Two Straight RAW Conversions

By milehipentax@gmail.com | Published June 22, 2020

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.

Here is the Lightroom conversion. Lightroom defaults to their “Adobe Color” profile. It handles Nikon files better than older Lightroom options but it still isn’t the most appealing. The colors, especially the dominant green, are off to my eye and highlights get a little crushed. The first thing I usually do in Lightroom is use a custom made profile with my ColorChecker Passport. I have a set of standard profiles (sunny, cloudy, tungsten, etc.) that I’ve made but if it’s a critical file, I’ll make a custom file for that particular image.

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.
Here’s a file that’s straight out of Capture NX-D. It defaults to the profile selected in camera. In this case, it’s just “Camera Standard.” The greens are more natural, the highlights aren’t as cooked and for my purposes, it gives me a much better starting point on a photo. The only problem is that the program is slow and buggy and not terribly fun to use. Still, if I’m looking for the very best starting point for a file, Capture NX-D gets the nod over Lightroom.
Full size crop of the Lightroom file.
And the Capture NX-D image. The sRGB colorspace and blog software compression don’t do this any favors but even with those limitations, you can still see the subtle improvements in sharpness, color and microcontrast.

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!

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