Upon first view of corrupted D80 NEFs - any advice on how to work around this?

[LateJunction]

I have some NEFs from a Nikon D80, taken 13 years ago (*), which were corrupted  by Nikon Capture NX when being loaded into my desktop. I was quickly referred to the excellent 'Fix Corrupted Nikon NEF images' at exiftool.org, only to find that the D80 is not supported. Is there some way around this restriction?

(*) Yes, I am a little behind in my raw processing, but not that bad: the images can be opened without issue by Adobe products, but when I switched to darktable and for other reasons returned to these much older images, I quickly learned that those which had been subject to Nikon software are not open-able in F/OSS and non-Adobe applications.

[Phil Harvey]

Send one of the corrupted files to me and I'll see if it can be fixed (philharvey66 at gmail.com)

- Phil

[LateJunction]

Send one of the corrupted files to me and I'll see if it can be fixed (philharvey66 at gmail.com)

- Phil

A generous, kind offer; thank you. Will send immediately.

[Phil Harvey]

Sorry to say that this image has been modified by software other than just Nikon Capture.  It seems that it has also been tagged by Adobe Photoshop CS2, which has done significant damage to the file.  The image may still be recoverable, but not by the fix_corrupted_nef utility unfortunately.

- Phil

[LateJunction]

Thank you for investigating this corrupted file. The discovery that the file has been damaged by Photoshop - in which I trusted - is most disappointing to me. I wonder if that is a 'user error', bearing in mind that I really did not understand the significance of adjustment layers and non-destructive editing until I upgraded to CS6 and began using Lightroom. Up to then I was quite 'happy', in my ignorance, to modify image pixels.

It has been suggested that I open these damaged NEFs in CS6, with no modifications in camera raw at all, and export them as 16 bit TIFs. This I have done; the files are much smaller than I expected, but the results are good enough for 5" x 7" jpegs. I'll have to live with that, but lessons learned.

Thanks again for your support.

[Phil Harvey]

If the file was indeed corrupted by Nikon Transfer, then editing it with anything afterwards will result in irreversible damage.  I don't think that Photoshop would corrupt a good NEF.

- Phil