Nikon Capture NX vs Adobe Light Room 3

[rkuramoto]

Which software is better and has more value the Nikon Capture NX or Adobe Light Room 3?

I'm currently only using the Nikon View NX and I'm finding I want to have a lot more features especially with white balance and automatic filter settings.

Do you guys have a preference? Keep in mind price as well.

[Franglais]

I switched to Lightroom 3 from Nikon NX2 about 2 months ago. My impressions so far:

Nikon NX2

- Expensive
- Has bugs (crashes sometimes)
- Well integrated with Nikon cameras. Full support for features like dust removal, view focus points
- Well integrated with NEF format (all changes are saved in the original file)

Lightroom 3

- Ridiculously expensive (I paid for mine - everyone else that I know has a pirated copy)
- The standard - everybody I know has a copy
- Easy to use. LR has commands to do things like highlight recovery. You can do the same thing in the Canon and Nikon editors but you need to know what you're doing
- Works with Nikon and Canon RAW files (I use both). But not integrated with either (separate sidecar file containing changes)
- Reliable. Not crashed so far

[rkuramoto]

Thanks for you input, it's much appreciated. I was leaning toward Lightroom 3, the only thing that was stopping me was the price.

Do you happen to know if the raw files are compatible with Nikon D3100 now? I know when I first looked it wasn't.

[Franglais]

I just looked and the D3100 is on the list of supported cameras.

My impression is that Lightroom is priced for professionals. It's part of a workflow package with Photoshop that includes development, editing and library management (which by the way I think that Lightroom does rather poorly).

If you just want to edit your PAW files and turn them into JPG's then don't forget that the RAW motor behind Lightroom is ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) - which I believe is usable from Photoshop Elements. I don't know if you can use Elements to edit the RAW files from the D3100 but it might be worth checking

[jetrim]

If you just want to edit your PAW files and turn them into JPG's then don't forget that the RAW motor behind Lightroom is ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) - which I believe is usable from Photoshop Elements. I don't know if you can use Elements to edit the RAW files from the D3100 but it might be worth checking

Best I can tell, if you have ACR, you have the develop module of Lightroom. It makes all the same adjustments, has the same camera calibration, has the same crappy clone & heal brushes, sharpening, noise reduction, clarity, vibrance, vignetting, lens correction, etc... It does batch synchronization, and save as .jpg too. Someone from Adobe explained that this is because of compatibility issues when moving RAW files through various Adobe software products. They really didn't want to include all this stuff in ACR but it caused problems for people who bounce between programs to accomplish different tasks.

[ksbryan0]

I'm not sure about Elements 9.0, but the ACR in Elements 8.0 does not offer nearly the controls and ability to process/manipulate RAW files as Lightroom 3.

[garfy2008]

I'm new so couldn't post a new topic so will ask here. Anyone using Nikon Capture NX2, could you please tell me how to "grab" an image of a person in a photo and copy them to paste onto a different photo (different background, basically). I just got a new D3100 and one of the DVDs that came with it showed this editing program would take a woman's image from one photo and move it to another one (saying that she wasn't in Hawaii but you could edit the photo to look like a background on the beach). Anyway, how would you capture just her image? Is there some automatic function that would outline the image correctly or do you have to use the "lasso" and carefully, manually try to trace the outline? Thanks for any help! (I'm using the 60-day trial, by the way, to see if it can do some of things easily that I'd like for it to do.)