enough talk, I got picture evidence to prove it.

The first image below is the un-touched RAW file as how it exports from Lightroom.

Below is the corrected image. Note that I've just used the tools in Lightroom 2 to achieve this result, no HDR or tricks like that. Plain and simple adjustments in Lightroom 2.

Well, what can I say, I think it is quite remarkable to achieve this kind of results. This is just one RAW file, I conclude that the 14bit NEF can achieve miracles!, well, kinda. At least compared to the earlier cameras this is a miracle in my mind. I'm sure that my D2Xs would not be able to pull this off. So it is time to sell the D2Xs and get a second D700, or even a D3, ah well.

And we can go kinda over the top also with the colours, and do some cloning on some areas of the picture, and then we have this. Quite extreme, maybe, but the NEF files sure can take a beating.

Captured with a D700 and AF-S 24-70mm f2.8 lens. Written to SanDisk Extreme IV Ducati Edition compact flash card.