Quote Originally Posted by OldSchool
Hi Seb,

Do you have Nikon Capture? It has it's detractors, but what I really like about it is that you can change all the in-camera settings and see the results on the fly. These settings include: exposure, white balance, sharpening, tone curves, color mode, saturation, and hue adjustment. I find this super-useful for tweaking the RAW file before I start any editing. Note that there is a button that will open PS with your current image in Nikon Capture. Also, there is a bunch of other stuff that Nikon Capture does. But I only use NC for basic corrections. I use Paintshop Pro for any images that have become projects.

At first I totally grumbled about shelling out the $100 for Nikon Capture. But after the fact, it is well worth it to me for the fidelity and control over the RAW conversion.

I don't use PS. So, I have no insight to your PS CS2 question. But, I'll do my best if you have any other questions about NC. One reason why I personally would not use PS (or any other program) to convert RAW is that they don't apply many of the in camera settings. And one in-camera that I find so useful is the tone curves. You can download custom tone curves to your D70 for tweaking the "style" of the image.

Also, fyi, get Nikon View if you don't have it. It is free. And it does a great job rendering the RAW images applying all in-camera settings.

Cheers,
Tim
Hello Tim, thanks for your imput. To answer your questions I never bought/used capture. I have been using View during a year (it came with the camera) mainly to browse pictures. At that time, I only had PS Element 2 which didn't handle raw files nor 16 bits files and I was mainly shooting jpeg fines. I would sometimes shoot raw anyway. In that case, I was using Nikon View to convert the raw image in an 8 bits tif file that was usable in Element 2.

In may 2005, I was buying CS2. Soon after, I was moving to OS X 10.4 and I decided to reformat my hard drive at the same time. I never reinstalled View since then... The thing is, I found View to be highly inefficient. I did what it had to do but it used insane system ressources to do so. CS2 is so much faster (for me), comparison hurts. I never heard really good comments on camera companies softwares (be it Nikon, Canon, Olympus...). It appears that they are all slow.

Adobe Camera Raw served me well so far. The automatic adjustments that MJS was reffering to (which are meant to avoid clipping once working in CS2) can be totally disabled. Now, I might be wrong but I believe that all the features from Capture you are reffering at exists in Camera Raw (anybody feel free tocorrect me if I am wrong on that one). I don't mean to sound like the close minded guy that doesn't want to give a try to Capture but my next DSLR will most likely be a Canon so I am not really enthusiastic to the idea of spending some more money to try Capture....

I probably told you much more informations than what you wanted to hear lol! Sorry for the rambling. I'll do some search on Capture to get a good comparison betwen Camera Raw and that one...

then again, thanks for your support

Seb