Capture NX-D is not my cup of tea. Inflexible. Underfeatured.
I loved NX-2 but it is gone together with its programmers.
Frank,
I used NX-2 as the only tool for post processing for years. Loved it like you.
Until Jan 2016 - as I had only "old" cameras which were supported by NX-2.
With recent camera acquistions this year, there was the need to move forward, not backward.
After much "resistance", I gave NX-D a try - and to much my surprise, I could do all the things with NX-D I did with NX-2.
Of course the menu structure was different, but after one evening, familiarity is now here as well.
A few things are even easier and more obvious than with NX-2 - so the pain is not really there.
Nice that Nikon didn't forget to support all the older D-SLRs in NX-D, so there is no need to use NX-2 for the older cameras.
You can of course use all the other RAW converters you like, but if you don't want to do all the profiling and second-guessing where a certain artefact is coming from, you might keep NX-D as your second RAW converter. At least you can be re-assured that the camera and (Nikkor) lens data are properly known to the software on your PC and you can re-run some of the in-camera processing steps on your PC again.
Going forward, my guess is that camera manufacturers like Nikon will put much more emphasis on the SW parts of the image processing pipeline in all 3 stages, so things will get more connected (and dependent). The days of product improvements alone on HW innovations might come to an end.
The 3 SW "buckets" I was thinking of:
1) SW processes and refinements before the "RAW file" storage step
2) in-camera processing like JPEG files and other capabilities (after the RAW step)
3) Post-camera processing on the PC (i.e. de-noising and demosaicing with FP numbers instead of integers the camera has to use for power consumption considerations)
rgds,
Andy
