Capture NX2 - seems great - am I missing something?

[iscraig]

I've been working with the demo version of Capture NX2 from Nikon and I'm impressed with the way it lets me adjust exposure and colour - much more easily than CS3. I'm on the verge of purchasing but, before I do, I'd welcome your opinions. Thanks very much,

Craig

[tirediron]

NX2 is not a replacement for CS3 (or any other full-fledged editing app). While it has a wide variety of tools, it is first and foremost a RAW editor. The control points are great, and something I get a lot of use from, and while it's clunky, non-intuiative, and a huge resource hog, it is, IMO, the best tool for editing .NEF files. That said, you will need another app for things like cloning, working with layers and other common-place editing apps. If the budge won't run to both, then I'd suggest NX2 with Photoshop Elements or Paintshop Pro. Also see if you can find a bargain on NX; having looked at both, other than some lightening of the load on the memory and other system resources, I don't see any improvements in ver 2 to make it worth buying over ver 1 if you can get it.

[Barefoot]

I purchased Capture NX on May 10th of last year. With no fanfare or pre-publicity hype, ten days later came the release of NX2.

No problem I thought to myself. Surely NikSoftware will upgrade me at no charge having only just purchased NX. Wrong. I went round and round with them over the course of a few days even threatening to sell what little Nikon equipment I had at the time and migrate to another make if they thought that this was fair treatment.

The forums over at Nikonians were abuzz with people that were in the same situation. Why did NikSoftware not let us know that a new release was in the works? They must have known that if we were aware, we could have waited just a week or so to get the newest version if the upgrade from NX to NX2 was going to cost another $80. People were pissed!

To make a long story short, I kept my Nikon equipment and trudged along with NX. About a month and a half later, I was over on Tom Hogan’s site (if you’re a Nikon shooter, you need to bookmark his site) and saw that NikSoftware had relented and would provide the upgrade at no charge once you jumped through a few hoops for them.

I now have NX2, and in my view it is a vast improvement over NX. If it had a clone tool, I wouldn’t use anything else. The retouch tool isn’t good for anything more than removing dust bunnies or maybe the bird in the sky that doesn’t belong. Though not referred to as “layers”, trust me, they’re there to the extent that an image editor needs them. The U Point technology works just as well with tiff’s and jpeg’s as it does NEF files.

Jason O’Dell has a great user’s manual for sale at his site and a few of his videos are on Youtube. NikSoftware has some tutorials at the link below. You can also listen to a podcast of Jason's at The Image Doctors on the Nikonians site where he describes the improvements made in NX2 over NX.

http://www.capturenx.com/en/lessons/lessons/index.html
http://blog.nikonians.org/archives/2008/06/id68_the_image.html
http://www.luminescentphoto.com/nx2guide.html

I really dig NX2, and think you should go ahead and take the plunge. It’s so much more than just a raw editor. TirdeIron's right about it being a resource hog, it's also the reason I sprang for a new quad-core processor. Now it runs like a charm even with two or three other programs open at the same time.

[Lovin]

I've been working with the demo version of Capture NX2 from Nikon and I'm impressed with the way it lets me adjust exposure and colour - much more easily than CS3. I'm on the verge of purchasing but, before I do, I'd welcome your opinions. Thanks very much,

Craig

Did you tried Lightroom 2 ?
Is a nondestructive image software. Basically they took everything that is related to photography post processing (sorry for my English :D), from Photoshop, and put it in a different software, but improved and with some advantages.
I saw that a lot of photographers and journalists are working now with Lightroom 2 (Adobe) or Aperture 2 (from Apple).
Study more about Lightroom 2 or Aperture 2.

Cheers :)

[F8&Bthere]

While I have no specific knocks against NX2, I haven't yet found any reason to use it on a regular basis since Lightroom does quite well for me as a RAW converter, and does so much more. I have read that NX2 is the best at processing NEFs, and I do believe this is true, but after trying some comparisons of my own I did not see enough of a difference to add it to my workflow.

I also had a sort of bullheaded attitude toward Nikon not including it, at least with their higher end cameras. They included it free with the first wave of D300s for example, and I get annoyed at this kind of now you see it now you don't hocus-pocus marketing. Other makers do include their proprietary software/RAW converter for free.

Bottom line- if you like it, get it. But as others have said, you might find yourself still wanting other programs at some point anyway and running into some duplication of functionality. Think workflow.

[iscraig]

Thank you all for your feedback. I have to admit that I'm not a Nikon shooter (Olympus E-500) but found NX2 to work well with jpeg files. I also have CS3 and Lightroom but find that they're a little cumbersome for quick adjustments like a little brightening here or a blemish fix there. So, I've been using NX2 for those little things and using CS3 for more complex adjustments. Thanks again for your help.

Craig

[Lovin]

Wow! So far 4-5 people on this forum are using Olympus, nice :highfive:
I have an E500 too.

[iscraig]

I bought the full kit from Henry's a couple of years ago as my first foray into the world of digital SLRs. As I'm still on the learning curve from snapshots to photographs, I haven't exhausted the capabilities of the E-500 yet. I'll likely upgrade to something more substantial when I retire in a couple of years and have the time to work at it.

[krphotogs]

The latest version NX2 is vastly superior IMHO to previous versions. It does nto crash (well, not very often compared to NX) and the batch mode is significantly faster. The biggest reason for using it is you can take a 12 meg nef file, make multiple changes and save multiple versions in the same file, and still be only at 12 or 13 meg.... Try that in layers in CS.... But, it is not a pixel editor and I still prefer the printing snapin in CS2 for my HP 9180B printer. Jason's eBook is great and Versace has made a DVD video on using it. If you are shooting in raw, it is the raw editor to use....