Back in this post, I mentioned that I generally preferred the look out of Nikon’s Capture NX-D more than Lightroom. After struggling with colors in yesterday’s post, I thought it would be fun to do a quick comparison of just a straight RAW conversion from Lightroom and from Capture NX-D. No edits whatsoever have been applied to this image. The file was uploaded into each program and then exported to JPG.
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One note on viewing this: I’m limited to sRGB color space that limits what I can show here. Keep in mind the differences that show up on screen would be even greater if viewed in a larger colorspace like Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB. The blog software seems to be adding a level of compression to the images as well, making it even harder to show differences in this venue. You’ll have to take my word on some of this or give it a try on your own files.
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Most of this can be overcome in Lightroom and Photoshop but not all of it. And it requires more work to get to an end product. Sometimes it’s nice to have the best starting point possible for a file.
Honestly, it’s been awhile since I played with an image in Capture NX-D and while it is slow, the user interface isn’t as bad as I remember it being. The increase in image quality also surprised me. While the convenience factor is still going Adobe’s way, I think it might be time that I spend more time in Capture NX-D. At least on images more worthy than this one!