Yes—roughly. Active D-Lighting works by slightly underexposing to protect highlights, then lifting shadows and applying a Nikon tone curve. That shadow lift is why noise can become more visible.

If you shoot RAW, you can mimic the effect in post with:

• a tone curve
• shadow/fill-light adjustments
• highlight recovery

But there’s an important limit: if you turn ADL off and expose normally, you may lose highlight detail that ADL would have preserved through its intentional underexposure. Blown highlights generally cannot be recovered later. So to get closest results, you’d need to preserve highlights at capture, then raise shadows in post.

If you want Nikon’s own rendering, Nikon Capture NX/NX2 can apply or adjust D-Lighting settings to RAW files after the fact. Third-party RAW editors can produce a similar dynamic-range-compression look, but may not match Nikon’s exact curve as closely.

So: yes, you can simulate it in post, especially from RAW, but the best match comes from preserving highlight headroom during capture and/or using Nikon’s software.