Capture NX2 - seems great - am I missing something?

[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/2...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.