Adobe Illustrator showing NEF file only as small thumbnail

[Spotted2202]

Hello,

I took pictures with my Nikon D750 and uploaded the NEF files into Adobe Illustrator. However, I'm only getting tiny thumbnails of pictures with very low pixel counts, when the files really are 30+ MB each. 
I'm at a loss. I have used Illustrator many times now and never came across this issue.

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

A NEF file is a raw file format, what you see is probably a jpeg preview.

Use Photoshop or Lightroom to create a usable file (.psd, tiff, jpeg...) from the raw file.

[Spotted2202]

Opening the image in Photoshop instead of Illustrator did the trick. Thanks so much for that hint!

[Ton Frederiks]

Good to hear that helped.