RAW converter comparison – Capture NX2 vs. Lightroom 2
I was asked to post side-by-side comparisons between Nikon’s Capture NX2 and Adobe’s Lightroom 2. I’ve incorporated both of them into my workflow but the NX2 gets much less use despite much finer controls, more accurate and cleaner colours and detail rendition.
But why?
For starters the NX2 is far from user-friendly and frankly unusable with slow computers. Oh and it falls over more often than a clown car rolling down a hill. Lightroom excels with quick and dirty editing with fast turnaraound from import to publish and keeping large amount of files organized but I feel it lacks the finesse you get from, for instance, Photoshop’s pinpoint curves and saturation adjustments. Lightroom’s sliders and controls have as much accuracy as trying to write your signature by sneezing.
I’m possibly an oddball here but I have no Photoshop, Gimp or other pixel based image editing software installed at home where I do my photography related work. Mind you, graphic design still eats 9 hours of my work day so after a day of sitting in front of Creative Suite and cursing Adobe, Photoshop’s not welcome for dinner after crapping on my desk, no sir.
However the NX2 sits in where Photoshop would be. No, not in the trashcan.
If I want to check out what NX2 could do with a photo, here’s a simple workflow example.
From Lighroom ‘Show in Explorer’, open the file in NX2, do your edits and save the NEF. Export your lovely NX2 NEF to a ‘TIFF’ folder inside the shoot’s parent folder and have Lightroom auto-import new TIFFs to the catalogue. Now you have a fast workflow loop around Lightroom where the NX2 edited files that you auto-imported to Lightroom can be quick collected, flagged, rated, metatags synced, watermarked (NX2 has no usable watermarking feature) and exported together with Lightroom versions.
And since NX2 embeds its edit data nondestructively inside the file, Lightroom keeps on churning happily completely oblivious that the files might have NX2 versions too as Lightroom keeps all the edit data in its catalogue file.
By the way, this is where the notorious ‘The Lightroom preview looks fine but then it messes up the colours’ comes from.
Loading a RAW into LR (or Bridge/Photoshop as they all use the same ACR converter) first loads the camera-embedded preview image (on which camera histograms are based, some manufacturer displays histograms on RAW data for more accuracy but can’t remember which one). Then ACR discards the preview and runs the RAW data through it’s converter basically guessing what the numbers should look like. All third-party converters use the same method of discarding the embedded preview and interpreting the RAW data for better or worse. Some converters might do a better job on different colours and scenes than others and some might have more details and less noise or different kind of noise.
Onto samples!
Another shoot and now we begin to see some big differences.
Some end results.
leave a comment