Hello I need help please! I had a new assistant help shoot a wedding and went to open his files in Bridge, but am having trouble with photoshop cs2 reading or even opening them. I can see them fine on my portable hardrive, but I need to edit them and I can't figure whats up. I downloaded all the latest updates for CS2, but no luck. Any suggestions? He shot with a Nikon (im a canon girl) and his files start with MNA an extension that I haven't seen before. HELP! PLEASE!

I don't know Nikon and I have no idea what MNA means? BUT, the only thing I can think of is if his camera isn't supported in CS2. Try downloading a trial CS3 or Lightroom from Adobe and see if it's able to read then?

Hopefully Bryce or someone else can chime in... Good luck!

CS2 does not support many new cameras, so depending on what model he uses (a little more info would be helpful) you probably won't be able to open his images in photoshop's RAW plugin. I suggest using Adobe Lightroom for all of your RAW needs. Not only does it and will it support all cameras now and in the future, it helps organize your images and provides an incredible RAW developing experience that will save you TONS of time over your current workflow. It's worth every penny of the $200 price tag.

http://www.adobelightroom.com get the free fully functional 30 day trial and try it out on those RAW files. I'm thinking you'll be hooked after using it, so enjoy!

Rather than doing all that, download either adobe's DNG converter (which will let you open the images in your existing CS2) or faststone (which can read most raws).

How big are the files? I have limited Nikon experience, but I thought their format was NEF. You didn't end up with the thumbnails by mistake, did you? (Like the canon .thm files)

Good luck!

Shan

Lightroom would still be a good move for her if she's still using the "old" workflow in CS2's RAW Plugin... honestly that's pretty archaic.

True, but if she's comfortable, and this is a one-time issue, then the DNG converter would be ideal for this situation.

The full version of LR2 is $299 from what I'm finding - where are you seeing it for $200?

Shan

I guess I got it with the early-adopter discount.

It's still worth more than $300 IMO. It saves like 500% more time than the CS2 RAW workflow.... so ridiculously nice, but funny that a lot of people don't realize it or are scared to try it.... LR is incredibly easy to learn the basics of, and not much harder to pick up on the more advanced aspects of the program.

Just sayin....

I have it too (2 copies) so I agree with you that LR is better for conversions than bridge.

When I switched to linux, that's how I found bibble (which was around long before LR). Adobe did a great job with their user interface, and bibble is going that route as well.

The one thing that always bugged me about LR was it seems odd how you save your work - it's almost as if exporting was an afterthought. (Shouldn't that have been a tab - surely more people need to send images to a lab than to create a slideshow!)

I haven't seen LR2 since the beta, so I can't remember if that has changed or not.

Bibble rocks though - you can have different export batches (web jpgs, full jpgs, 8 bit tiffs, 16 bit tiffs, you name it). That's where they've always focused (output quality + speed) and adobe went for easy user interface. Fortunately with LR2 and Bibble5, both companies have made big strides in their weak areas.

Shan

I use both a D200 and D300 and confirm this is an option for the user. You can actuall change the file naming convention in camera. Those must be his initials, no?

And furthermore, if the file names START with MNA, it isn't an extension.

Thanks all I'll try downloading CS3 for now to see if that works. I have Lightroom I recently purchased it, but since I have more experiance in Bridge I planned on finishing this wedding season using bridge so that I can learn Lightroom more on my own time this fall. I'm in a time crunch for this wedding, the groom is being deployed soon, so I wanted to get the images done asap. Thanks for all your input, the files do end in nef, my other assistant uses nikon too and hers works fine. He had a new nikon camera so I really do think it's just not compatible with CS2. Hoping it'll work in CS3. Thanks, again!

Just be sure to download the most recent version of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and install it according to the instructions.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html

That, plus CS3 and you should be fine.

Let us know what fixed it!