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…
Posted in
Tutorials on October 20th, 2008.
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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…
Posted in
Photo editing,
Tutorials on September 1st, 2008.
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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…
Posted in
Photo editing,
Tutorials on January 6th, 2008.
9 Comments.
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.
In Capture NX, you can create multiple versions of a photo and save all the different versions in the same NEF file. For example, you may want to have different crop sizes, colors vs. black and white, different sharpening levels of the same photo. Instead of creating multiple copies of the RAW files, Capture NX can use the same set of RAW data with all the version information embedded so you don’t get several large files to manage. Read More…
Posted in
Photo editing,
Tutorials on December 23rd, 2007.
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The Orton effect is named after photographer Michael Orton. It is a unique expressive photo technique that creates a dreamy artistic feel in the photos with the combination of sharp and blur elements. The original effect was created using two slide transparencies stacked together. The same effect can be easily created using digital photography techniques and tools readily available today. If you are not familiar with this technique already, there are many excellent resources on the Internet.
Today, I am going to show you how to create the Orton Effect using Nikon Capture NX. It is probably easier than any other photo editing software. Read More…
Posted in
Photo editing,
Tutorials on December 17th, 2007.
8 Comments.
There are some people who claim the Capture NX is slow, buggy, and don’t ever want to touch the software even though it comes with the new D300 and D3 free. How wrong is that?! There may be some truth about the slowness if you have an old computer or do not have sufficient memory. However the program is a great piece of software that consistently bring out the best from NEF raw images effortlessly. Here I am going to illustrate the unique control point and selection brush features in Capture NX and show you how easy it is to touch up a landscape photo in a couple of simple steps. Read More…
Posted in
Photo editing,
Tutorials on December 9th, 2007.
9 Comments.
