maljo@inreach.com wrote:
> Once you resave it, its no longer encrypted.
>
> See Thom Hogan's discussion.
I guess I'm going to have to check back in here, since I'm being quoted.

First, I need to make an apology: a couple of things I said in other posts were essentially passing on of "information" from people who I trusted to have looked carefully. At the prompting of several folk in the know, I pulled out a simple debugger and looked more carefully at what Capture is doing to verify what they said was different than what I had written. Here's what I see: Nikon is using a simple form of what I think we have to call encryption, as it appears to use both public and non-public data to obtain the data stored in the field.

Specific to the first line quoted above and attributed to me, it's not quite that simple on a technical level, though in practice saving in Capture does "reveal" the WB setting. WB values for the D2x are saved in the manufacturer's tags, not the normal EXIF WB tag. When you save the file in Capture, a WB tag is written to the right place, but it appears that the original manufacturer's tag is left intact.

Historically, Nikon has always been a little oddball about how it's been writing WB info into files, for reasons that have never been explained (at least I've never heard an explanation). The D2x change seems like an escalation away from the rationale behind EXIF tags, which is to allow downstream hardware and software to have access to key data points about the capture. I'd like to hear Nikon's explanation for the change.

--
Thom Hogan
author, Nikon Field Guide & Nikon Flash Guide
editor, Nikon DSLR Report
author, Complete Guides: D70, D100, D1 series, D2h, S2 Pro
www.bythom.com