Image Dust Off is a very useful feature supported by Nikon Capture NX and NX2 NEF raw converter/editor. You can take a reference photo (feature-less white wall) in supported cameras and used it to automatically retouch subsequently taken photos in Capture NX/NX2 to remove the spots in your photos caused by dust particles on the image sensor. Dust spots tend to show up more clearly if you shoot small apertures (high F numbers). Macro and landscape photographers probably find this more of a problem than portrait photographers. If you’d like to learn more about Image Dust Off, please check your Capture NX/NX2 user manual or the help file.
In order for this automatic process to work as expected, the photos you want to edit should have the same dust pattern as the reference photo. To make sure, you need to take a reference photo for each shooting session. For Nikon DSLR cameras that has sensor-shake dust removal function, it gets tricky. You cannot use the dust reference photo taken before sensor cleaning to retouch the photos taken after sensor cleaning. Nikon recommends you to take the dust reference photo after each sensor cleaning. If you have setup the camera to clean the sensor automatically at each startup/shutdown, you may not realize that the dust reference photo is rendered invalid each time you switch off/on the camera. This is clearly documented in the instruction manual of your camera but how many of you actually read the manual throughly?
Our friend totographe was kind to stop by and let us know that his signature tool NXSignature (original post in French) for Capture NX is now version V1.1. The new version allows you to specify the color of the selection for the ‘Colorize’ step so you don’t need to use Capture NX to change the color of the signature. This makes it more efficient for batch processing.
One of our readers was kind to drop us a note about the $60 savings you can get by buying the Capture NX 2 full version from Cameta Camera (check store rating). At $119.95, it is the cheapest we have seen.
You may want to add a signature (or logo, copyright, etc) to your photos for many practical reasons. If you shoot Nikon NEF RAW, Capture NX is the top choice for getting the best image quality. However Capture NX does not have a built-in tool to add signature to photos. You typically have to relay on a third party editor such as Adobe Photoshop.
It is rare for Nikon to announce upcoming software updates. But this time they announced the April release of Capture NX2 V2.2. It will be a free update for users of current V2.x versions.
The new version will include improved processing speed in batch processing, Intel-approved logo permitted for Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad support, NRW (Coolpix P6000’s RAW data) support, vignette control function utilizing lens information, and axial color aberration correction.
Typically we want to avoid lens vignette (light fall off at the corners of the photo) caused by lens itself or stacking too many filters on the lens, but sometimes it can add some intrigue to a photo. In this tutorial, I will show you how to add the effect using Nikon Capture NX 2. This technique is similar to the other tutorial I posted here: How To Create a Soft Fade Vignette Effect in Nikon Capture NX but with some twists. Read More…
Our friend from Nikon has posted a note in the Nikon Capture NX user group about the training videos available on NikSoftware.com. If you haven’t heard, Nik Software, not Nikon, created the Nikon Capture NX software.
The two new Capture NX2 videos show you how easy it is to touch up photos using Capture NX2. You can watch the flash videos online, or download the videos in mov format to watch offline on your computer or the m4v format to watch on an ipod.
There are bunch of other videos as well. They are nice to watch but probably useless unless you have the software. If you really like Capture NX2, you may want to consider the excellent but expensive photographic filter package Color Effect Pro 3.0 for Capture NX 2.
This is a quick video showing you how to remove unwanted details from portrait. The same technique can be used for other types of photo as well. This earlier post shows you how to remove hot spots (strong reflections) from faces.
