Capture NX2 - user-friendly compared to Lightroom?

[ScoutR]

Hello Everyone:

I've tried fooling around with the trial copy of Nikon Caputre NX2 that came witht the camera. Is anyone here familiar with this program. Apparently it is supposed to be intuitive. Hmmmmmm NOT TO ME. Does anyone know how it compares to LightRoom for being user friendly.

I'd like to do some post processing but I think if my current efforts are any indication, I better make sure I just get a good photo to start with.

Anyway, I am rambling on. First Post... so many questions, so much to learn, not enough time.

Anyway greetings to everyone,

Scout

[mrsohtobe]

Sorry - Canon and CS4 here.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Scout,

As alluded to earlier elsewhere, I never got my head round NX2 before my 60 days ran out

I googled and found some video tutorials which made it all look so easy, quite powerful and mainly non-destructive edits; i.e. it stored a series of scripted actions and these are kept alongside the nef image without altering it, so you can always go back.

Great, just what I need, I thought, but alas, I soon found it far easier to drop back into my tried and trusted PSE6 workflow with ACR 5.4 on the front for RAW. However, I do now use Nikon Transfer and View NX for keeping track of things, but it's not the final answer and that may yet be Lightroom for me. People using it swear by it - and not at it

Cheers,

[bricynt]

ScoutR - having the same experience. Did you ever figure it out?

[Colin Southern]

that may yet be Lightroom for me.

Just a little heads up Dave - Adobe have just released a public Beta of LR3, with some nice new features.

[Dave Humphries]

Just a little heads up Dave - Adobe have just released a public Beta of LR3, with some nice new features.

Many thanks Colin

Cheers,

[bricynt]

Dave - Did you give up on Capture NX2?

[Dave Humphries]

Dave - Did you give up on Capture NX2?

Hi Radu,

Yes, well, due to bad timing on my part, I started the 60 day trial at a silly time, so it has now run out.

I certainly wasn't so enthralled by it as to spend about £200 on it.

Hence looking at LR in future. - and this time I will be careful to start the trial period at a time when I'm not going to be away for a fair chunk of it

Cheers,

[ScoutR]

Hi bricynt: Sorry for the delayed response. I just went through a computer crash and upgrade, and I'm just getting back to normal.

I finally did get Capture doing some work for me and it does seem to have potential. Below is a link to a Utube video that was originally given to me by David Humphries. I found all the videos on Utube by haranwahab to be very clear and helpful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlIqtkSwUWc

I am such a rookie at this and that along with all the computer issues I was having, prevent me from being much help. All I can say is that I did try some of the methods used in the video and found they did work quite well.

[Amberglass]

A friend of mine gave me a copy of Capture NX2 and I found it to be really slow to use. I much prefer using Adobe Lightroom. FYI, any custom adjustments that you do in camera will be brought over into CNX2, and you can also program NX2 to create custom profiles for your camera. This can be a blessing or a curse when working in RAW.

This is why some photographers wonder why images will appear differently (from back of camera's LCD) after images are imported into Lr. Simple, Lr will automatically interpret the files in default camera settings because it can not recognize custom settings created within the Nikon camera body.

[The Blue Boy]

Someone who is a real advocate of CNX is Chris (crisscross) He was an expert. I've tried it, still have it, hardly ever use it. I'm a Photoshop person and couldn't live without layers, masks and the pen tool. This doesn't help at all does it?

Download Gimp. :-)

[GillR]

Hi Radu,

Hence looking at LR in future. - and this time I will be careful to start the trial period at a time when I'm not going to be away for a fair chunk of it

Cheers,

Dave, one thing to be mindful of if you try the LR3 trial is that it is VERY much a beta, and Adobe aren't guaranteeing that any changes made in LR3 can be transferred to either LR2 or the proper version of LR3 when it's released. I'm thinking of trying it myself (alreday using LR2) but will only use copy images.

[Big Pix]

NX2 is very good, a tad slow, perfect for the image that you cannot work in PS without a lot of masking.......

......some help here......
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/re...hread=29991175

[Blazing fire]

I don't have NX2 but I use view NX to convert NEF 14-bit lossless compressed files and do some minor editing eg. sharpening, contrast, saturation etc. Since viewnx is basically a simplified version of NX2, the performance of these 2 products should be similar.

Here's my thoughts.

It's slow, even on my 3.6ghz quad core (QX6850 (old school )) and 4gb of low latency, high bandwitdh RAM. It takes a full ~5sec to change the value of the white balance or to change the value of sharpening. Worse still, it crashes after 30minutes of editing on multiple photos. Totally unreliable.

[Dave Humphries]

~ I use view NX to convert NEF 14-bit lossless compressed files and do some minor editing eg. sharpening, contrast, saturation etc. Since viewnx is basically a simplified version of NX2, the performance of these 2 products should be similar.

Here's my thoughts.

It's slow, even on my 3.6ghz quad core (QX6850 (old school )) and 4gb of low latency, high bandwitdh RAM. It takes a full ~5sec to change the value of the white balance or to change the value of sharpening. Worse still, it crashes after 30minutes of editing on multiple photos. Totally unreliable.

Hi blazing fire,

I use ViewNX on my 32 bit Vista Home Premium, Intel dual core, 1.6GHz, 2GB RAM, laptop;
I never use it to tweak pictures (I have ACR plus Elements for that).
So just to import (actually that's called Nikon Transfer now I think of it) and then to quick view (one click 100% loupe is ace ) plus to organise/rename/tag/grade pictures.

Anyway, I wondered if you have any of the problems I have (I'm on V1.4 *):

1) If I import from an 8GB card, say 600 RAW (nef) images, it does the first and last 50 or 60 at a reasonable speed (i.e. av. 1/second), but the big block in the middle takes forever. Now, this appears to be because it maxes out the RAM; I have a widget thingy that shows me RAM usage and it climbs slowly to 99/100% over the first 50 - 60 files, then the whole PC slows to an absolute crawl until it gets near the end when the RAM is slowly released and it falls back to 30% when finished.
If I click the Stop Transfer button just as it reaches 98%, it immediately releases all the RAM, then I can click it again to re-start where I left off and all is well. It is obviously a chore having to do this repeatedly, but much quicker than letting it max out the RAM. The last 100 are not a problem because it never gets up to 100% before it starts coming back down again. Very inconvenient

2) If rating images with stars, even though the sort order is on Filename, giving an image a rating, moving to an adjacent one then trying to go back (with arrow keys or on screen buttons) fails because it has 'moved' the star rated image to the end of the list. Now this doesn't always happen, but does more often than not. The original order can be restored by going to a different sort order and returning to the filename one - bizarre!

3) If I edit images in Elements and save jpgs back into the same folder, the organising window jumbles the thumbnail pics and files, so if I double click a thumbnail image, I may, or may not, get the one I expect! This only seems to occur if the thumbnails are sized such that they form more than two columns in a grid. Adjusting the size to make it go from 2 to 3 columns and back has an obvious effect - bizarre, but with a workaround

I haven't said anything to Nikon about these yet , but perhaps I will now I have explained it above, I can copy this text into an e-mail (but I won't be holding my breath)

I think in summary we're saying Nikon can't 'do' software very well, at least, not outside their cameras.

* I have yet to download install ViewNX 1.5 which is recently available.

EDIT: As I recall, the transfer issue is the same whether the card is read in PC or if I use the USB cable.

Makes LR2/3 seem attractive (thanks for the note Gill)

Cheers,

[Blazing fire]

Hi Dave!

I can only comment on the first problem regarding the RAM.

I'm using an even older version (1.3) and I don't experience such a problem. However, I have a larger RAM capacity, and I'm using XP 32bit home. Vista, as you know, struggles with computers which have less RAM. I read that NX and ViewNX are not using resources efficiently and constantly access the RAM and HDD. The high bandwidth usage may be a problem.

I suggest getting a dedicated card reader like a kinsgton 19-in-one [Note: 15-in-one and older models are slow. This one isn't. It is also very affordable (~14USD)] instead of using your camera. Also, try to transfer your files the conventional way- go to my computers > Removable drive > highlight and copy and paste in the desired folder. That way, you eliminate the need for nikon transfer and other complications. It might free up some RAM.

I realise you are using a D5000, which is a 12mp camera. How do you store 600+ NEF on a 8gb card? I can only achieve 312 on my D700 (also 12mp).

PS: I was also considering NX2 but the frequent crashes is a major disadvantage. My computer is stable and has been tested to run at the overclocked settings so the crashes are not due to instability.

Cheers!
Blazing fire.

[Dave Humphries]

I'm using an even older version (1.3) and I don't experience such a problem. However, I have a larger RAM capacity, and I'm using XP 32bit home. Vista, as you know, struggles with computers which have less RAM. I read that NX and ViewNX are not using resources efficiently and constantly access the RAM and HDD. The high bandwidth usage may be a problem.

I suggest getting a dedicated card reader like a kinsgton 19-in-one [Note: 15-in-one and older models are slow. This one isn't. It is also very affordable (~14USD)] instead of using your camera. Also, try to transfer your files the conventional way- go to my computers > Removable drive > highlight and copy and paste in the desired folder. That way, you eliminate the need for nikon transfer and other complications. It might free up some RAM.

Hi there,

Thanks for the reply; yes, I have a feeling it has more to do with Vista<>Nikon Transfer (since latter was probably written for XP) than anything else. Wonder if it'll behave any better with Windows 7?

I have a card reader built in (it is what I use), so yes, I could do it the 'file copy' way you suggest, but I would lose the bulk renaming on import and having them in ViewNX logically arranged. However, maybe that's not worth the extra effort now

Of course, I should really take less (but better) pictures
It is something I know I need to work on, because the cull process in 'post' just takes too long (partly due to the other two issues).

I realise you are using a D5000, which is a 12mp camera. How do you store 600+ NEF on a 8gb card? I can only achieve 312 on my D700 (also 12mp).

That's easier to answer: my files come out between 8.8MB and 12.5MB, with most being 10MB + 0.5, so 600 fit into the 8GB ok. Now, that's a lot more than the free capacity the camera says it has when I empty the card out, but many of my pics are birds on sky or water; there's not too much hf detail there so I guess I get more on one 8GB card than the predictions

With a longer lens I would have more bird and less sky!

Cheers,

[Blazing fire]

Not sure about windows 7. Could not be bothered to make another partition for tripple boot.


Why does ViewNX rename better? Is it because NEF files cannot be read by Windows? If that's the case, try this from Nikon.

Oh! 8mb is rather small for a 12mp NEF file. I never got that small. Perhaps ~11.4mb.