"RAW" Editor

I have been shooting digital for about 3 years now. I have been using a D70 for about 7 months shooting in fine jpg. I am ready to get into Raw for all of the obvious reasons.

My question is, will my Photoshop CS2 Raw editing be sufficient, or will I need to purchase an additional Raw editing software to really get the best results?

And if so, what software do you recommend?

Thanks. And keep shooting!


--Marv

I too have a D70 and use Nikon Capture for all my RAW editing. The thing that I like about NC is that it applies all in-camera settings to the photo (tone, exposure, white-balance, sharpening, etc.). You can change any of these to see effects on the image.

However, there are some other things that I am not comfortable with NC such as automatically removing color casts (if I can't do it with a white balance correction). I also don't like their histogram when trying to take a close look at other changes.

When I need further finishing, I pop over to Paintshop Pro. I've been using that for years and know my way around well.

There are many who do all raw conversion in PS. I think it is very sufficient. I've been thinking about getting photoshop. If I do, however, I'll still do RAW conversion in NC.

BR,
Tim

When I was shooting Nikon I liked the quality I got from Nikon Capture, but for everyday workflow Adobe Camera Raw built into Photoshop was worlds ahead in usefulness. I had NC for a bunch of reasons, including the tethered shooting, so the software is worth keeping around.

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Originally Posted by Marv

I have been shooting digital for about 3 years now. I have been using a D70 for about 7 months shooting in fine jpg. I am ready to get into Raw for all of the obvious reasons.

My question is, will my Photoshop CS2 Raw editing be sufficient, or will I need to purchase an additional Raw editing software to really get the best results?

And if so, what software do you recommend?

Thanks. And keep shooting!

--Marv

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Nikon Capture 4.4 has added something major. You can actually get back detail from RAW in highlights that were burnt-out in the JPG. It's in the "Exposure" control. You can adjust the exposure by +/- 2 stops and hey presto detail that you thought you lost comes back. I've been trying it out on some of my most hopeless images and it works.

Chasseurs d'Images (Feb 2006) says that this give you about the same possibilities as on a Fuji S3 Pro in Extended mode 1 but not mode 2 (whatever that is).

Charles

Thank you, friends.

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Originally Posted by Marv

My question is, will my Photoshop CS2 Raw editing be sufficient, or will I need to purchase an additional Raw editing software to really get the best results?

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My apologies for being late with my response.

I own a D70 and have been capturing and working with RAW images for a few months now. Prior to that I too was capturing JPEG fine before my changeover to RAW. My workflow is Adobe DNG converter, Adobe RAW plug-in for Photoshop CS, and Photoshop CS for final processing. I found this sequence of photo processing steps to be the least cumbersome and the most productive, with equal or better results when compared to any other combination of Nikon SW with Photoshop and I tried a few.

However, it took a while to get the hang of manipulating the RAW images with the RAW plug-in, and I'm still refining my technique. But all in all I'm quite happy with the results. Whatever you end up using, find a good manual that explains how to use your software to manipulate the RAW image and keep trying, regardless of how difficult it might all seem in the beginning. Once you start to figure stuff out - and that won't take too long - you'll be very pleased with the results, regardless of whether you go with Nikon software or an Adobe plug-in.

Happy shooting! HS