Author: James Vornov

American Eagle Portrait, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

As I’ve used Capture NX2 more and more over the last month because of it’s much improved curve tools. One important part of my workflow that was left behind in Photoshop was my NIK Color Efex filter set. I’ve used the Skylight filter and lighten Center on many of my images.

Today I saw a press release regarding the new Color Efex for Capture NX2 release from NIK and it sounded like my license might be good for the NX version as well. Sure enough, when I logged onto the NIK site, I was notified that the Capture NX2 version was available to me for download.

Color Efex integrates into NX2 much more completely without the second screeen that the Photoshop interface requires. It is also very fast and, in keeping with the NX2 process is entirely non-destructive. This is a huge advantage over the layering that Photoshop requires. I don’t have to create snapshot layers to apply the filters. And when two filters interact poorly, I can go back and adjust something like a curve earlier in the workflow.

Overall, it’s cementing the role of Capture NX2 as my editing program of choice. Now if I could just more easily send RAW files from Aperture to NX2, I’d have a nicely integrated workflow.

Too Deep in the Forest, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

After I downloaded Capture NX2, I found that it was able to achieve much of what I was doing in Photoshop much more quickly. The ability to selectively control where curves were applied with the U-point technology was a key factor in this.

Since so much of my current workflow has been influence by Vincent Versace’s “Welcome to Oz”, which is Photoshop-based, I thought it would be valuable to buy one his Capture NX materials. Since I was exploring Capture NX2, I thought that it would be a nice combination to both get his approach to NX2 while learning the program in more detail.

This is a DVD training course that is very, very dense. Just like “Welcome to Oz”. It bears repeated watching and you really need to play along with the video to try the techniques and see the effects. It’s all simply video of the screen with a well recorded voiceover. Absolutely no filler at all. I’ve watched the movies straight through. Now I’ve been playing the quicktime version on my laptop screen while I have Capture NX2 running with one of my own images open on the second. I’m working by figuring out what problem I want to address in an image and then find the section in the DVD that deals with it. It’s harder to do this than you might think because control over location with a long single Quicktime movie is very in exact. It would be useful to have a collection of smaller movies to open if only to find spots more easily. More indexing would help as well.

This is an image that I worked on while watching Vincent work on a flower image. As usual, I’m a bit over the top in the approach, but I often do that as I’m learning. I’m piling up multiple experiements and it’s like an over spiced dish. Later on, when I’m trying to create an image, I’ll be more subtle. Here I was trying just to get the complementary colors of the green foliage on the red dirt of the tree roots to pop and vibrate, creating a visual center for an image that was way to busy as it came out of camera. Toned down a little, it could be mistaken for a Velvia chrome perhaps. But I would never have been able to go back and fix the light like this shooting slides.

I haven’t been a big purchaser of DVDs in the past as I always find the pace too slow. DVDs also make lousy references compared to books to look up a technique. Judging by this DVD, the Acme approach may be more suitable for me and could be worth some futher investment as time goes on.

No Haystacks, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Two days later, I rode past the same field, this time with the Sigma DP1 in my underseat bag on the bike. I stopped in what I recalled was the same spot as on Sunday’s ride, but about 2 hours later in the day.

The haystacks had been brought in. The wider lens on the DP1 renders the scene differently, but the image quality difference is quite striking, especially when view full size on the monitor or as prints.

Maybe on my next ride I’ll drag along the Nikon D80 with the 24mm f/2.8 or 50mm f/1.8 and try yet another rendering.

For Sale Coal Country, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

US 209 through south-central Pennsylvania is an interesting ride through a struggling region. Photographically interesting, but intimidating to me to stop and capture. But I guess that Summer is for traveling and my images lately have been further afield than my usual suburban landscapes.

This image was entirely post processed with Capture NX2. The 2.0 version of Capture NX is a very capable program and could serve as my only post processing software when dealing with my Nikon D300 images. Even with the Sigma DP1, after RAW conversion in SPP, I’m favoring post processing in NX2. The only fly in the ointment is that Capture NX doesn’t play well with Aperture, so I’m faced with the separate folder structure containing the edited NEFs and Exported TIFFs. But as long as I leave file names the same, I’m OK with the moving in and out of Aperture.

Green Rock, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

We took a short holiday hike in the central Maryland mountains. Catoctin National Park contains the Presidential retreat, Camp David. It was an overcast, intermittantly drizzly day.

I brought both the Nikon and the DP1, but left the heavy Nikon in the trunk of the car. With the f/4 lens, the DP1 needed ISO 400 for well exposed images along the trail. While it was nice to have a camera in my pocket, I did loose some exposure flexibility. As always, the DP1 image rendering is very special.

Flag Display, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I’m really pretty pleased with my decision to commit to the Nikon system last year. The D300 is a great image capture device for me, doing everything I need at this point.

In retrospect, moving up from the D80 to the D300 was a good decision, mostly because I find matrix metering in the D300 to work much better for me than the D80 did. My presumption is that it’s a matter of tuning the system for consumers vs advanced shooters. Using the two cameras with spot metering results in relatively similar images in the end.

What would a D700 do that the D300 doesn’t? Presumably I’d get another stop or stop and a half of sensor speed. But I don’t run into the D300’s limits frequently enough that it would really make a big difference.

There’s the advantage of wide lenses being wide, but I’m fine with the 12-24mm f/4 DX lens providing me with an 18mm equivalent. I’m learning to use my stable of lenses most efficiently- the 24-120mm f3.5-5.6 staying on the camera most frequently, with the 105mm f/2.8 for when I want macro or really sharp images.

This image shows something more- the capture is a first step. The editing and the post processing are so much more central to creating images now. This is another Capture NX2 postprocessing exercise. I set out to make the flags really stand out with local contrast changes. I’m still learning how to best apply curves and u-point adjustments, but it’s easier to achieve in Capture NX2 at this point than in Photoshop.

Cornfield Storm, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Why is that I so frequently take the camera out and fear that I will be unable to create a compelling image? You would think that after a while I would know that the odds were pretty good that something would work out.

I wanted to get an image of Baltimore County along one of my cycling routes. I stopped at the end of the day, but approaching storms clouded out the sun and left me without interesting end of day light. But once the sun had gone down, the sky became more interesting being itself lit from within.

This was captured with the D300 and the 12-24mm f/4 DX lens. No tripod. Postprocessing was entirely in Capture NX. There was some noise in the sky, but the noise reduction in NX2 took care of that quite nicely. WIth the U-points, it was easy to keep the smoothing effect of the noise reduction out of the corn stalks where it would otherwise kill the nice sharp detail.

I like the lighting in this. The highlighting of the stalks under the bright sky area doesn’t exist at all in the original capture. It was added using a coloro control point to pull up the highlights which reads very nicely as an eerie lighting of the foreground by the bright sky area. I did it to get the eye to be pulled back into the sky region from the sharp foreground.

Considering the Source, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This is another in the recent Nikon D300 midrange zoom images I’ve been collecting. What’s significant is that I used it as the subject as I began to explore Capture NX2 in earnest.

With the previous version, I thought that the conversions were clearly the best available for the Nikon NEF files. I used the control point technology for overall tonal balancing. But I’d move to Photoshop (via Aperture roundtripping) for local contrast adjustment with curves and then use of the NIK Efex filters plus selective sharpening and blurring.

In the new NX2 any adjustment can be a control point, including curves and sharpening. So instead of using masks in Photoshop, I can use the more direct U-Points of NX2. I’m lacking the handful of Efex filters I favor, but I could purchase them for NX2. That would put almost all of the editing I do directly into NX2.

One point that’s lacking is the ability to directly round trip with Aperture. Now I export the master NEF into a folder, open in NX2, save as TIFF and then drag back into Aperture. If I choose edit with NX2 in Aperture, Aperture first insists on converting to TIFF itself and sending that to Capture NX. It would take a real integration for Aperture to send a NEF, but then for NX2 to send Aperture back a TIFF.

I’m sure I could automate part of this using Applescript and Automator but getting the file back into the project where it belongs seems a bit tricky.