Skating girl on ice rink near the Ferry Building, in San Francisco, CA, late December 2008.
Smiling girls in Union Square, San Francisco CA
Sears, near Union Square, where they come up with delicious breakfast food.
All the shots above were taken with my D700 and my 24-70 f2.8, at very high ISO. If Nikon ever did something good with the D700, it was this glorious performance at ISOs above 3200.
But I won't keep gushing about the camera or the lens (which has its drawbacks, but I'll elaborate on them later). I need to hear what others have done. Right now, I'm thinking seriously about NOT buying the Nikon software, Capture NX 2, as I have updated my Photoshop Elements version to handle RAWs from the D700. With a plugin recently added, PSE can actually open Nikon's RAW files, and I can resave them as TIFFs that later get turned into JPEGs (like the photographs above). There is one feature of Capture that I like: the famous D-Lighting. It's a lighting "smart" fix that comes in handy to have for the cases in which I haven't applied it on the image while editing in the camera. Otherwise, unless D-Lighting work as the Auto Levels in PSE, I feel pretty much like I'm ready to face the RAWs. In fact, I'm more familiar with PSE (and find it a little more intuitive) than with Capture NX2.
So far, the D-Lighting is the only pro about Capture NX 2. As for its drawbacks, I must say that it does slow down your computer, that the menus and functions are, at least in my little experience, pretty similar to those in PSE, but without the intuitive quality. Since I can open RAW files by clicking on them (in both of my Macs, one with Tiger and the other with Leopard), I frankly feel like the one and only virtue of Capture got cancelled.
What do you think?
3 comments:
Cool Photos Fracisco and thanks for commenting on my blog.
Cheers.
I'm asking myself the same question. Currently I'm importing RAW with either Aperture2 or AdobeRAW and then using Aperture fore management and PSCS4 for advanced editing.
Not that I need to add anymore complexity, but I'm interested in being able to use Nikon Picture Controls, which means using CaptureNX. I'm taking the Nikonians Capture NX workshop in March, so I'll download the trial soon and make my decision after the workshop.
You asked Yecap: Nice job! How do you manage and format your jpegs? I want to know. Thanks!
Yecap replied: It is all done in Photoshop CS3. Not that hard really once you know a bit about it. A book I can recommend is by a guy called Scott Kelby, "The Adobe Photoshop CS3 book for digital photographers". It is really good.
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