Adam, So your comments piqued my interest and led me to take a look at Capture NX2. I downloaded and installed it on my PowerBook G4 15" and have gone through the reference manual. I went through several JPG and TIFF files, and had a friend with a Nikon D300 send me a couple of NEF files (a couple each taken at ISO 200, 400, 1600, 3200 in two different kinds of lighting). I processed the NEF examples in LR2 first, then in NX2.
NX2 is pretty good ... performance is actually decent on this old single processor system. I wouldn't say that I'm expert in its use by any means, but I can get around in it without too much difficulty. I read up on the Control Point stuff and played with it. Cute but there's little there that I cannot do in LR2, more easily at present since I know it better. I don't see that its editing capabilities as being that much different, really, although the UI is very different. It has a couple of niceties, LR2 has others. I also don't see that it does all that much different a job on the NEF RAW conversion, even at ISO 3200. One major omission in my opinion is no support for ProPhoto RGB. But no image management, no off-line image location services, simple printing without templates, only NEF RAW support, no DNG support, etc etc. One of the things I did like which I wish LR2 had was the ability to set a couple of watch points and see in numbers how adjustments affect them. I can see the numbers in LR2 very easily, but it's always dynamic and moves with the mouse. I'll send in a feature enhancement request ... i think that's occasionally a useful tool. Godfrey On Sep 18, 2008, at 4:04 PM, Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: > > On Sep 18, 2008, at 3:49 PM, Adam Maas wrote: > >> I've used LR2 enough to get a good idea of the how capable the >> selective editing controls were (A very nice upgrade over LR1, but >> not >> nearly as capable as NX2 or PS). I didn't compare the high ISO NR >> when >> I was doing so. >> >> While CaptureNX2 can't do many things PS can do, it can do some very >> interesting things with selective editing that PS can't do unless you >> buy one of the Nik plugins (which cost more than NX2 does). Nik's >> Control Point system is very, very Nifty and makes a number of >> selective edits far less painful than they would be with layer masks >> or lassos. > > I'll have to look at the Control Point stuff you're talking about. I > don't use any plugins at present ... I've never found them to be of > much real value to me. > > My actual editing needs are pretty light. I find that if I get the > exposure right I rarely need more than a little crop and rotate, > then some modest tonal adjustments. I don't use much of what you and > others seem to call high ISO ... high ISO to me is ISO 400 where > what people here seem to regard as high is stratospheric to me ... > so noise reduction isn't an issue when I've got proper exposure. My > need for selective editing is beautifully addressed by the LR2 brush > tool overall, it's very similar to what I do in PS with adjustment > layers, masks and the brush. > >> I still have to use PS for some things, most notably the clone stamp. > > Most of what I need PS for nowadays are those occasions when I have > to do overlays, profile conversions for print services (and > associated soft-proofing/gamut checking), and such stuff like that. > I haven't seen anything that does those things as well. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
