What you can do to a Nikon Z 7 massive RAW file?

1 year ago, I was in Hong Kong with a Nikon D850 and shot a night cityscape panorama right when the typhoon – Hato landed.  Fast forward 1 year later, I had the opportunity to carry the latest and the brand new mirrorless ILC system from Nikon to Taiwan.

I believe you can find tons of reviews and info online currently and I am not going to bored you with that anymore.  Instead, I would like to share the actual out-of-camera RAW output, shot in 14-bits Loseless Compressed for you to play around and have some ideas what the camera can provide.

As we know, Nikon files typically can be recovered nicely in the shadow area, so the shot was intendedly shot to preserved as much highlight as possible.  In this example, the camera was set to -1.7EV under Aperture priority mode, and let the camera do the rest.

-1.7EV
Intendedly underexposed to -1.7EV to preserved highlight

The photo was shot with the new Nikkor Z 35mm f/1.8 S lens.  From the output, you can see that the details was nicely captured despite the strong backlit situation and generally dimmed foreground area.  To illustrate what you can do in post, I did some basic adjustment to bring out the shadow details and recreated the tones using Adobe Camera Raw (Which are currently in beta version for Nikon Z).

Adjusted to bring out shadow details and color while preserving highlight as much as possible. Ultimately making this a ‘HDR’ like photo with a single shot.

As mentioned earlier, the original RAW file from the camera can be download via this Google Drive link .  The ~49MB zip file included both the unaltered NEF, and the XMP files generated by ACR for your references, and password protected with ‘albertyap.com’.

Please have a try and let me know your comments below.  Have some fun with photography!