Nikon Lossless compressed (LC) purportedly has lossless compression so that upon decompression bit-for-bit the result is the same as would have been in the raw image that Nikon would have encoded. HE and HE* use TICO lossy compression. Many photographers report no visual difference (as Nikon advertises) – however, I often both have to crop and use the “dark recovery” built into DxO PL6Elite, the latter often providing (near) HDR results. This question may be more directed to DxO staff. In reality, how much information is lost with HE and HE*? Does dark recovery work as well? Detail in cropped images (sometimes less than 10 percent of the full raw image area)?
I think to remember it depends on the scene dynamic range.
But maybe wrong about it.