Review nikon capture nx2 free

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Nikon View Review nikon capture nx2 free software can be downloaded here. We’ve sent нажмите для продолжения query over to Nikon about the keyboard shortcuts, and will update this article if and when we receive a response. With version 2, the bulk of the Base Edit adjustments are in a new edit called Camera Captkre. October 29, at pm.
 
 

Review nikon capture nx2 free.Review: Capture NX 2

 

But one of my primary complaints with this duo was that neither app offered a complete feature set. ViewNX-i’s Raw processing capabilities were rather more limited in the interests of approachability, while Capture NX-D lacked features like support for geolocation, keywording, movies, slideshows and more. That left users having to switch back and forth between the pair for a full experience. The newly released Nikon NX Studio definitively addresses this.

It’s essentially a replacement for both applications, offering almost every feature of the pair in a single program. Capture NX-D and ViewNX-i will remain available for download, but are unlikely to be updated to add support for new cameras or compatibility with future operating system updates. It comes bundled with a new version of Nikon Transfer 2 whose sole change is to add support for NX Studio itself.

Although with that said, AVI-format movies from a couple of dozen Coolpix models released between and can’t be played back in the app. The user interface is aesthetically similar to that of both earlier apps, but it’s now cleaner, friendlier and more standards compliant than before.

Icons are monochromatic, with a bolder yellow accent color used to call attention to enabled options, rather than the more muted yellow of the Capture NX-D and ViewNX-i. And unlike both earlier apps, there are no drop shadows or gradient effects, giving NX Studio a cleaner, more modern look. Adjustment panels are no longer hidden behind toggle buttons, expanding a new one no longer causes a previous one to vanish from the UI, and nor do conflicting variations of a single control appear in multiple places as in the earlier app.

If you only use a subset of the controls on offer, you can also create a custom panel containing just those specific controls, which helps made them easier to find. And unlike in Capture NX-D, Windows conventions are now properly followed, so you can tab or shift-tab to switch back and forth between fields when typing in values directly, saving some wrist strain in having to reach for your mouse or touchpad repeatedly. One slight shortcoming is that while keyboard shortcuts are supported — for example, the F key toggles full-screen mode — there’s no list of shortcuts to be found in the otherwise-excellent user manual, and nor are they listed in the app’s settings.

We’ve sent a query over to Nikon about the keyboard shortcuts, and will update this article if and when we receive a response. There are relatively few downsides to the new UI.

You can no longer undock and float panels to place them wherever you like on the screen, nor can you dock them in different locations to their defaults, other than for the film strip. This defaults to a horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen, but can be switched to a vertical column at screen left instead. The navigation panel, folders and albums controls are all fixed at screen left, while the histogram, adjustments, EXIF information and keywording tools sit at the right of the screen.

Both of these side panels can easily be resized, or hidden with a single click on their centrally-located arrow buttons. The film strip lacks a similar button to allow it to be hidden, but you can hide it by dragging downwards when resizing. In most respects, NX Studio’s editing controls are identical to that app, although it does add the Color Booster control from ViewNX-i alongside NX-D’s saturation tool, giving you access to other method.

But what else do you gain by switching from NX-D? If your images are geotagged, you can also add location-based tags semi-automatically, choosing from a list of app-selected location name suggestions, or even from place names suggested via Wikipedia. Confusingly, though, this functionality is available only when in map view, even though the ‘Set from location data’ button remains visible — albeit grayed out — in other views.

I’d like to see Nikon correct that to be clickable regardless of your chosen view. Speaking of the map view, that’s another new addition, and it allows you to see geotagged images from your currently-selected folder or album on an interactive world map.

You have a choice of map, satellite, hybrid or physical views provided by Google Maps. Each individual image shows up as a yellow pushpin on the map, with the currently selected image being shown in red.

If your camera recorded a compass bearing at capture time, that direction is also indicated on its pushpin when selected as shown in the screenshot above left, but not otherwise. If you have an NMEA or GPX track log recorded by the camera itself or a compatible device, these can be imported and shown as a red track line.

And once imported, they can be used to approximately geotag selected images based on their capture time as compared to the times recorded in the track log. Another new addition is support for movies, both in terms of playback and basic editing. The editing functionality allows you to quickly trim the start and end of clips, or splice multiple files together. You can also combine multiple movie clips and images to make a new file complete with titles, captions, and overlaid music.

There are, however, only three transition effects, three still image durations with optional motion effect , and three brief music samples provided. You can also add your own music in. WAV or. M4A formats, and process movie clips to remove autofocus noise. Unfortunately, you’ll need quite a beefy processor and GPU for smooth playback if you shoot in 4K, let alone editing.

On my Dell XPS 15 laptop running Windows 10 version , I found p clips from the Nikon Z5, for example, played smoothly but those at 4K resolution stuttered badly. And that’s not down to the hardware, as VLC Media Player played them perfectly smoothly on the same computer, while Windows’ own Media Player and Photo apps only dropped a handful of frames. For one thing, you can now upload images and movies directly to Nikon’s Image Space service and YouTube, respectively.

You can also view slideshows with optional, user-provided background music, and the new program adds support for more obscure file formats such as 3D Multi Picture Object files or voice notes recorded on older Coolpix cameras. Really, I can only find a couple of omissions. As mentioned previously, you can no longer undock interface panels, nor can you change whether they appear in the left or right-side palettes.

Other than that, I couldn’t find any other missing features this time around. However, on testing the program I’ve found its results with identical settings to be visually indistinguishable from those of NX-D, even though precise file sizes do differ fractionally at the same compression level.

With that being the case, I’ll refer you to the second page of my earlier article , instead, for a more detailed analysis. NX Studio is capable of delivering good image quality with very pleasing color and impressive shadow recovery, but feel Adobe still has a slight edge when it comes to fine detail at low sensitivities, which increases at higher sensitivities thanks to significantly stronger noise reduction from Nikon.

The good news is that with no noticeable change in image quality, and with all the same controls on offer as in both predecessors, NX Studio will read and apply all the same tweaks as did either earlier application, meaning you can upgrade without fear of having to rework all of your adjustments.

As for performance, which was already a strong point of Nikon’s software compared to that provided by many manufacturers, things are also pretty similar to before. Adobe still has a small but noticeable edge in the speed of final output processing, and a more substantial advantage in terms of preview performance.

Using the same six comparison images as for my previous article, it took 28 seconds to complete the batch. By way of comparison, performance leader Adobe still holds the crown with a time of In my time with Nikon NX Studio, I’ve found it to be very stable, but that’s not to say it’s perfect, nor would I expect a brand-new app to be. I’ve run across a couple of bugs, although only one strikes me as particularly significant. And both are related to issues I found with the previous apps, as well.

Firstly, there’s still an issue with detecting dragging of the right-panel scroll bar, regardless of whether the program is running maximized or not. But where this only happened with my Dell Active Pen, it now also happens with both the touch screen and even when dragging with the mouse. Simply using the scroll wheel or a two-fingered touchpad swipe works around this, however. The program also ignores Windows’ scaling settings entirely in mixed-resolution monitor setups when running on an ultra high-def screen.

That makes it extremely difficult to use on a 4K display unless you either lower the resolution or disable your lower-res screen s. The good news is that Nikon is aware of this problem and working on a fix. In the meantime, desktop users with mixed-resolution displays can work around it using a scaling setting built into NX Studio, but notebook users will find that they constantly have to change this setting — which also requires an app restart — every time they disconnect or reconnect a display of differing resolution.

I have to say that it’s a big step in the right direction, giving photographers that use Nikon cameras a powerful editing application where they can perform most of the edits they’d want to.

The most important thing here is that the new program provides basically everything of any significance from its two predecessors, allowing you to ditch one of them altogether. Its new interface is noticeably better and easier on the eye, and its performance and image quality are just as good as before. I think this first iteration of NX Studio is a great replacement for Nikon’s earlier apps. I like NX Studio a lot. I do my selections and most of the editing here.

I want to see the difference between pictures, and before and after editing changes. But this is really difficult because between viewing the two results, the screen blacks out for several seconds. By then it’s hard to see the difference. There is a before and after function where photos are side by side with a scroll function, both showing at the same time. No black out. A 12 MB file gets shrunk to about 1. That should be addressed, as it is a real drawback. No dual display support?

Everything else seems so far to be an improvement, or at least an equivalent to ViewNX-i, but not being able to open the selected image on my second display is very disappointing indeed. I run it with dual displays with no issues.

I did have to figure out the settings to make it happen however. Do a search on-line and you will find the directions to make it happen. What I was after was menus on one smaller screen and image alone on the other. How have the fixed menu locations on Studio affected the dual screens? For people with large numbers of files, should offer the option of showing file names in a compact format rather than thumbnails taking up huge amounts of the screen.

The results are excellent and the software is quite speedy and the new workflow is much quicker. Thanks Nikon for a great professional grade, free, software. So far, it has crashed on my Win 10 PC several times, and it often refuses to actually execute things like Retouch.

Convoluted to say the least. Nice freebie for a light user but definitely not in the same league as a professional tool like Lightroom, either cloud or classic.

I have a decent setup, recent i7, 16GB ram, but NX studio runs kinda slow and my computer is churning away just to go through photos. Strangely, when accessing photos via memory card, it’s much faster, so it doesn’t like pulling from my folder on the computer.

Wondering if I set it up wrong or something I have set up the colours spaces so they are identical in NX and Affnity. When I export a tiff file to my harddisk and then open it in Affinity, the colors are spot on. I have never had this problem when exporting from Capture One Pro 10 to Affinity. Any ideas?

 

– Review nikon capture nx2 free

 

In that time, the competition for our image processing dollars has been furious. Adobe has updated Photoshop Lightroom to version 3; Apple has done reviee same with Aperture.

And yet, despite the temptation to switch, I still use Capture NX2 almost exclusively. Let me explain why. The first thing that you captuure to understand is that Capture NX2 captture only one mission: image editing particularly NEFs. Capture NX2 is not a pixel editor, at least not in the sense that Photoshop is. They are image management applications that bikon offer editing features.

Comparing Capture NX2 ffee either of these review nikon capture nx2 free is apples to oranges, unless you only focus on image editing capabilities. For me, Capture NX2 has two major strengths as an image editor.

First, it saves all edits directly into your NEF file, meaning that all the image metadata and nx information is inside jikon NEF container. The other major strength of Capture NX2 is that any adjustment you make to your image is completely reversible, or non-destructive, provided that you save the file in the native NEF format.

There was concern captire few review nikon capture nx2 free back that Nikon would abandon support for the NEF format, and the call for an open RAW standard was very loud, indeed. At the time of this brou-ha ha, I think a more valid concern would be if 3rd-party developers abandoned support for earlier NEF versions.

Far from it. Nikon Japan needs to get it through their collective egos that they are stifling the development of potentially excellent software by not giving users a clear upgrade path to native bit OS support, etc.

This, combined with the numerous reported issues of failed installations, etc. I rarely have issues with the application. The point of this comparison is to show that when it comes to a non-destructive editing workflow with Control Points, which is something built-in to Capture NX2, review nikon capture nx2 free of other applications would need to fork out for the /2472.txt version of Photoshop and all of the associated Nik plug-ins.

I was a heavy NX2 user until Aperture 3 came acpture. I am now up to Aperture 3. Aperture 3 now provides all those capabilities out of the box with non-destructive editing. It is 64 bit also, so it is much faster than NX2. Thanks review nikon capture nx2 free this article. Speaking of Educational regiew, people can save a ton of money if they meet the qualifications.

I am a fan of both your website and your ebooks. I agree with you on sticking with Capture NX2. I downloaded the free trial of Aperture and evaluated it for a couple of weeks but I review nikon capture nx2 free prefer using NX2. As you freee out, the LCH editor is very powerful and unrivaled in other programs, and the implementation of the non-destructive По этому адресу Points in NX2 is very nice.

I hope Fred and Nik are listening to you Jason. My biggest fear is that NX becomes Orphanware. Jason a nice succinct article.

We have been having a similar discussion in the Nikonians CNX2 forum and you have covered the key points well. I realized that I could get better review nikon capture nx2 free results just using CNX2 and nlkon going to Adobe when I needed something like a pano or to merge images. As a result, I rarely ever go to Photoshop now, primarily for all the reasons you stated above.

Your essay eloquently mirrors my observations and accurately describes my practices. Nikon could beneficially emulate that support; it has often required many email exchanges just to get them to escalate the problem to someone who can understand it. Hopefully, your comments will be appreciated and acted upon. I believe I speak for many Nikonians in saying that we are looking forward to something like CNX3 which will embody your suggestions. Amen, bro. I find it easier to get better quality images nikn NX2 review nikon capture nx2 free Lightroom 3.

I get better colour and way better sharpening with NX2 in particular, and also get more accurate prints with my Canon from NX2. It does need an update though.

My experience is a bit different than some. NX2 even the latest release still crashes with some regularity and it is very slow. In no case have I have nikpn as satisfied with the results with CS3 as I have been with NX2 in terms cappture color and free though I do agree with the comments about better plug ins for noise reduction. All this said the folks frde Nik have been great free deal with. Nikon on the other hand is inexcusably non-communicative and is completely unwilling to forecast anything in terms of features or fixes review nikon capture nx2 free bugs that have been outstanding for more than a year.

This tells нажмите чтобы перейти they just do not get it and it will just be a matter of time before they fall further behind and it will be harder to justify the use of NX2.

I am fgee happy with using the rest of Niks offerings as plugins just like CEP currently is in the next version. I am also very happy with Photo Mechanic for browsing and tagging, and almost as happy to use MS Windows Live Photo Gallery to find and catalog, since that is just levering Windows indexing that is already there.

CNXx will always be at the center of my image editing universe. Nikon — did you hear that? I also dapture hope Nikon is reading this and taking notes. Sometimes I like больше на странице match up a white sky to absolute white. That can involve a for windows 10 of saving and exiting out to VNX2 currently to make sure I have the right illustrator adobe cs6 free. Jason, while I agree with most of the points взято отсюда your post, I think your price comparisons are misleading.

For example, LR3 is on Amazon. Second, for many people the Photoshop cost will be substantially less. I think Nikon, as a total camera system, is the best and NX2 captyre to give Nikon the edge. NX2 is the biggest reason Review nikon capture nx2 free would not consider shooting with another brand of camera. Источник also like the NEF nimon system. I can make multiple adjustments to the image and save each version in the NEF file. This is helpful because I can always go back to review the list of edits in case I want to apply this same list of edits to another image at a later date.

I was fairly content with CNX2, but it seemed review nikon capture nx2 free Nikon was standing still while the competition was moving forward. And all of the native non-Nik LR3 adjustments are nondestructive. To get that, you need either Capture NX2 or the Nik plug-ins. Not everyone is an academic, has bought the previous revidw versions, etc.

A never ending story continues…. Absolutely ridiculous policy, having to wait for more then review nikon capture nx2 free читать больше for updates. So hello Adobe for me, everything I need they rfee me, including regular updates. Good point on the control points, Jason. That feature is perhaps the biggest reason why I like CNX2. My main reason I like to use Capture NX2 is n2x ability to read my camera settings. I try my hardest to rrview it close in camera.

Plus the automatic color aberration control. Just bugging. Lots of interesting thoughts and comments by people. I have used it since Capture 4. I think the shift had mostly to do with the shift in my revlew. And with the current camera profiles the color rendition is very close to the NX2 rendition.

I have high hopes for NX3, assuming it ever makes an appearance. Not to mention the ecosystem around Adobe is better. Far more training, tutorials, tips, videos, etc. Sorry for a second posting, but on reading the responses, I wanted to add one продолжение здесь. For another group there are serious concerns that if unaddressed will likely cause us to move on.

As someone else posted…… I hope Nikon is reading this, but I am sure that even if they were it will not have an impact. The past few years a lot of people wrote and were pretty sure CNX2 would be updated soon…. Somebody wrote it before, what you are writing is just webnoise, useless! Lightroom review nikon capture nx2 free to review nikon capture nx2 free better and with all of the other features that it offers, revoew the ease of use, it does not look like NX смотрите подробнее see me again soon.

Lightoom allow me to stay away from Photoshop for most of my image processing. Care to clarify this remark Jason? Are you referring to addins? Adobe have dropped the ball of opening the rendering pipeline to third parties. I believe this is due to an autocratic viewpoint capturr Thomas Knoll and tis a revkew. You also mentioned the sidecar files. As you likely know, they are not necessary if you maintain the lightroom catalogue, where all changes are recorded.

There is also the risk of writing to the NEF file, although that is not significant if you have review nikon capture nx2 free up the original.

I used all the versions of capture and became tired of the constant stability and performance issues. I liked the ergonomics of capture 4, but that was lost when NX came about.