Happy Mothers Day to all those Moms out there, especially the one my little girl calls Mommy! We went out for dinner then to a nice little frozen yogurt joint we just found, after that we walked around to find a few places to take some pictures, I like the way these two came out. All processed with Nikon NX2, exported to Tiffs, then into Adobe Lightroom to add one of my presets and up-loaded to Flickr using Jeffrey Friedl’s excellent LR to Flickr Plug-in.
OK, if you read my earlier post about Capture NX2, how much I enjoy using it, and the long dark and lonely journey it took to get there, you’d know I promised a second part. Well, this is it! As I mentioned in the earlier post I really like how NX2 processes my NEFs, and in my opinion it does a better job then LR2. Well, that could all change with the news of specific Nikon and Canon profiles you can load into LR2. These are profiles created to match the camera manufactures processing and output of their proprietary RAW files!!! Now, what exactly does this all mean, well, camera manufactures generally keep their “secret sauce” recipe for their RAW files quite, and 3rd party RAW processors like Adobe have to reverse engineer how they think these files should be processed, which they do a pretty darn good job of I must say! However, it’s not the “secret sauce”, and if these camera manufactures are anything like my Aunt Millie, they will take their recipes to the grave with them…and some how know and haunt your dreams when you try and dig her up to get said recipes but that’s another story… Anyway, I guess what I am saying here, is this may be the closest thing to the camera manufactures processing you can with-in LR2 right from he start, which in my opinion, is pretty darn exciting!
Now all of this excitement started when I check a site I go to often which is Photoshop Lightroom™ KILLER TIPS, with Matt Kloskowski, and the other day he posted this;
http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2008/video-camera-profiles-for-lightroom/
Then, a few days later he posted this;
http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2008/presets-camera-profile-presets/
Matt lists them on his site but you can also get the profiles from the Adobe Labs site here;
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_cameraprofiles
So go to his site, watch the awesome video, download the awesome profiles, and make awesome pictures! And remember what Kung Fu Panda says, “There is no charge for AWESOMENESS!”
*NOTE: There are actually two different things to download here, the actual profiles and Matts pre-sets. He created the presets so you don’t have to navigate to the Camera Profile section in the develop module every time, and this way you can apply then to and entire set of photos or on import, brilliant, thanks Matt!!!
So I am a Nikon user, I put off trying out Nikon Capture for a long time. I just didn’t see the use, another software package I had to learn, I’d spend more money, and I just didn’t see the point all ready having Lightroom and PSCS3. Then I listened to a pod cast with Vincent Versace and I knew I had to give Capture NX 2 a try. Low and behold, it’s an awesome piece of software, and in the end, my NEF’s from my Nikon D200 do in fact look better then when opened in Lightroom (yes I did the nerdy side by side comparison). Not that they looked bad in LR, just better in NX2. I was stunned, baffled, sad, happy, and a little itchy…but I don’t think that had anythign to do with LR or NX2. Anyway, other then the NEFs looking better right from the start, I found the u-point technology pretty damn amazing! Overall I found NX2 a faster process then PS as well, now obviously this is due to NX2 not being nearly as powerful or diverse as PS but it is more honed to what I need from an image processing software. now with that being said, there is one problem, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of information out there. I searched the internet for PS like tutorials but came up with nothing for NX2. However I did eventually come up with a few resources which I will list below. If anyone has any more please just drop me a line and I’d be glad (and grateful) to list it, thanks!
Moose Peterson’s site has some great videos on NX2 as well as some other Nikon stuff, thanks Moose!
Nikon’s own NX2 site has some good information as well.
A guy from Flikr who calls himself MikeD_R has some excellent video posts on using NX2.
The ” Nikon Capture NX users group”.
Here’s an older site for learning NX, the first version of the software.
NOTE: This is actually a two part post, there’s some exciting new LR news related to this, I’ll post it tomorrow for those of you who haven’t heard.
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