Hi guys,
Knowing that NX2 is going to be end-of-life in a couple of months and also knowing that NX-D isn't really a successor (it doesn't offer the same functionality as NX2) and will never be, I had to reconsider my imaging workflow. I have been investigating a new workflow, one without NX2/NX-D, for some time now and I think I have found one that works (for me).
For my (new) workflow I wanted a) great (raw) editing results, functionality and speed, b) edits to be visible in PM, c) support for the years to come.
Regarding a), this also meant (for me) that there should be good support for batch processing and that I should be able to do as much as possible in raw (with NX2 I can do 99% of my edits in-raw, pano's and HDR are an exception, of course).
There are numerous possibilities for editing raw, but most die on requirement c) for me; many players are just too small to consider stable towards the future. Of the bigger ones, I knew (well) how to work with Lightroom (and Adobe Camera Raw) en Capture One, so these were obvious choices. The latter, I didn't like really much when I used it (though it probably has improved in the last couple of years), besides, I'm not perfectly sure about their stability towards the future (they should be big enough to continue to exist and develop their software for years to come though). So that basically left me with Adobe software.
Requirement a) is mostly covered with ACR/Lightroom, though definitely not as well as with NX2. The functionality that I (so far) miss most are:
- the “layers” and blending modes that NX2 offers,
- control points to quickly make good selections, and (probably the most important),
- the retouch brush; the spot removal tool of ACR/Lightroom is simply lightyears behind that of NX2 (in many cases that works even better than PS's context aware magic)
This simply means I have to work more in PS (luckily the interface with PS is well integrated and has the added bonus of being able to load your raw files as smart object). Therefore this is not too bad (still hoping Adobe will include something like layers and a better retouch brush though).
b) Well, here's a tough one; the (somewhat understandable) approach by Adobe is to never alter the original raw file, but to put everything in .xmp sidecar files. This has the huge disadvantage that PM is not able to see your edits, rendering it's functionality mostly useless
Luckily there is a solution to this: DNG, here Adobe does embed all data, and even allows for an (updated and full size) built-in preview.
It does mean having to convert all raw files to DNG first, of course. This can be automated/batched though, so no real issue here. Oh, and if you don't want to loose your original raw file, there's even an option to embed this in the DNG. As I have a backup of all of my original (and untouched) raw files anyway, this is not a problem for me.
One caveat: Adobe does not support nef files that were converted from in-camera uncompressed to lossless compressed (using NX2), this is a huge problem for me as this is exactly what I have done with my D200 files… Good to know I have the original raws still too though so if I ever need to edit an “old” file when NX2 doesn't work any longer, I can dig up the original file and be on my way.
We've already discussed my requirement c), so now it basically comes down to “to lightroom or not to lightroom”.
While Lightroom
looks great, it does have its problems. For one, I find it nearly impossible to make small and precise adjustments with the sliders, also the fact that the keyboard shortcuts for e.g., crop are not the same as in PS is quite maddening (but one can certainly overcome that after practice). Oh and why doesn't CMD/CTRL-+ work to zoom in, it has to be CMD/CTRL-= (meaning the + on the numerical keyboard doesn't work). The biggest issue I have with Lightroom, though is the fact it does not automatically update the preview embedded in the dng file; you have to do that manually (ok, speed reason), but then you have no means of selecting (only) those images that need their preview updated (extremely cumbersome).
For bulk adjustments, it's great though!
ACR on the other hand really has a crappy looking UI (why haven't they overhauled that one too when the overhauled everything else in PS CS6?), but it works great! I like the philosophy behind their UI-approach a bit more than that of LR (best would be a combination of the two) and they use the same keyboard shortcuts as you will be used to from e.g. PS (yeah!). Even CMD/CTRL-0 works to fit the image into the window! And it does update the embedded preview automatically!
To cut a long story short, for my future photography I will now fully adopt a DNG workflow using both LR and ACR together (LR for batch updates, ACR for smaller batches/individual file updates).
Hope this helps!
