I just downloaded NX-D and am giving it a spin. My opinion so far is that NX-D is definitely
not a replacement for Capture NX2. Too much has gone missing. I am certainly not the first one to say this!
NX-D Ergonomics: Mostly very painful. A couple of good things.
- The app is all black background in preview pane and toolbars. When I get the tools open that I want to use, it is difficult to find them quickly and to find particular parts of them.
- In the Edit palette, there seems to be no logic behind the placement of the tool icons. Six of them are on separate menu bars. The remainder are on one menu bar.
- When I apply an edit, the preview has one of those totally annoying refresh "hiccups". The preview goes black and redraws in jerky chunks. I'm on a fast 64-bit machine, so there is no excuse for this. A couple of times the preview went black and never returned at all!!
- The app is sloooooow. Again, no excuse.
- Nice feature: Split screen for before and after views of foto edits. I like that. But if you have tools open, they cover some of the after preview.
- Good thing: Cmd-H and Cmd-S still trigger blown highlights and blocked shadows. But now it works even if the cursor is not over the foto.
Can I do what I need to do to get a NEF on its way as a TIF for further sharpening and editing? Let's see....
To mimic NX2's Develop section, click the NX-D white balance, picture control, exposure control, noise reduction and camera corrections icons.
- In-camera settings for white balance, picture control, noise and active d-lighting can be tweaked as though still in-camera. Also distortions or CA control can be enabled. All these settings work as they do in NX2.
- Noise reduction: Whether or not you enable NR in-camera, the NR tool provided in Develop always worked well, imho. Works still the same in NX-D. I can see myself maybe using NX-D occasionally on certain files because of Nikon's good NR.
- White balance: No more capability to draw a marquee of any size for white balance averaging. Only a little box can be drawn with the gray dropper. I'm not sure this would greatly affect my work, but I still would miss it.
- NX-D permits use of the new Pic Controls with the clarity slider even if the foto under edit was made on an older camera. That is nice.
To mimix NX2 Quick Fix settings, it is slightly trickier. Click the NX-D exposure control (if not used above), tone and tone detail icons.
- You will get the old NX2 Quick Fix exposure/contrast/highlight/shadow/saturation sliders and also sliders for brightness/D-lighting. The Quick Fix histogram can be replicated by the LCH tool.
- The Tone slider for D-lighting is not the same as in-camera ADL.
- Dealing with highlights/shadows/brightness/saturation in NX2 was always best done, imho, with those wonderful colour control points, so I never made much use of the Quick Fix sliders except for the exposure compensation slider. YMMV, of course.
- The LCH tool is great. Works just like in NX2. For Quick Fix replication, I used LCH's histogram to fine tune black/white point settings and for the usual global curving which I used to do on the QF histo.
At this point NEF development could be considered complete, just as it would in NX2. So you could Save As a TIFF and finish local edits elsewhere. Save As has been renamed Convert File. And NX-D has no blankety-blank idea where the file came from originally, so just like in NX2 you have to lead the app to the location where you want the saved file to land. Geez, even my lowly PSElements knows where the original file lived when doing a Save As.
NX-D offers a bit more for global edits: LCH (Lightness, Saturation, Hue panels), Levels & Curves, Straighten and Unsharp Mask. The NX2 LCH tool I always thought to be excellent and I used it a lot. However, I always made the most use of it for
local edits by applying changes with the NX2 Brush.
My personal opinion on Unsharp Mask, in either NX2 or NX-D, is that I infinitely prefer Nikon's in-camera Sharpness setting for getting the fuzz off the photo prior to more sophisticated sharpening techniques. That Pic Control setting is very interesting. I've never quite been able to replicate it with USM, although I grant you I probably did not try too hard. "-)
Gaussian blur is gone, so no more sharpening via a 2-pixel gaussian blur overlay. I used that a LOT in NX2 for local detail work.
I think that if I use NX-D at all - perhaps for some D810 work - it would be by creating a preset for a particular shoot and batching out some TIFs. The slowness of the app and the general clunkiness makes one-at-a-time foto edits way too tedious.
