Capture NX2 speed and reliability tips

If you own a Nikon camera you probably know that this is Nikon's professional software for image editing. Capture NX2 can edit Nikon Raw files as well as JPG and Tiff files. So if you own a Pentax, Canon, Sony or any point and shoot camera and shoot only in JPG this software may also interest you. Capture NX2 provides the best image quality on the market for converting Nikon RAW files. Capture NX2 does have some small problems and with this post I will try to help you find some workarounds which will save you hours of frustration.

Let me start by saying that when I shot Canon a few years back I mainly used their software for converting my images from Raw. Then I started experimenting with other software on the market and found DXO Optics pro to be the best converter for me. DXO Optics pro was SLOW. Image previews sometimes took 20 seconds to load after just changing the white balance and this made it a real pain to use. What DXO Optics did well, was processing files automatically. You could literally just tell it which files you wanted and put it on autopilot. The results were excellent as they required very little to no extra processing in photoshop after conversion.

Then came the big switch over to Nikon. Lucky for me Nikon gave away free copies with the D300 when it was released. I immediately fell in Love with Capture NX. It was easy and quick to make adjustments. The only problem was the speed. It was still miles ahead of DXO Optics but now you had to make the changes to files yourself.

No matter how great Capture NX2 is it has some very big problems that can get annoying and eventually make you switch over to another RAW converter.

My biggest problem with it is when I get an error saying can't save file. This usually happens after editing about 10 files and having multiple adjustment layers applied to an Image. It took me almost 10 Minutes to get the photo just like I wanted it and now Capture NX2 tells you that it can't save your file? Well after turning red in the face dozens of times I found a way to cheat my way around it. What you need to do is select all adjustments and then right click. Click Save adjustments, give the adjustments a name and press ok. Now close your image without saving it and restart Capture NX2. Open your Image again then go to Batch -> Load adjustments and select the adjustment you just saved. VIOLA! All your settings are back and you can save your Image! I hope this tip saves you some time.

The other problem I was having with Capture NX2 was editing large Panoramas merged with Auto Pano pro. See the Taking Panoramic Photos part 1 and Taking Panoramic Photos part 2 as well as the 100+ Megapixel Golf GTI post.

The first thing you will notice when Importing a Tiff file created by Auto Pano pro is that Capture NX2 says it cannot load file. The sollution to this is to open the Tiff File in Photoshop and go to the channels tab and delete the channel Auto Pano Pro created.

Now we can open our 40+ Megapixel file in Capture NX2 only to realize it is almost unbearably slow to try and make any edits to it. So the first thing we need to do is to adjust the Images size to lets say 3000 pixels on the longest end and save it as a jpg. This file can now be edited much more easily by Capture NX2. You can do all editing on this smaller file except for cropping! When you are happy with the edits you have made simply select the adjustments and Save them. Now open the original 40+ Megapixel file and load the adjustments from the batch menu.