Seeing clearly with Nikon Capture NX2.

I thought some of you might be curious as to the process taken when editing the images in Nikon Capture NX2. Through the use and grouping of control points the effect can be evenly applied and uniformly controlled.

You can see the points on the image split into linear sections along the rainbow. I wanted to have the ability to have three different control sections due to different varying choices in color saturation. Using the point selected above we can see the individual options for adjustment. From top to bottom (of the four options) we have: the amount of effected area , brightness, contrast, and saturation. Not all have to be used. It all depends on your motive. As you can see here the lowest slider was dragged much further to the right to help increase the lesser shades of violet, blue, and indigo. Once you have the settings you want to carry in a series of points you hold the ‘ctrl’ or command key and hit the letter ‘D’ to duplicate the point. All the similar control points get grouped as you can see on the right and will be more clear in the snapshot below.

A really cool feature of Nikon Capture NX2 is being able to see the exact impact of your actions with a selection option called “Show Selection.” Pretty to the point. What it does as seen above is convert the entire image to a scale of b&w showing only the effected areas by your adjustments. This is a great way to know exactly what is effected without trying to figure out if the saturation has hit a certain area and also it’s intensity. The color image this was done with is seen below. I used a different image for the two screenshots for some odd reason. Another advantage to the grouping can be seen by the menu on the right. You can effect them all at once; rather then individually tweaking each individual point within the group.

Nikon Capture NX2 handles the conversion of their raw files on the premature end better (I feel) then dumping them straight into photoshop. Through use of editing in Capture first and then through a 16-bit .tiff file for photoshop is a better and higher quality way to edit your images.