Just started playing with RAW images on the D300. Nikon was nice enough to include a key for their Capture NX program with the camera. This is good, because their proprietary RAW on the D3 and D300 are apparently not compatible with most RAW conversion programs. You can do them on PS-CS3, but as far as I know that's about it. Turns out that Capture NX is a really nice program. It has some excellent features and the basics are easy to use. One of the cool things you can do is identify the black point of the picture, the white point, some color points and neutral points. You can adjust the luminescence of the black and white individually, and pick areas of color and adjust them for brightness, contrast, saturation and sample size. This is much more subtle than using the magnetic lasso in PS. You don't have that telltale cut-off line where everything is different. I was taking some pictures of a few flowers my wife was going to throw out. Since I was playing with settings, DOF, etc., I took some really bad shots in the group. Just for the heck of it, I decided to see what I could do with one of them in the RAW conversion. This shot was taken at I think f22@1/1000. Pretty dark. In the past, trying to repair this in PS or my other RAW program would have resulted in a grainy picture with washed out color. Shot was taken in Nikon NEF @ 14bit.
Original Raw, converted to JPEG with no mods:
Same shot, lightened and adjusted in Nikon Capture NX (poorly-this is my first try at it.
Original Raw, converted to JPEG with no mods:
Same shot, lightened and adjusted in Nikon Capture NX (poorly-this is my first try at it.
