Thanks useful information: 
Always!Originally Posted by darkbhudda
a case in point is the differences in how a non manufacturer raw converter/viewer will render the raw image as it deems to be the best way.
From my experiences, the manufacturers software generally displays the raw image as your camera captured it.
And the embedded jpg can help you to determine how good or bad third party software shows the differences between the two images.
A jpg is a set image. Once it's been made, all software will render it to be roughly the same looking. There may be some very subtle differences in tones and colours, but I suspect that in the majority of cases they're going to be nothing by comparison to the differences between the rendering of raw images.... that I've seen between the different software I've used.
I've used PSCS2 or thereabouts via ACR(something early), Bibble Pro, LightRoom3, And just about all of Nikon's own raw viewing software.. except I hated Nikon View, which was an early and buggy program form many years ago(replaced by ViewNX).
The example screenshots I have currently are only with Bibble Pro< as I never thought to record the differences when I had a working copy of LR3 trial. LR3 is not quite as bad as Bibble with 'over exposure', but far worse in terms of colour and contrast looking so flat in terms of tone that I'd be inclined to give it all away! With Bibble, all have to do is set -1.5Ev compensation for every image and I'm done.
But this is a seriously deluded workflow system as the exact same image opened as a jpg and rendered by Bibble is perfectly acceptable!
I noted similar differences with LR3 too(compared to how my camera renders the images as well as Nikon software does).
The main point is that my digital camera is loaded with it's own specific image rendering substance. I capture it one way in the camera, and when I get it home and see it via thirdparty software... it can only be described as crappy looking!.. unless the raw viewing software displays the embedded jpg file(as FSViewer does)
Maybe this is isolated to Nikon only raw images...on my PC?? ... or something, as there are a lot more people that seem to be happy with their images via these thirdparty software vendors than I would ever imagine possible.
FSViewer is what Nikon ViewNX should be(like).
ViewNX is a crappy program that is more than capable(if that makes sense). It has barely any editing ability other than very mild tweaking and really only good for viewing and mass converting NEF images into more manageable jpgs.
FSViewer is awesome considering it's free.
The flexibility of how it allows you to save images and with what compression settings and some of the editing ability is very nice. Only problem is that it's woeful at converting raw images into jpgs. it creates badly rendered images, just as the others do.
it's also great in the way it's almost nonexistent on resources on your PC, and you can run it directly off an external memory source(such as a USB drive or whatever!!) but that's a separate program to the one that installs on your PC. The slideshow feature is also very good. Good for old PC's or laptops and suchlike.
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