Light Room is essentially the ACR engine with the addition of the cataloging features. ACR is fairly seamless with Photoshop products so many PS users choose ACR for a RAW converter. It's just a question of how difficult it is to get there. With virtually any of them you can produce the same end product from a RAW beginning.
Otherwise you'd likely not be asking why they look differentīased on all of the various discussions I've participated in with other photographers over the years, software selection typically has as much or more to do with seamless transition between packages and/or with plug-ins than it does with ultimate quality. They have tried to mimic them to some degree. Most other third party software seems to more or less mimic the Adobe interface in order to be as seamless as possible so they can fritter away a few Adobe users.Īs far as I understand it, the standard, vivid, etc settings in ACR are NOT reading the NEF settings. However I never used it heavily as the Nik interface is significantly different from Adobe products. When Nikon contracted Nik to develop Capture NX for them it was pretty good. I am a Nikon shooter and for 6-8 years used Nikon software as RAW converter and PS Elements. But yes, in general the Nikon software isn't so great. Until you begin to understand post processing and your particular needs that's not a bad way to go.
Many people start out as you are by using the camera manufacturer's RAW processor plus a free or inexpensive additional program. From the very start it is up to you to adjust contrast, saturation, etc. So what you start with is a truly raw image in the literal sense of the word. So any other RAW converter that you use other than Nikon's can not read the in-camera settings other than WB. The NEF file is a proprietary format that Nikon does not share with software companies. The Nikon software reads those settings and you see them when you view the RAW file and they transfer to any TIFF or JPEG that you create. which are all combinations of contrast, saturation, sharpness, etc. In other words the camera was set to neutral, standard, vivid, etc. The reason you are seeing a major difference is presumably because you are shooting with a Nikon camera and the Nikon software renders the RAW image with the camera settings at time of capture. So, I was wondering on other people's experience of using ViewNX-i is it really the best RAW converter for Nikons, or am I being a total noob and just not using the other programs correctly?įirst off, are you using ViewNX-i or Capture NX-D? ViewNX is intended to be a viewer and Capture NX an editor. It might be free, but is a little flaky, takes ages to save a TIF or even just zoom in on an image! Now, try as I might I cannot seem to get as good an image from the other two programs, as I do from ViewNX-i for RAW editing, it seems over the last week to have become my benchmark to which I have tried to get as good results from other programs. My process is take a challenging RAW image with a large range of tones, and carry out the basic adjustments on the RAW before moving on to further improvements (layers etc). Now it maybe that I end up with one or more programs as there will be no best fit, but I am trying. I have been evaluating the above three programs for over a week to decide on the best program to edit my RAW files, before going to further adjustments. Let me be clear, I am an inexperienced amature with a small budget.