Most people seem to shift away from NX2 to something else, usually Lightroom and, to a lesser extent Aperture. I do not know about Aperture, but LR now does a very good job of rendering Nikon files (I think Aperture does as well).
In earlier versions of LR and Aperture, the rendering was inferior to the Nikon product, which was why some people stuck with NX2, in spite of it being difficult to use in the opinion of many. Now that the other products do a good job on the files, many switch. Spend some time with it to see if you are comfortable with how it works. The control points are nice and I like how it adjusts the curves when you move the center slider. However once Local editing was available for LR3, I stopped using NX2. The other products also have the image management features that NX2 lacks.
Thanks mhayes......I sat all night last night and played with 20 files I had shot that evening of a flood lit building and a house completely covered in Xmas lights. I shot NEF.
Gotta tel you I swore more last night than I did hitting my thumb with a hammer once. I like what Capture can do but all these bits of windows that lay on top of each other and then disappear all of a sudden are very frustrating. There are some awesome feature in there like the sliders you mention but that's about it. I even had to download a tool to transfer Nikon NEF's from a Nikon camera to Capture. Nikon Transfer or something like that.
I think I'm sticking with Aperture but have to say as a RAW shooter there are bits of it too I dont like.
first off, there is no 'must download' for Nikon Transfer. Any way you get the .nef off the camera is just fine.
CaptureNX2 does take some time to get used to and yea, it can be slow and clunky w/ a weird user interface. It also doesn't have the database capabilities of Aperture or Lightroom.
You might really want to download a trial of Lightroom if you find NX2 or Aperture unappealing.
Try the Lightroom trial. I use LR3 and I tried Capture NX2. It was clunky as stated. There were a couple of things I liked about it but too many things I didn't like and I just love the speed, ease and convenience of the LR workflow as well as the results.
