Nikon put the "demo" up for download today. Been reprocessing some old stuff - made these two while toying with some of the bells and whistles...

 

Good stuff!

 

Nice shots. How do you like Nikon Capture NX compared to Nikon Capture? I was about to un-install NC from my desktop in favor of Adobe Lightroom. Is Nikon Capture NX worth it?

 

Well...

The forums over at DPReview are showing markedly slower batch processing on both high end Macs and PCs. My own testing on my OC'd A64 rig confirms. It's a bit buggy and has an unfinished feel to it. If either of those things would bug you, then probably not best to buy a 1.0 product. I doubt I'll purchase it when the trial is over.

It runs plenty fast enough, but again, my PC is pretty beefy. My laptop, which could run NC just fine pretty much chokes on it. It will do ok for most of the actions, but occasionally really gets into trouble. It bluescreened due to a paging error.

I like the new tools, and so far I'm having fun with the demo. I never had the patience to do a lot of masking and stuff inside Photoshop, so for me it's really useful. People who know their way around Photoshop and mask a lot already seem to think it's a step backwards for them. In my mind, it's a disruptive innovation - putting more functionality in less capable hands for less money (but not satisfying the power user).

I'd suggest playing with the demo, but ultimately I think that it will prove to be a novelty item - at least for the next couple of versions.


Adobe's recent purchase of the RawShooter engine for integration into Lightroom means that Lightroom will be an absolutely first class RAW conversion utility - which at the end of the day trumps pretty much any other metric by which to judge this new class of photo editing tools. I think feature and gimmick-wise, they'll likely be very similar.


Try it out though, I've been having a bit of fun with it.