Nikon Capture NX-D

[john beardsworth]

See http://beta.nikonimglib.com/faq/ . Looks like a post-Nik rewrite of Capture, so no U Points, and edits saved to a sidecar rather than back to the NEF.

[Simon Garrett]

Yes, and apparently runs like a slug on valium.  People on dpreview talking about screen draws of D800 images taking a minute on a Sandy Bridge processor. 

This appears to be an "improvement" over NX2 in the way politicians and advertisers user the word. 

[Simon Garrett]

I downloaded it and compared a few images in NX2, NXD and Lightroom 5.

NXD is pretty slow, but it's a beta, so I'd ignore that.  I compared 2 images: an indoor flash portrait and an outdoor shot with blown-out overcast sky.

The indoor portraits were near-as-dammit identical in all three (NX2, NXD and LR5).  They were shot with Standard picture control (no tweaks to the sub-controls) and I used Camera Standard profile in LR5, so I was comparing like-for-like.  Skin tones, white point, overall lightness and contrast etc were virtually indistinguishable.  LR applies very slightly less default sharpening.

With the outdoor scene, LR's image-dependent treatment of highlights and shadows was evident.  There was noticeably more highlight detail visible in the LR shot, and I couldn't get as much highlight recovery in NX2 even with manual adjustment.  I couldn't find a highlight recovery tool in NXD, but maybe I missed it.  

Edit: I posted example images at http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/53205655

[G*]

Nikon asked for feedback, and I gave it to them. Though I tried to keep it brief I just sent them 8 pages of remarks on NX-D via their dedicated website. Now they won’t be able to say they did not know or were not warned …
My key suggestion was saving money by putting NX-D to the garbage immediately and instead investing in superior profiles for established raw developing softwares. That would create happy customers and be a really innovative and bold move for a camera maker.

[PhotoEcosse]

Nikon asked for feedback, and I gave it to them. Though I tried to keep it brief I just sent them 8 pages of remarks on NX-D via their dedicated website. Now they won’t be able to say they did not know or were not warned …
My key suggestion was saving money by putting NX-D to the garbage immediately and instead investing in superior profiles for established raw developing softwares. That would create happy customers and be a really innovative and bold move for a camera maker.

Neat.

[Some Guy]

Seems like they combined the View NX2 and Capture NX2 both.  Interface and text is sort of dark to me.

The loss of the Control Points (u Points?) is very disturbing as I used those a lot and they were far more convenient than going into PS or some other editor to address spot coloration, contrast, saturation, and brightness.  Very good tool and a shame for them to abandon it as it was a nice selling point over PS too.

As to speed, they might be doing more noise processing as is being done in DxO Pro 9 that is super slow with their PRIME noise tool at over a full minute or more for some images.  But if NX-D is a boost to the image even though it may take longer over the Capture NX2, then I'm okay with it.  Some huge TIFFs (400-800MB) are slow no matter what.

SG

[BernardLanguillier]

The loss of the Control Points (u Points?) is very disturbing as I used those a lot and they were far more convenient than going into PS or some other editor to address spot coloration, contrast, saturation, and brightness.  Very good tool and a shame for them to abandon it as it was a nice selling point over PS too.

Yep, U-Point remains, IMHO, one of the few real breakthrough in image processing since layers in PS.

I am not surprised that Nikon was unable to work something out with Google on this one, but it does remove one of the key values of NX2 for sure.

Cheers,
Bernard

[PhotoEcosse]

All of the replies seem to indicate one thing:

Now is the time for NX2 users to (belatedly) switch to Lightroom + Nik.