Capture NX or Phase One Capture 4 for Nikon NEFs

[py6km]

I've been reading up a fair bit recently about Nikon's RAW files, and it seems that the Nikon proprietary software (NX) produces some excellent results because it can pluck out some extra info from the nef files that 3rd party apps cannot, or simply do not use.

In this respect, results from NX are generally regarded as better than ACR.

Trouble is, NX is very clunky and slow, and not ideally suited to processing a large number of files.

Phase One has just released v4 of its Capture software, and I'd like to know if anyone has used either of these and if they can comment on how this 3rd party app handles nef files.

I've now got NX free as it comes with D300s, so will definitely give it a go, but my first impressions are that it is soooo slow that it may result in much hair pulling. If Capture can produce better results than ACR, but has a better user interface and isn;t as slow, then maybe that would be better ?

[SignalMan]

I also got a copy of Capture NX software free with one of my D200s but I found it to slow. Started using Elements 6 and and will not be going back to the Nikon software.

Don't know which gives the better results, I can't tell the difference

[alfienoakes]

Like you I got NX free with the D300. I tried it, I think the results are excellent but I cannot live with the speed of it. I will use it again in the future, but probably only on single images that I want to spend time editing for the best quality. It would take days to go through a large set of pics with.

I've used Capture One 3.x as my main RAW processing tool for the last year. It's quick and simple to use and produces great results. There's still no sign of v3.x for the D300 so I gave 4.0 a go yesterday. So far results look good, it's like lightning in comparison with NX. I'm not a fan of the interface yet, but like anything new it takes some time to familiarise. It took a while to work out how to turn the sharpening by default down to a much more reasonable level. The default sharpening was way OTT for my tastes.

I ran some quick comparisons on output with C1, Lightroom and ACR. There wasn't a lot to choose between them. I didn't have NX installed on this new machine to test, but I'd imagine it will be slightly better.

There's a version of Bibble out that supports D300 NEF files as well now. I've not used that before but may give it a go. I think these may well all be stop-gaps before C1 release a compatible version of 3.x though. It's what I'm used to

[py6km]

Great thanks - I think that sounds similar to my position - I like NX, but want to poke my own eye out after having used it for more than 30mins.

I'll download the demo of C1.

by the way, how do you feel Lightroom stacks up against all these, as I've been using that up to know for the bulk of my work?

[viffer]

haven't had any problems with the speed side of NX.
Find it pretty easy to use, granted my pc ain't the quickest so maybe i don't notice the speed side.
Found that moving the temp/cache settings of NX to a separate physical drive helped things a lot.
Takes a couple of mins to process a file, plus i like the fact you can have several different edits of a NEF file saved under 1 file name.
Jason Odells NX guide helps with speeding up the workflow.

[alfienoakes]

Originally Posted by py6km

How do you feel Lightroom stacks up against all these?

I haven't really used Lightroom enough to give a good opinion. It has a few things that annoy me, but that's probably down to experience more than anything. I really think I should learn it as I can see it's a great time saver The images I've had out of it are pretty close to C1, but I'm not a big pixel peeper

Will be interested to see what you think of C1. It's got a bit of a slating in the official forums for being buggy. But so far it's run fine for me, and that's on Vista 64-bit.