Hobby project - Nikon NEF file reader

So, my new hobby is digital photography. I have bought a slightly used Nikon D50 camera, and has already taken a lot of pictures.

If you're into digital photography, you will know that most cameras can produce both JPG and RAW output, where the JPG images are compressed by the camera firmware before being written to the flash card. The RAW files are uncompressed data as it was sampled by the camera CMOS (typically).  Remembe, JPG is a lossy compression format, so detail will be lost if you just save the JPG's. Therefore, if you are serious about photography, you will want to shoot in RAW.

However, as RAW files are essentially untouched image data, a RAW file needs to be processed by some image processing software before it can be used. This can be a cumbersome process, loading up the camera manufacturers software and maybe Photoshop or another image processing utility, processing each image, perhaps adjusting colors and saving the file into a more common format.

Therefore I have decided to try and create a .NET program that does the conversion for me. For "version 1", it will probably only support the NEF file format that my Nikon produces (Nikon's proprietary RAW format), but perhaps I will add support for others along the way. This program will not be a replacement for professional photo processing software, but is meant to be an easy to use tool, that can be used when one simply needs to convert a NEF file to a JPEG or bitmap representation quickly.

The NEF file format is not documented anywhere that I have been able to find on the web. But, looking at the files, they seem to be based on the TIFF image format, and they carry the TIFF file header.

Also, I have found that Dave Coffin has created an excellent utility for doing just what I want, dcraw. I could just as well just use that, but I think that it will be an interesting challenge to try to implement it myself. But I am quite sure that digging in to the dcraw source code will provide me with most of the details that I need to decode the format.