(And I usually shoot raw + JPEG anyway, so if I wanted Nikon's "look", I'd just use the JPEG.) This is my solution at work.ĭon't get me wrong, I hate Adobe, but there's nothing like Photoshop if you're going to do a lot of image editing while maintaining as much detail as possible. I've no interest in trying to match the look of Nikon's JPEGs - if I'm editing raw, it's because I want to change the JPEG look anyway. If you're going to save money, GIMP has a free raw converter based on dcraw. I'm mostly outputting 16-bit TIFF and then editing in Photoshop, though. For the past few years, I've mostly been with ACR and various versions of Photoshop, but I have recently paid to upgrade DxO - I had an old version that I used to prove that its LoCA reduction tool couldn't cope with the amount of LoCA on my 135 f/2 DC, and the upgrade was because of the noise reduction abilities they introduced recently. (I think I've also never installed a mouse driver.) I went with Capture One a long time ago for me Eos 300D, before taking the plunge on Adobe - but that was partly motivated by wanting to produce a magazine and flatly refusing to go through the pain of trying to do it in Word (and I'd tried LaTeX) buying Creative Suite at the time was effectively InDesign at full price, Photoshop at half price, and everything else thrown in free. I've never installed any camera maker's own software. However, I prefer NX2 raw conversions so I use it for intial steps of post-processing. I don't see Adobe software a trap, I find it very good, and the current pricing makes it easier to keep the software up to date. I think it's clearly quite far from release and I would hope NX2 to still get support for some new camera generations until NX-D can genuinely supplant it.Īs for control points, they're nice for some things but these things can be done in Photoshop, if you have enough time (quite a lot of time actually -)), so I don't consider their loss all that important to me personally. just as they added some important WB options (the ability to see the K and G/M tint values of an image captured with camera auto white-balance on) NX2 these do not yet exist in the NX-D. Also there are a lot of things missing from the early NX-D prototype software e.g. This works now only with some adjustments, not all. IMHO: always leave the jpg export as the last step.I think one thing that is important that Nikon allow NX2 edited NEF files to be read correctly into NX-D. Then do what you need to do in GIMP, then export the edited TIF to a. That should preserve most, if not all of the DR in the photo. My suggestion is this: anything you can't do in NX-i/NX2/NX-D that you need gimp for, export the RAW to a 16 bit TIF file, and open that in GIMP. My workflow can use ViewNX-i and Capture NX-D, and sometime I do use GIMP. That's the same image that was captured as a raw + JPEG.īeatboxa gave a good write-up of dynamic range, so I won't rehash that. Now, let's try doing the same thing, but starting with the raw file in Silkypix (similar to Nikon's Capture NX-D or View NX 2): Now, let's take a look if we try to constrain to the tonal range of the moon from that above JPEG, using Gimp: This would be the same as "after conversion to jpeg": These are from last night:įirst, I'll show you an out of camera JPEG cropped down. Here's an example of what this can mean in real-life shooting. per pixel & channel (red, green, or blue).Īnother difference (of many): The JPEG will have things like noise reduction, sharpening, compression, etc. A JPEG will contain a total of up to 256 of these tones. Now you've got 3 or more: black, dark grey, middle grey, light grey, white, etc. Here's a simple way of thinking about it: Yes, there is quite a bit of information contained in the raw file that is not in the JPEG. I have also tried using View NX 2's exposure compensation (for example creating layers with different adjustments from the same photo, to be combined in Gimp later), but is this slider using any information from the raw which isn't available in the converted jpg? I see that View NX 2 has a sharpness setting, but I've read that sharpness adjustment should always be the last thing you do. I have recently started taking raw (without jpg copy as my unprocessed images go straight up to Google Photos and I don't want duplicates).įor the ones I want to do post-processing on, my question is, what should I do using View NX 2 and what should I do in other software (Gimp in my case) after conversion to jpg? Up to now I have mainly used View NX 2 to adjust the white balance (so far only selecting one of the presets I like best), but is there anything else I should adjust before conversion before relevant information is thrown away?
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