Lawrence Ripsher

While I don’t shoot Nikon as frequently anymore, I was an avid D200 user for almost all of 2006 (and still own a D70 which I travel with). About halfway through the year I switched to RAW and wanted to share my experience with Nikon’s Capture NX. 

Capture NX is Nikon’s flagship software product for RAW conversion and image processing, built on technology from their collaboration agreement with Nik Software (www.niksoftware.com). Capture NX replaces previous versions of Nikon Capture which while, generally regarded as the best RAW converter for Nikon’s proprietary NEF / RAW format, was also considered to be inflexible and slow.

So when Nikon released Capture NX, they promised it would contain a host of features that would make it far more advanced (and ease to use) for advanced image processing. The innovation they made the biggest noise about was U Point technology which promised to make advanced, selective editing of colours, brightness, contrast, etc far easier to the average user.

Following its announcement and availability for download, I immediately started using Capture NX and from day one until now, it has remained the first application I reach for when beginning my post processing work for Nikon files. Given I was using Photoshop CS2 as the primary raw converter / editor for NEF files until then, I think that says quite a lot about how much I liked the software.

The rest of this entry will give a quick round up of the general features / benefits of Capture NX, or rather – the ones that were significant to me (Note – this doesn’t cover the benefits of shooting RAW in the first place – I will prob do another entry for that later).

RAW Conversion.
When talking about Capture NX, I think this is the place to start – as the actual quality of the conversion is an often overlooked item. For quite some time I was using Photoshop CS2 to process Nikon NEF files and the first step I would always take was to modify the colour balance. There was something about the colours in Photoshop that never quite looked right when I’d convert an image and I found myself constantly referring back to the original image on the camera’s LCD Screen to use as a reference when processing. I know this issue did not just affect me – I had heard many mention it. Anyway, that changed with Capture NX – the colours following conversion look identical to the original that sits in your camear. I’ve attached an example below of a NEF file processed with both Photoshop CS2 (default settings) and Nikon Capture NX (default settings). No modifications were done following opening the image.

Nikon NEF RAW image converted using Photoshop CS2

Nikon NEF RAW image converted using Nikon Capture NX

The difference should be pretty clear (particularly when you click on the image to see a larger version). The orange from Capture NX is much more, well, orange. And the colours on my dog’s with Capture NX is much lifelike. While it is certainly possible, through colour balance / tone adjustment, to get the colours from CS2 the same as Capture NX, I generally considered that step to b quite a pain and am glad when it can be avoided.

FYI, some people have also spoken about resolution / noise differences between RAW converters in general, but I’ve not found there to be very different between these two applications.

U Point’s
Ok so this is the technology that Nikon was making a big fuss about upon Capture NX’s launch. A different approach to Dodge / Burn / Saturation brushes (predominant in CS2), you might ask what’s wrong with the normal approach. Well I guess that the main issue is that when you use brushes to selectively edit an image, you’re making changes that you can’t modify them after you perform them, they take plenty of practice, etc. So what Capture NX does is take a different approach through U Point’s. These are small modifiers that you can drag onto an image and then use sliders to modify their Brightness / Saturation / Contrast / Hue / Colour Balance / etc. They apply a “circle of influence” around the area where they are placed, meaning they’ll look for pixels of similar colour, etc and apply the changes to them.

So as an example, say you want to brighten someone’s face – all need to do is drag a U Point onto the face area, drag the brightness slider up and the face is more visible. Easier to do than dodging? Maybe / maybe not – but certainly a lot easier to see what you’ve done, go back and change, move the affected area around and so forth.

As an example, I show the process of using U Point’s (click on image to see a larger version).

Take the following original image.

It’s hard to tell but when I took this, I was convinced there was a great image in the data waiting to be seen. I realized the foreground colour was too harsh and distracts the eye from seeing the real subject.

There’d be a number of ways to reduce the saturation of the foreground in Photoshop CS2, but with Capture NX, you just need to drag a control point onto one of the blue areas of the image. Once there, you can apply changes (like desaturating the foreground) to like minded pixels. To see what pixels you’re selection is going to change, you need to select “Show selection”. Then the following image is revealed:

This image shows what parts of the image are going to be modified. Parts of the image in white means that changes will be applied to those areas. Parts in black mean they won’t be applied. And obviously all the shades of gray in between suggest the varying strength of application. OK so see the window to the top right? That’s a modifier. Just increase brightness and contrast and hit OK.

And voila – this image results – a funky abstract of a woman climbing up the stairs (and one of my favourite shots from 2006):

The image took a few minutes of fine tuning but the above step was less than 30 seconds.

Non destructive editing
So non destructive editing is something I mentioned above – and we know through layers, it can be done in photoshop as well. The problem I have with photoshop is that the files get up to 100MB in size which is pretty horrendous. For Capture NX, every change you perform is automatically non destructive (no need for layers). The biggest difference however is that when you save files, the file sizes are on the order of 10MB to 15MB (I’m talking about 10MB as a starting image size in the first place). This means I can now store all my images in this saved state – rather than with Photoshop where I selectively choose only a few to store in PSD format.

Camera settings
One thing I always thought was a shame with CS2 was the fact that it does not copy over camera settings. So you have modes like Vivid, Vivid+, custom settings, etc – In CS2, these are all ignored. In Capture NX not only are they used, you can also change them which becomes a great tool for learning about your camera.

OK – so that’s a quick whirlwind introduction. As you can probably see – even those four items are a fairly compelling case for looking in Capture NX if you shoot in Nikon RAW.

Issues

Before considering Capture NX, there are of course downsides to consider. These were:

• Memory hog (even more than photoshop). Peronsally I wouldn’t enjoy running this with anything less than 2 GB RAM (1GB is ok if you’re not doing much else with your PC at the time)
• Inconsistent GUI (User Interface), which requires you to click OK with the mouse sometimes, and other times allows you to use the Enter key or mouse
• Crashes every now and then. Probably 1 in every 20 photos – something like that
• U Points aren’t as effective as dodging / burning when very complex or very heavy selective editing is required
• Only can be used for Nikon formats (although JPG / TIFF supported also)
• Some actions are slower than photoshop (e.g. zooming / resizing can be sometimes)

For me however, the positives definitely outweighed the few downsides and slightly clunky UI. It can’t do everything by any means – but I use it for processing 90% of my NEF images and the use of U Points (and not having to fine tune colour as much) cuts down my processing time by about half I would estimate. The images that fall into that other 10%, which were too complex for U Points to handle, I would still use Capture NX for first to convert from RAW and apply levels / contrast, then save as JPG to be further modified in CS2. So it was, as a minimum, my RAW converter for all images.

OK that’s about it – hope that was useful. I’ll be covering similar software I use for Canon soon and also discussion of workflow in general.

For those interested, you can download a trial of Capture NX here:

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