appealnow Loc: Dallas, Texas

Has anyone got experience with the Nikon editing software? Your opinion?

JR45 Loc: Montgomery County, TX

I am new to using raw, and post processing. I have been using it to learn.
It seems pretty basic compared to what I see done with other software.


http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-419170-1.html

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Many years ago when I was starting to learn postprocessing I used a number of different editors. Most of them were discarded after a couple months but Capture NX persisted for a while. It had some features I liked.

Eventually I started to use Lightroom/Photoshop exclusively and dropped all the rest.

I believe that the features I liked in the old Capture NX are no longer available in the newer versions since they were licensed from a company that was bought out. The few features I liked have been realized in LR/PS so I don't see any need for me to return to Capture NX. It was never something that could do it all.

Nikon makes good cameras but it is not known as a software company.

appealnow Loc: Dallas, Texas

Thanks, guys, for the information. I have recently retired and am getting back to photography in a more serious way, although mostly it's travel pics these days. From reading the various posts, it's hard to figure out which software to buy since each person seems to have a favorite. I want to learn to do more than just simple color correction, etc. and am particularly intrigued by some of the black and white stuff. Gosh, it's been almost fifty years since I was last in the darkroom. BTW, my current photo equipment is Nikon D5300 with Nikon 18-55mm, Tokina 11-16mm, and a newly-purchased Nikon 18-300 m.m f 3.5-6.3 for travel when I am not carrying my camera bag (haven't used it yet).

selmslie Loc: Fernandina Beach, FL, USA

I have used Capture NX2 and found it to be a useful program even though it is not totally intuitive. Their scanner software is better than the third party stuff. Only a couple of features were dropped in the newer version of NX.

Although it may not have been developed in-house it is very professional and reliable.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

When I got into digital photography it took me about a year before I started to recognize that I was going to have a problem keeping track of photos. I had a Point & Shoot camera at first, and the pictures all had file names like "PC101234.jpg". Once I got a couple thousand pictures on my hard drive I started to rename them on download so they had a meaningful file name (e.g. "Suzie's Birthday"). A friend had a Nikon DSLR (D70) and I thought it looked pretty good so I went shopping and picked up a D200 at what I thought was an astronomical price.

I used that for a while, taking jpgs until one day I took a set of pictures that I needed. When I was done I discovered that I had the white balance set to tungsten, and the photos were all outdoors in sunlight. Lots of blue photos. It took me forever to get something reasonable looking from that since all the color adjustment I knew was adjusting red, green, and blue independently. So that encouraged me (1) to shoot raw, and (2) to look into some good processing software.

I shot raw+jpg because I wasn't really familiar with the programs that dealt with raw files. I tried a number of them. They all had things they could do that the others couldn't, but none of them had it all. So for another year I did multiple edits on the important pictures, using different programs to try to cherry pick the good adjustments from the different software.

After a couple years I had more than 10,000 shots on my hard drive and I couldn't even remember what I had, much less what the name of the file was. About that time I switched from using several programs to using Lightroom exclusively (about 99.5%, anyway. Occasionally I would branch off into something else for a special tool). The advantage of Lightroom was that it could store tags in metadata. You could search on the tags, so if your set of tags on all your photos was fairly complete you had an easier time finding things. That hooked me on Lightroom, and I've used it ever since. It has improved over the years and all the tools I liked in the other programs are now found in Lightroom (at least all of them that I can remember). I also started using Photoshop. I actually started with GIMP (a freeware program) and got moderately proficient with it. However, I found that Photoshop does a lot more than GIMP so I now use GIMP very seldom.

I got up to about 60,000 photos in my Lightroom catalog. Sounds impressive, but in reality there were a lot of duplicates in there. Duplicate shots, several files with different processing from the early days, reject shots that I never got around to deleting, stuff like that. So one winter I took about 6 weeks and went through all the photos. Deleted the stuff I'd never look at again (although it was all on backup so it's not really gone). Got the catalog down to 15,000. Tagged all the photos at the same time. It was a lot of work but it was worth it. I can now find almost anything fairly easily.

The moral of this story is that organization is important. Eventually you either use software tools to find some shots of something that you even forgot you took, or you just write off all the old stuff since you can't find it. For me, that point was about 10,000 photos. YMMV.

I have two levels of organization. The first level is putting meaningful file names on all the photos. The second level is putting tags on all the photos in Lightroom. Using tags in Lightroom is enough if you're only considering that you will be the one searching for photos. Using meaningful file names is not necessary in Lightroom because you can organize it by using the tags. However, none of us gets out of here alive. When I'm gone, someone else could probably find the important pictures (probably mostly the family stuff) by looking for file names, even if they don't know how to use Lightroom.

I found a program that downloads my photos from the camera card to the hard drive and makes it easy to give them meaningful names. Downloader Pro will detect when you plug a card into your card reader and will start up the program. It opens a window that shows you thumbnails of all the images on the card. You can select the ones you want to download or just download them all. I have it configured so that when the program starts up you give it a descriptive text string. That is the base name you will get on the photos you download. It also places the photos in a folder with that name. The final file name is "[text string] YYYYMMDD nnn" where YYYYMMDD is the date (from the EXIF data) and nnn is an index number. The YYYYMMDD format sorts the same numerically or chronologically.

A more complete description of my file naming and workflow can be found at:
[File naming] http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/user-page?upnum=1595
[Workflow] http://www.uglyhedgehog.com/user-page?upnum=1584

N4646W

My Wife and I have both been using it for the last two plus years. We have all sorts of PP software, but everything starts in NX, "saved as" with a rev# back in raw format. Then it can go to some other PP software for what ever. This way we still have the original raw and the edited raw to take into PP. Add the NIK collection to NX and you have a pretty powerful piece of software.

We have our own catalog style. Yes we do have LR, but I quit using it after about 3 months, I did not care for it's catalog system or it's functions. There are other PP software that in my opinion far exceed it, (LR) and at a better price. We have both found that DXO and Affinity can take care of just about anything we need and then some. Maybe next year I will try to take the time to learn Raw Therapee for PP.

It may seem a little bit klunky to many, but it does the job if your are just willing to spend the time finding out what it can do, especially if you add the NIK Collection to it.

Ron

CO

I've been using Nikon Capture NX-2 for years. It's an outstanding editor for Nikon RAW files. Unfortunately, Nikon stopped updating it for new cameras a couple of years ago. It was made for Nikon by Nik software. Amazon bought out Nik software and for some reason Nikon could not continue with it. I still use it for editing my Nikon D7000 RAW files.

Its replacement is Capture NX-D. I'm using that program as a processor for my Nikon D500 RAW files. Download Capture NX-D and View NX-i from Nikon's website. They're free downloads from the website. View NX-i has a transfer function that will create a new folder for you as it transfers photos to your computer and numbers the folders sequentially.

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

I have Nikon Capture NX2 and all of Nikon's editing software including Nikon's Camera Control Pro (which is designed for tethered shooting of the camera from a laptop or desktop computer (useful in studio shooting with camera on a tripod or other mount and you would see what the camera sees on your desktop screen) This gives the photographer complete control of the camera (aperture, focus, shutter speed, ISO everything) from your computer.
Capture NX2 is a nice program that was originally provided to Nikon through Nix software. It ceased to be upgraded or sold after Nix was sold to Google (or whoever) and Nikon Developed their own replacement Nikon D something or other but it wasn't nearly as capable.
Be warned that Capture NX2 hasn't had an upgrade in several years and probably wont support the newer NEF files or cameras. (I think the Nikon D7100 was the last of the supported models to be added to Capture NX2 and the versions for sale on the internet are non-supported by Nikon.

jelecroy Loc: Huntsville, AL

I have also been using Capture NX2 for about ten years. It is a powerful program. IIRC I had to download a new codec from the Nikon site to get NX2 to work with NEF files from a newer Nikon 1 mirrorless camera, but once I had the codec loaded it did okay. I needed the codec as well just to have the Windows preview function to work on raw files.
I like the workflow in NX2. It is a powerful image processor, and I have a few custom add-ons loaded. One funny one is a filter that adjusts the image rendition to make the pictures look as they would if taken on various legacy emulsions - like Kodachrome, Ektachrome, etc. It works well, processes pretty fast on my computer, and has pretty good color control features. Sadly, it is totally unsupported. I'd hoped that Google would do something with NX2 when they bought the product from Nikon, but it appears to have fallen off the face of the earth.
Capture NX-D will work on all .nef files, but is not nearly as powerful as NX-2 - it is an entirely different product. It is simpler to use.

Festus Loc: North Dakota

Nikon is not known to have the greatest editing software. And they can be a bit slow in updating it when new camera bodies reach the market. That being said, I feel one should always give the software that comes with the camera you purchased a good try. That software is generally tweaked to edit shots taken with that manufacturer's cameras. And generally you can get some of the best results in using that software.

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

Nikon NX2 software was the software I used for many years with great success. IMHO, Nikon NX-D, the current version, is nowhere near as useful or good. A bit over a year ago I switched to Lr CC and I've never looked back. The Adobe software has not only improved but accelerated my PP process and I couldn't be happier. I use Lr for 90% of my PP work and Photoshop for the other 10%. Best of luck.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

You will want to keep this in mind:

"Capture NX was first released in July 2006. Capture NX 2 was released in June 2008.
In September 2012, Google acquired Nik Software,[2] but Capture NX has remained a Nikon software and is advertised as a Nikon product.[3]
In July 2014 Nikon has released a new software Capture NX-D and desupported Capture NX 2. Nikon D810 is the first camera only supported in the new product which was developed based on SILKYPIX Developer Studio and does not contain the U-Point technology of Nik any longer."
Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_NX

Nikon software returns the best results with Nikon NEFs. Adobe's interpretation of NEFs is flat. Capture One is much better and you can tweak and get what you like, with either one, but IMHO the best results in the least time are obtained using Nikon software. But the Nikon View xx software is a bit clunky and crash prone. So when processing NEFs I will import first to Nikon View NX then export as TIFF for any further work.

dsnoke Loc: North Georgia, USA

I have had Capture NX2 for over ten years. I also have GIMP, Lightzone, Raw Therapee, and I've seen a lot of demos of Photoshop and Lightroom. I have yet to find anything any other tool can do that I can't do with Capture NX2, with the exceptions of adding text or a frame to a picture. For those cases, I use the GIMP because it is inexpensive.

With that claim made, Capture NX2 does not have great selection options for making changes to very specific parts of a picture. I like either GIMP or Lightzone in the few cases when I've wanted to do more than C NX2 would do. However, the lasso tool, color control points, selection control points and selection brush can do an awful lot if you are patient and zoom in so you can see the detail adequately.

In addition, Capture NX2 has some different terms for some things, at least as far as I have discovered. For example, many other tools have an adjustment called "vibrance", and I find the Capture NX2 "chroma" control does about the same thing. That did take a while to discern.

You can find many pictures processed with Capture NX2 at http://www.seven-oaks.net/dickspics.
I

G_Manos Loc: Bala Cynwyd, PA

Appeal - I use both View NX2 and Capture NX2 almost exclusively (for D750 & D5100 .NEF files). As some on this thread have said, the older versions do not work; however, the new upgrades work just fine. And they are FREE. The main reason I stick with this software is that it interprets the camera's white balance settings more accurately than any other software I've tried. This includes View NX-i and Capture NX-D, which are just not up to par with current post-processing applications.

I use View NX2 for 99% of post-processing, it does a very good job of most everything you need to do with half decent shots that haven't strained the ISO setting (thus producing noise). You will need Capture NX2 to take blemishes out of portraits and to refabricate your raw photos into artwork. If you intend to do that, try some of the other software programs suggested above, as they are easier to learn. I'd recommend that, since you have a Nikon camera, you start with Nikon software and graduate from there to something else if it does not suit your needs.

-George-