Soft focus is not blur or “slightly out of focus”. If you think you can get the same effect by intentionally turning the lens out of focus during shooting, you will be disappointed. True soft focus should still have the important subject areas in focus while having a sense of softness.
To achieve the soft focus, you could spend anywhere between 20 to 100 US dollars to buy one of the soft focus filters
The Crop Tool in Nikon Capture NX2 is quite usable for practical purposes. You can do crop with fixed aspect ratio (presets or custom) or do a free crop that allows you to change the aspect ratio and size on the fly. However you may find it tricky if you want to crop a region with a fixed pixel dimension, for example, you want to crop an exact 1058 pixel wide and 705 pixel high region out of a 4288 (W) by 2848 (H) image. It is easy to set the exact ratio using the custom fixed aspect ratio crop method, but NX2 doesn’t tell you the size of the crop when you start cropping. That makes things a little tricky. Read More…
Cross processing (xpro) refers to processing film in a chemical solution intended for a different type of film (Wikipedia).
Two methods are common: processing color negative films in slide chemicals (”C-41 as E-6″), or processing slide films using the color negative chemicals (”E-6 as C-41″). Due to the characteristics of the films and chemicals, the effects are different. Processing color negative film in slide chemical tends to produce flat tones and muted colors with less red but more green/yellow while processing slide film in in color negative chemicals often produces very contrasty images with blown highlights. In either cases, we’d expect to see wild color shifts that are not quite predictable due to many factors such as film/chemical, exposure, etc, will affect the process.
Simulating the cross processing effect in photo editors are fairly easy using curves adjustments in individual color channels. For photoshop users, this is a nice tutorial on how to do the “C-41 as E-6″ type cross-processing in Adobe Photoshop. For demonstration purposes, I will show you how to do the same adjustments using Nikon Capture NX2. Read More…
Black and white photography never lose its charm even in the digital photography era. It is difficult to find a camera that does not offer a Black and White mode. Nikon is no exception. If you shoot JPEG, the camera performs the color conversion in the built-in processing engine. This leaves you with little control over the process. Raw shooters are much better off because the Black and White mode in the camera is merely a tag in the Raw file. The Raw file still has all the color information. Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) completely ignores it but Nikon software such as Nikon View/Capture NX recognizes the tag and displays the image accordingly.
So, what’s the point of selecting the Black and White mode in the camera when shooting Raw format? Not much. Perhaps in most cases you are satisfied with the default result so you don’t need to do anything before converting the photos to other formats for sharing or printing. Otherwise, shooting in color mode and convert it to Black and White is likely more flexible.
In this tutorial, I will discuss the different ways of converting normal color photos into black and white in Capture NX2. Read More…
Getting punchy colors in Capture NX is an easy task. In this tutorial, I will show you some tips for getting more vibrant fall foliage colors and contrasty blue skies in Capture NX. I am using Capture NX2, but you should be able to get the same result from Capture NX as well. Read More…
I was forum surfing at DPReview and found a nice Capture NX tip to remove dust spot. Nikon Capture NX does not have a healing brush or clone tool like Adobe Photoshop. Typically dust spot removal in Capture NX involves selecting the dust spot using lasso tool, colorizing the selected area with color that is the same as the background, blurring the edges with some feather on the selection. This neat new technique uses distortion control (Adjustment -> Correct -> Distortion Control) instead of the Colorize tool. And it works!
Previously, I have showed an example of portrait retouching using Nikon Capture NX without going into the details. In this post, I am going to explain how to change eye color using Capture NX. I hope this becomes the start of a new series on portrait retouching using Nikon Capture NX. Read More…
Is Capture NX any good for JPEG shooters? Although it is mainly a RAW converter for Nikon NEF files, it is also a very useful tool for for JPEG shooters.
For the most part, you get the same powerful editing capabilities as for NEF raw files. Plus, you can save all your edits at the end in NEF format non-destructively! You can go back to your original JPEG photo embedded in the NEF file without image quality degradation. You can also create different versions of the same JPEG photo and save them all in a single NEF file. Of course, you can export JPEG file again.
