Home > Consumer Reviews > Nikon Capture NX Software for Windows and Mac

If you shoot RAW with a Nikon digital camera "Capture NX" makes retouching those normally unsalvageable shots a breeze. Working with proprietary Nikon NEF files this software is a boon. Though sometimes slow ( even on a 2ghz dual processor G5 with 4 GB of RAM) Capture NX allows not only global corrections but also area/subject corrections without having to resort to masks.. well worth the cost for a Nikon shooter.

Those who use digital photography soon learn that film photos allow you much more latitude in producing a good photo with little after photo taking manipulation required than digital photography does. Before digital photography I used to say that 50% of an excellent picture was in the dark room. Though this may have been a slight exaggeration for film photography it is completely true for digital photography. I have used various programs such as Microsoft Digital Image Suite and recently Corel Paint Shop Pro to manipulate and improve my JPEG photos for years. But it wasn't until I purchased Capture NX and started taking pictures in NEF format with my D80 that I learned how much I could clean up and improve my digital pictures. After taking the on line tutorials on Nikon USA, reading the book that came with the program and practicing on a few bad picturess I was able to learn the program and and use it competently in a matter of a few days. I find the program intuitive to use and fairly easy to learn. One thing to remember however is that the normal 8 to 9 MB NEF photo from my D80 may grow to 14 MB with an added 60 to 80 MB attached temp file after modification. This can make a single modified NEF photo nearly 100MB in size. Another benefit of this program is that the modifications to the NEF file are not permanent and can be modified at any time without destroying the original photo as occurs with JPEG's. I have not used Adobe Photoshope which is supposed to be the gold standard for digital imaging software but at nearly $600 for the full program I think I will be happy staying with Nikon Capture NX which only costs $149. I would definitely recommend this program for the serious Nikon digital photographer.

The capture NX works very slow if working from raw. However, it gives great flexibility with camera adjustments later on. The drawback is that it is agonizingly slow when working with raw. It improves speed a little bit with the the duo core processor. It is great with JPEG fine but you lose some data compared with working with raw.

The previous version of Capture NX was really slow. Even after I increased the memory of my PC to 2 GB, it was still slow.
This new version 1.1 is fast, maybe not as fast as Photoshop CS2, but you enjoy using the program now.

If you are an experienced Photoshop user you will have to learn the "Capture NX" way of editing a picture. However, it doesn't take long before you start loving this program.

I like the fact you never loose the original picture. The raw NEF file will retain the original plus all your editing steps. Even when I don't use it, you can even convert a JPG to NEF file in order to save all your steps.

Accepting the default parameters for converting NEF files to JPG will get you a JPG that has the 'right' size and Good quality. Usually the size is smaller than the one created from Photoshop.

I use Capture NX to edit most of my pictures now. Only a few require to open Photoshop to finish them up. Usually for cloning or to add text/layers.

The Control Points of Capture NX are wonderful. Very easy to correct dark faces or any other areas of a picture. I strongly recommend to watch the tutorials of Nikon web site. The Image Doctors podcast is also useful to learn a few more features. Recently I learned that you can have several versions of your picture in the same NEF file.

The program still needs to fix a few minor bugs: a tool goes to the Edit List even if you change your mind and didn't modify anything. Select +/- gets sometimes confused and doesn't work.

Capture NX is a good Nikon product for the price, but rather than compare this product to Photoshop the real alternatives should be Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture. Both products offer much more than NX does to the photographer without the steep learning curve of PS. If you only want to spend about $100.00 to jump into camera RAW than this product will be the one buy, but if you haven`t made your purchase yet, I would definitely recommend a look at Aperture and Lightroom. Either one will be less of a resource hog, are a more refined product and are designed just for the pro/sumer photographer. This is particularly true about Lightroom which coming from Adobe brings their years of experience with digital imaging.