Wow - to me that is a LOT of additional effort.
In my case, as was the case long ago, I want to open a ‘dng’ image from my Leica M8.2 camera. If I edit the EXIF file, and change the camera to “LEICA M10” the dng image opens, and I can edit it as usual.
This would be a lot more risky with my Nikon, as PL6 probably would recognize most, if not all, of the lenses I use. For the Leica images, PL6 mostly ignores my old Leica lenses from the 1960’s, and never sees the current Leica lenses as I can’t afford to buy one, and little by little, I find myself switching to Voigtlander lenses (which won’t show up in the EXIF field because my camera has no idea what lens is mounted. I leave the lens field empty, so hopefully PL6 will ignore it.
Here’s one example of an M8.2 image edited in PL6 after renaming the camera as LEICA M10:
L1000689 | 2022-10-21.dng.dop (14.5 KB)
L1000689 | 2022-10-21.dng (10.1 MB)
Inside the trolley it seemed dark, compared to outside where it was bright sunlight. You probably would have gotten a better result than what I got, but I didn’t want to push things too far. Out of 30 photos I took, I thought only three were worth editing, and in this one the driver looked to the right which I thought added to the image.
I thought my choices were to edit in PL6, where I felt comfortable, or to re-learn DarkTable, or to re-learn Lightroom.
…but back to my point - even if PL6 were damaging my image because of the wrong lens, which I could correct for by removing all the lens information, this is still better FOR ME than refusing to open the file. If I remembered how, I could have used DarkTable or Lightroom, which would have taken much longer until I remembered enough about how to use them.
PL6 is better for my Nikon photos, where it understands my cameras and lenses. With my Leica photos, my “best” lenses are Voigtlander, and while I could buy new Leica lenses for between $4,000 and $8,000 each, that ain’t a gonna happen. I might as well buy the new Leica M11 for $9,000 while I’m at it too.
Looking at your posted images, I would guess that the Nikon D100 and D200 are very, very different. But in my case, the M8.2 has a CCD sensor, and the M10 has a CMOS sensor so they’re also very different. Maybe I just got lucky… You were using .nef files, and you got it to work by changing to .dng files, and maybe that’s why PL got confused as I don’t think you can get a Nikon to shoot in .dng format?