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Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs

Photography reviews

Introduction

Camera technology has reached a major inflection point. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say cameras are looking for an inflection point. The camera body designs, lenses and sensors have all settled down into a comfortable arms race. Customers can have all the megapixels they want even in low-priced cameras. If they’re savvy enough to discern quality, consumers can opt for high quality digital SLRs with optional lenses of any description. Now, it’s all about money and brand.

There is one more detail—formats. He who owns the format owns the data. And that, in a nutshell is why imaging companies and camera companies are offering their own tools to complement their formats. At the heart of the issue is RAW data, the information that is picked up by the sensor with no interpretation. Similarly, our eyes record information but it is our brains that interpret it and make sense of it.

All RAW files are not alike. Different cameras produce different RAW formats and digital SLRs come with software to interpret the that data.

Adobe has addressed the issue by offering its own RAW format, DNG, as an option and proposes it as a standard. Adobe promises that no information is lost in DNG and of course DNG is well understood in Adobe’s products. In fact, asks Adobe, since you’re so happy with the system we have built for you, why don’t you stay forever and live happily in the house of Adobe. Needless to say quite a few people have ended up living happily ever after in the comforting arms of Adobe.

Interestingly, Apple started asking the same question. The company introduced its own software for organizing photos and interpreting RAW data in Aperture. And, over the last two years, outside companies have improved their ability to handle RAW files so that shooting in RAW and even maintaining photo masters in RAW is not an issue. It’s the way professional photographers prefer to live.

Capture NX

Nikon thinks that if you’re using a Nikon camera you should be relying on Nikon’s software. Nikon has its own RAW format NEF and its own interpretation software. Nikon believes that by tightening the link between the camera and the hardware, it can offer users an inherent ability to take better pictures. The close integraton of software, hardware, and image processing also ensures repeatable results. After that, says Nikon, if you still want to use Photoshop to take advantage of all the features included in that program, knock yourself out.

Nikon’s Capture NX software has been developed in conjunction with Nik Software. (NIK software by the way was founded by xxxx and the name is a combination of his initials). Although it includes RAW interpretation for NEF, the software does much, much more.

However, in spite of what Nikon saw fit to name the program, NX Capture is not actually a capture program. Nikon assumes you will have your own method of bringing content into the computer and wants to fit into your established workflow.

Professional organizing software including Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom have the ability to open an image with another image editor and even round trip the edited data. We experimented with Aperture and Capture NX on the Mac and the round trip process was flawless (at least to our naked eyes). On Windows, I have all but reverted to Picasa for importing photos and in that situation going out to Capture NX some work around since Picasa determines external editors according to the programs associated with the file formats in Windows. If you’re working with RAW content that’s not NEF content, you’re going to have to go to TIFF or JPEG so that Capture NX can work with your image. Kind of a shame, but Nikon really would prefer that you use a Nikon camera to work with its software.

All this is leading up to the point that Capture NX is worth just about any work-arounds that might be required. (Although, honest to god the workaround between Picasa and Capture NX is pretty darned gnarly. For instance, Capture NX refuses to recognize the flavor of TIF produced by Microsoft’s Windows Picture Manager.)

Capture NX has a nice interface with an edit list that lets you go into the middle of the process and turn on or off any edits you may have performed.

Once you’ve fixed the parameters for one image in a shot you can, if the situation calls for it, save the corrections and apply them to all the pictures in a shoot.

Now, almost all of these features can be found in a good, professional image editing tool including Photoshop. However, Capture NX’s simple interface and the edit list put the functions you want to perform most frequently right in front of you.

But wait, none of this is the real main feature that made me willing to pay the measley $145 for Capture NX. Nope, the feature that blew me away is NIK’s U Point technology which lets users interactively apply a correction to an area without having to go through the process of creating a mask. What’s really telling, I think, about Capture NX’s ease of use is that I discovered this feature within minutes of firing up the software for the first time when I started using it with the Wacom pen.

Also, photographers won’t tell you this but I will—one of the most important aspects of any image editing software is the performance of its automatic features. Professionals might say they never automatically adjust lighting, or contrast, or colors, but they at least try an automatic fix as a test and Capture NX seems to get it right more often than some of the other programs I use. Capture NX also offers D-Lighting controls to improve the odds of success. Using lighten and darken controls universally lightens and darkens pixels, often leaving one area corrected perhaps but also altering areas that might have been alright. Capture NX analyzes pixels to determine which pixels represent shadows as opposed to being dark objects. So, applying D-Lighting enables you to lighten shadows without affecting objects that you wanted to remain dark.

Those two features alone make the software so compelling that I started weighing the possibility of buying a Nikon camera because then I could use Capture NX to interact more directly with the camera to adjust such things as lens distortion etc. And, of course, getting me to think in this direction is just exactly what Nikon had in mind with the development of Capture NX by NIK.

A couple of notes. Capture NX has fixed flyouts. This can be kind of annoying when the software is being used on a small monitor like a laptop because the flyout could very well obscure the part of the picture you wanted to fix. It would be nice to be able to move the menus and pin them elsewhere. Also, Nikon’s fussiness about recognizing other RAW formats really can be a drag if you have signed up for the whole non-destructive workflow as preached by the big players in imaging including Adobe, Apple and, yes, Nikon. Microsoft is also getting on board with Windows. If you’ve got non-NEF RAWs you’re going to have to convert.

In sum

There are plenty of other features in Capture NX. What I’ve written about here is what I was able to find in a week or so of working with the product on both a Mac and a PC. And, I’ve highlighted the features I know I’ll use over and over again. I’m coming to believe that products should really be reviewed twice. Once, as a straight out of the box review and second, if the product is worth further use, another review after a few months of real world use. There are products that I have eventually taken off the computer and I’d like to revoke a too glowing review. There are others with hidden charms and underlying strength that make me want to return to the review to buck up scant praise or add new observations. After all, when we’re the poor schmuck who has actually paid for a program, we invest a lot more time into making it work. But perhaps all this is another story to come down the road.

Right now, I can say that Capture NX is going to remain on both machines. It is going to be used and I look forward to finding out what else it can do.—KM

PRODUCEABLE ART

Alien Skin offers instant paint plug-in

By Kathleen Maher

There’s no such thing as easy art but that doesn’t mean I don’t keep trying. Snap Art, a plug-in program from Alien Skin, seems to promise users a shot at becomming high art with a few push buttons. In the end, you can get some pretty interesting creations but as in all things, the more effort you put into it, the better your end result will be. And, this being a computer and all, the old rule, garbage in/garbage out still holds.

I have used several Paint Programs and I enjoy them a great deal. The leading example is Corel’s Painter. It is a tool that lets artists create original art in the computer with pen tablet, their imagination and an infinite combination of brushes, styles, paints, papers, lighting, etc. And, it has extensive tools for adding artistic effects to photographs. Snap Art doesn’t aspire to be Painter, it aspires to give artists a fast way to add aristic effects to photos. For artists who use Adobe Photoshop’s filters or for those who have been frustrated by their limitations, Snap Art is going to open up lots of possibilities.

I tested it as a plug-in for Photoshop (though it can also be used with Corel’s PaintShop Pro Photo XI or later) and after a few frustrating attempts to make water color, oil paint, or pastel filters work I realized the way to work with this program is to just have at it and create lots of variations on a theme. One of its really nice features is the option  to run the filter and save the result as a separate layer in Photoshop. I then found that by turning on and off certain layers and adjusting the opacity so that various features could come, through I could get some really nice effects, and it wasn’t as hard as painting the image as you usually do using a product like Painter.

Photoshop has a pretty nice lineup of filters already installed. So, if you’re someone who might occasionally use a tool like Snap Art but not necessarily use it all the time, you might wonder why you’d want to spend $145 for Snap Art. Well that does depend, but Snap Art is really much easier and more interactive to use than Photoshop’s own tools which seem to require a lot more trial, error, and “oh rats” undo, than Snap Art. I suspect that’s a benefit of Alien Skin’s long experience in the filter business.

Sadly, at least so far, Snap Art is not a great way to redeem mediocre images though I had high hopes in that direction. I had a really nice photo of a couple that I shot completely out of focus. I can’t bring myself to delete it but I can’t do a thing with it. I had hoped maybe I could find the edges and recreate the image as an oil painting and that’s when I once again learned the hard rule of garbage in/garbage out. This is the kind of problem that would require more painting using a program like Painter and it would probably require a tad more talent than I’m blessed with. After all, if I were just a touch more talented I might have managed to focus the picture in the split seconds god gave me to take the picture.

Snap Art was developed to mimic the way an artist works with underpainting—creating a light pencil sketch as a guide. It works by finding edges and determines the shapes of the objects in the original image. Then when you choose a particular filter style, Snap Art’s paint engine can fill in the sketch it has created according to the variations you choose.

It’s pretty easy to waste an afternoon playing with effects but Snap Art lets you save the setting used in a successful session so you don’t have to go through the whole trial and error process again. In fact, I wasted several afternoons before I got the hang of the program but now that I have, it is going to be used. The most satisfying effects for me have turned out to be more basic effects, pencil sketches, pen and ink drawings, and cartoons and stylize which is good for poster effects. Combinations of pen and ink with paint work very well.

Image editing still challenges the processor. I have a very stable, young HP Workstation with dual Pentium 4 360 GHz CPUs. It has to think about things. This can get a tad tedious when you’re trying out variations on effects. It’s a good reason to save effects you’ve had good luck with. This would also seem to be the type of program where hardware shaders would be a real kick in the pants for the software...maybe next time.

The bottom line still seems to be the bottom line. At $145, Snap Art is a professional tool. There are less expensive ways to get similar effects. On the other hand, at $145 Snap Art is a no brainer for artists who want to use these effects fairly frequently. The amount of time saved pays for the product.

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