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Feb. 19, 2007
Using
Nikon Capture NX as an image editor for Adobe Lightroom 1.0
The
image on the left is after I adjusted the image with the Recover and Fill light tools in Adobe Lightroom. The image on
the right is after I made some more adjustments with U point technology - Control Points in Nikon Capture NX.
Since Adobe Photoshop
Lightroom is obviously an Adobe application, one would think that the
appropriate image editor (for editing functions that are not available
in Photoshop Lightroom itself) would be Adobe Photoshop CS. In most
cases I would say that would be the best way to go and I do use
Photoshop CS quite a lot myself, but Nikon photographers (and others)
have another choice.
Nikon Capture NX is an exceptionally good RAW (NEF) image file
converter (for Nikon NEF images only) and has a few image editing
capabilities that can not be found in either Photoshop Lightroom or
Photoshop CS. The most outstanding feature of Capture NX is what Nikon
refers to as their U Point technology
which uses Control Points to
selectively adjust the size, brightness, contrast, saturation and
hue of a particular color or area of an
image.
For example yesterday I was driving down the road between Utapao and
Sattahip (this should bring back some memories for the guys who served
in South East Asia, in the sixties and seventies) when I saw a large
outdoor Buddha statue that I had been intending to photograph for some
time. So I pulled into the temple compound, grabbed my new Nikon D40
and started looking for an angle. Unfortunately the sun was so bright
and high, that half of the face of the Buddha was in a deep shadow.
Never mind I figured it would make a good story for this website.
Since I was not satisfied with the adjustments I could make in
Lightroom, I decided to Edit in
Capture NX, which made a TIFF copy of the original RAW file and
sent the TIFF image to Capture for editing. After the editing
process I Saved (not Save As)
the image which was then automatically picked up by Lightroom and
placed in a Stack with the original RAW image file.
TIFF and JPEG files can be adjusted using U Point - Control Points in
Nikon Capture NX but the image will in a sense be flattened (to borrow
an Adobe term) when it is saved and can not be re-edited without
introducing new Control Points. Nikon NEF (RAW) files can be saved with
the previous U Point settings available, the next time you open the
file.
The process in Capture NX was fairly straight forward I created a Control Point in the shadow area of
the Buddhas face and increased the brightness in that Control Point
area. I then duplicated that Control Point a number of times and placed
these Control Points in the areas that I considered to be too dark. By
making a number of small Control Point areas I was able to adjust the
shadow area without affecting the highlights.
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