Having just missed the boat with DxO's discounted offer I'm again trying to get to grips with NX2.
The first question that I'd appreciate advice on, is about how it handles ca for a known Nikon lens. I have a 10.5 FE which I use for VR panos; I've had the lens hood shaved and I'm using it as a circular fisheye in FF mode (D700). This lens has quite a bit of ca. In the past I've been using ACR to process my RAWs, so it came as a big surprise to see that there was almost no ca visible when viewed in NX2. My assumption is that the ca characteristics are known and that NX2 corrects them automatically. Is this the so? Does this apply across the range of Nikon lenses? In which case why oh why haven't they also included geometric distortion mapping too, like DxO? Being able to forget about this is one of the things I really like about DxO. I like it less than £176, unfortunately. Of course it's also irrelevant for the VR pano application where fisheye needs to remain fisheye.
I frequently need to process batches of files for HDR pre-processing for these panos. Typically 3-shot brackets x8 or x10. NX2 won't open >20 shots it seems and goes pretty haywire with even 15 (I'm using a quad 6600 intel processor, XP 32 bit os, 4Gb ram etc). In ACR I simply open the entire set, tweak a few parameters (ca, vignetting, wb etc) on one file and then synchronise/save them all as 16 bit tiffs. How the hell do you apply a set of tweaks to the entire open set of files in NX2? I browsed around the GUI and opened the help file without managing to figure out how to do this (basic) process. I know there's a batch file tab, but surely it's not necessary to set up batch processes for such a simple one-off requirement?
RTFM, I know (I tried). But if anyone feels like having mercy on me I'd be grateful.
Roy