Nikon Capture NX: Strange New Worlds of Editing! *Images Added*

[AFS]

Added post with pics and walkthrough of what I did further down the thread
Hi all!

Well true to form I was one of the first to download NX- I even downloaded the japanese version but decided not to install. I skipped the euro download instead preferring to get the USA version right when it came out to avoid the overloaded european server.

a few minutes later I was running Nikon Capture NX on my Macbook Pro. And what a treat it is!

I had some pretty high expectations coming in to this program- and so far I don't think i've been disappointed.

Speedwise i'm running it on an intel mac via Rosetta, so it is not running natively. Still, it runs faster than 4.4 at about everything, including NR, opening, and so on.

Control points are truly neat- you can select from several quick selections to have when you click the point aside from sizing it, or you can have all of them- there are quite a few. Menus are straightforward, and I absolutely love the easy to use "Edit List". At any time you can just click the step you want, delete it, revert to it, or click the little arrow and modify the settings and opacity you used in it independently.

Opacity adjustment is really nice- kind of like working in layers only simpler. It helps when you want to partially desaturate something. I'll be posting a sample shot and giving you all my step by step.

One of the best features IMHO is the +/- option- you can select the brush, lasso, marquee, etc. and use them to add or remove the effect you selected in a given area. right-clicking when the brush is selected accesses the brush options box. Using a + marquee lets you select an area and when you use the brush, it only affects that area- basically you're masking off everything else with painter's tape :smile:. Right click with the marquee tool to change its edge hardness.

I did find one thing a bit confusing, and that is that the RAW adjustments are part of the left-side "camera settings" tab- part of the Nikon Browser that you can instantly open up just by pressing the little +. I think this is supposed to be for convenience and speed, and in time I may find this to be the case.

EDIT: I just found you can also access them in the "Base Adjustments" section of the edit list, but one part at a time, as in separate ones for exposure comp, color mode, etc.

What could be better? It could have been Universal Binary- the MacTels like mine run 4-5x faster than the best Powerbook did when each runs a native application, but it runs about the same as a PB G4 1.5-1.67 when using a power-PC only app. Nikon really should have had this universal at release, but NIK dropped the ball I suppose. Still, it is perfectly usable for me.
What else could be better? I liked the camera settings thing to be at the top not the side.

Overall i'm extremely pleased with the software- my next post will have an image for you all to enjoy.

 

[MGlennn]

Neat.....I tried to download a while ago from the USA site and my time estimate was 4hrs+ (I'm on a T1)....something wrong here today though I think...:smile: :smile:

 

[Steve S]

Whoa! NX is complicated and hard to learn!

Thanks Harrison for at least showing where the h@ll the raw adjustments were. I initially thought that this was no substitute for NC, but maybe not.

What I do think is that it's going to take the average, or like me, below average user, a long, long time to master this inteface. :frown: That said, I will add that I absolutely hate learning new software!

 

[Retief]

I only had a couple of minutes to test prior to leaving for work a few hours ago and my "test for speed" was D-Lighting, which USED to be, heavy empahsis on USED to, really slow. Surprised the heck out of me how quickly it worked.

I'll be following this thread to pick up more bits tonight when I get a chance to work with it a bit more.

Can someone test one thing for me please? One of the truly obnoxious things I found in the Speed, or lack therof department, in Capture is when you try to do adjustments, or anything, when zoomed in. I did not check this prior to leaving, but am curious.

Thanks,

 

[Retief]

Thanks Harrison for at least showing where the h@ll the raw adjustments were. I initially thought that this was no substitute for NC, but maybe not.

What I do think is that it's going to take the average, or like me, below average user, a long, long time to master this inteface. :frown: That said, I will add that I absolutely hate learning new software!

Download the manual, it looks pretty comprehensive.

 

[beaucamera]

Well, I got it downloaded, but now the PDF download for the Manual is stuck on page 225 (of 234).

Virginia
aka beaucamera

 

[AFS]

I think that you can squeak by trying out the various things I mentioned above. Do a black and white conversion with the menus and try the minus brush :smile:

 

[califlefty]

NET vs. non-NET

To help the speed-up the down-load process, dwnload the non-NET version. If your PC needs NET (and you should have NET 1.1 if you're running XP) get it from the Microsoft download site. This will speed things up much faster.

Current broadband download for the non-Net took me appx. 20 minutes. your results may vary!

 

[PhotoByMark]

I was able to download and install around 9am cst.
Did not get to really try it out before leaving.
Control points look like fun.
Already had .NET installed so I got to download the smaller file.

I did notice mouse moves real slow over the image and then regular speed when not over the image. Interesting behavior.

 

[jeff-c]

Where is the PDF manual?

I only manage to find a marketing brochure which is good enough for me to establish a workflow with NX. http://nikonimaging.com/global/products/software/capturenx/nxsp/pdf/CaptureNXcatalog_e.pdf

All the NC options are there, mostly in the Base Adjustment.

But one must go beyond those NC functions. NX is much more powerful than NC, the control points, the selection gradient, and more. Plust many of these functions have built-in overlay/opacity options.

In a way it does in a simpler and fewer steps than Photoshop which requires more complicated layering and masking. Just by playing with NX for two hours, I'd say NX does 80% or more of PS digital photography post-processing whereas before Nikon Capture is just a RAW converter like ACR.

I will need to spend more time to evaluate the tool to decide if I can completely do away with PS for most of my post-processing.

Here is a before/after comparision and a screen snapshot of the steps. It took me an hour for this "quick" fix as I wasn't familar with the tool. I'd say it shouldn't take more ten minutes once I become efficient with the program.

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[AFS]

Captain's Log... (lots of photos)

Well, i've been working on this conversion as a learning experience as well as a serious conversion, while chatting with several people and posting continuously, so it took me a while- like 2 hours while...but I had most of it done after a very short time, the rest was just going back and checking it over, writing this up, uploading to web, saving other versions, realizing i'd forgotten to check the resize box before resaving, going back and resaving the resaves, etc.

In this case I did the edited version first, then unchecked all the little boxes except size/resolution (resize for easy post to web) so it would revert to the original version.
I will say now that at the last minute I remembered I forgot to apply USM...but I don't think it really needs that.

So, I've got a little bit of a step by step here. I'll show you some intermediate versions since I didn't take screenshots. It is really easy to give someone the step by step on this- you do the whole thing then just click the check marks :smile:

-----------------------------------
A Photo in the Making
Wednesday afternoon, it was getting a bit cloudy and I wanted to go shoot. I took my sorely underused pair (D200+200 f/2) outside with me on a monopod and slung the HS and 70-200 over my shoulder. It stayed there- the 200/2 saw all the use.
This is one photo from my little journey, of one of the Jackfruits on my father's biggest jackfruit tree. Shot in Raw on the D200.
Its vital statistics at creation:
Nikon D200, ISO 800 1/160 sec. f/2.8 with 200mm f/2.0G VR.

This is basically how it looked out of the camera.

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Click here for larger (1024x685) version.

not terrible but a little PP would make that look a fair bit nicer.

Enter capture NX. I admit, I waited to do this batch until I got NX :redface:

I got the idea to do a bit of boosting the greens on part of the image but I felt that doing so would overpower the fruit and tree too much because the original background was so close in color.

NX to the Rescue. I start by sizing a control point to fit the fruit. This is really easy to do. Another thing I did was in the control point dialogue box, hit view selection. This changes you to a black and white view that shows you by the bright areas just what the control point is affecting.

here is a screenshot of the control point with all options enabled and in view selection mode.

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Full Size Version- Click Here (1440x900)

After checking where it would apply, which is very intelligent in its choice of how much to apply even when the radius spills over, I then added my desired changes: Hue +10 degrees, Saturation +34%, -4 brightness and +12 contrast.

Then I added a little bit of Noise Reduction- but I did so Selectively. There was already a tiny bit applied in the base settings, but I applied a bit more because it was a bit aggressive in the shadows near the bottom of the fruit. It was already supposed to be out of focus, so a bit of softness didn't matter. I started by applying it over the whole image. I then used a large diameter minus brush while NR was selected to remove NR from the whole fruit and its stalk, the leaf above it, and part of the tree that was well exposed. This let me get it done very quickly. By going to view> show selection you get a representation of the areas you selected to remove it from in red on the white background. This lets you quickly check if you covered everything.
Then I took the plus lasso, which restricts whatever you do to inside the lasso, and whipped it around the bottom/right part of the fruit where it drops off into the shadows and the noise was building up, and used the plus brush to add the NR back in in those sections.

NR by the way if overdone doesn't look super good, but if you do it in the right amounts it is perfect. NR On-Low with the D200 auto applied gave me luminance only, grainlike noise only in the worst areas.

So here was the result after the Color Control Point and NR.

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(click for larger version- 1024x685)

Looking better so far.

Next step was to simply play with the curves a bit: mostly dropping the darker end down under the baseline and nudging the area just past the midpoint the tiniest bit up.

After the curves:

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(click for 1024x685 version)

Finally all that remained was the selective color partial black and white conversion....yeah like that'll be easy (NOT!), especially since I want my background to be toned down but not all the way B&W.

Actually it was more than just easy, it was downright insultingly easy!
There are at least two ways I can think of to do this, but the way I used was described in the preview of NX that was linked here a few weeks ago. What you do is you go to Filter-> Black and White conversion. This converts the whole image to B&W. You can apply filters- I didn't bother changing it from defaults this time around. You then adjust the opacity of the B&W conversion- normally it is 100% so it covers the whole thing. I put it to 65% opacity. Then you do something like I did with NR. You take the minus brush, size it appropriately (with hardness at a minimum so it doesn't look weird) and go over the areas you want to have color. I started out with the huge brush, and moved to a smaller one at high magnification for the edge work. Whenever I accidentally went out of bounds, I just took the plus brush and added the conversion back in. You could theoretically lasso the whole image area you wanted like that and applied the brush but that would have been kind of difficult and time consuming. I would think it might be possible to use the lasso/marquee tool to keep the B&W from affecting the area in the first place but again, i don't draw straight lines with my mouse

Then I just saved as JPEG and here is the final product:

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Click above image for larger 1024x685 version.

Hope you all enjoyed this supplement to my Capture NX ruminations thread and liked the image as well! let me know what you think.

Harrison

 

[obelix]

I kinda like it. UGLY UI, what is with the widgets? That is like 4 steps backward. I am spoilt by the speed of bibble pro, and this thing is SLOW compared to that, but many steps ahead as compared to capture 4.4.

I LOVE control points. Just a quick test, I went from here

http://photos.anands.net/Album/Landscapes/Bristlecone/slides/treeInSunrise.jpg

to here

http://www.anands.net/tmp/DSC_9041.jpg

in about 3 mins with one control point. This would have taken about 20 mins with my crippled photoshop skills.

 

[PhotoByMark]

Keep the examples coming.....

Stuck at work so all I can do right now is follow along.......

 

[obelix]

Harrison

How do you enable all the options in control points?
Did you see the blending modes? .

Thanks

 

[PhotoByMark]

I think this is one place to find the manual
Let me know if I am wrong

http://tinyurl.com/z6db9

 

[AFS]

To get all the options in the control point at once, pull up the dialogue box for the control point you want, on that box click the arrow for advanced options, select 'all' from the drop down list.

 

[obelix]

Harrison. Got it, thanks. If only this thing is faster - but this is turning out to be a cool product.

 

[AFS]

what are you using it on anand?

 

[MontyDog]

#1064 - You have an error in your SQL syntax;

 

[obelix]

Harrison

Using this on Windoze , P4 3.0 GHz [single core] with 2 GB RAM.