I farked myself good, now…. Any Nikon advice?

[3Horn]

CS4 is fun, but I still recommend Lightroom for your day-to-day functions of importing and minor tweaking. It’s a wondertool!

But you should get Bridge with Photoshop, so it gives you some of the functionality of LR2. Additionally, if you buy Photoshop from Adobe’s online store, you have the option of a downloadable purchase, so that should save you a little time. Of course all of this assumes that you haven’t taken care of all of this in the past 6 days. 🙂

[thepostess]

You might give UFRaw a try: http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/index.html

Thanks for the link. Still learning to use our new D80 and love it.

[kashari]

I’m a n00b to the DSLR world and recently purchased a D60. I did a photo workshop where we shot in RAW. In the post-processing portion of the workshop, they were using PS & Nik Filters. I was told and have read that for NEF processing, Capture NX 2 should be used, since it reads all the camera data, where some programs won’t. Anyone know if that’s true or not?

[Choc-Ful-A]

I’m a n00b to the DSLR world and recently purchased a D60. I did a photo workshop where we shot in RAW. In the post-processing portion of the workshop, they were using PS & Nik Filters. I was told and have read that for NEF processing, Capture NX 2 should be used, since it reads all the camera data, where some programs won’t. Anyone know if that’s true or not?

I use a freely available program called “ufraw” to read my NEF files and convert them to oher formats. I’m not aware of anything data it’s unable to read. I’m not saying that Capture NX isn’t better, since I’ve never used it. But if I’m living with limitations they aren’t bothering me.

[swampa]

I use Photoshop CS3 to process my RAW images and it seems to have no problem reading all the data (in Bridge it shows a heap of fields with the information about the photo in them – ISO, white balance, flash fired, lens used … blah blah blah).

If you use Photoshop I would recommend CS3+ as the RAW integration is part of the application. With version CS2 and earlier you can download a plug-in but it requires hunting down (Adobe don’t make it easy to find!). Plus the RAW processor in CS3+ has more functions in it.

I tried UFRaw on my laptop and can’t say I’m a fan of it. Now maybe I haven’t set it up right or just really used to the workflow in Photoshop but the fact that UFRaw won’t revert back to a baseline after processing an image annoys me, so each image needs to be have all the values changed as it is very unlikely that they are right for the next image.

[kashari]

Ok, thanks for your input, you guys!

[kashari]

I’d forgotten about this thread…

So I’ve since purchased PS3, Capture NX2 and use Transfer NX & View NX for ratings, etc.. In View, you can also do a lot of your basic adjustments and be finished without even moving into NX2. NX2 has control points (aka U-point technology) and uses an active, non-destructive edit list, which is much faster and easier for me as opposed to layers/masks in PS, since I’m no PS expert.

The Nikon guys say the difference in the raw processing is that most of the other programs have to reverse-engineer the data, rather than using the data straight as is. The other Raw-related difference is there’s also the Picture Control utility, where you can send your favorite settings to your camera (D60 doesn’t have that capability though) and exchange them with other people.

NX2 doesn’t have all the editing functions of PS, there’s a healing tool, but no clone stamp (yet). These programs work with other cameras, not just Nikons. If anyone is interested, I recommend checking out these short tutorials: http://www.capturenx.com/en/lessons/lessons/index.html

There’s also a longer, more in-depth workshop taught by a Nikon guy which goes through the whole process of using the three products and I learned a lot from it, it’s a great session. There are three 45 min clips, the first 30 min is kind of trivial stuff, but the rest is really helpful. Go to http://www.video.bhphotovideo.com/, then type Capture NX2 in the search box, you’ll then see the three videos listed in the bottom row (at least that’s how they’re showing up now.).

Just thought I’d pass on the info for anyone else who hates working in Photoshop as much as I do. 🙂

[Author]

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