OK, So I purchased Nikon Capture 4.1 a little more than 9 month's ago. Tried it out, but it was dog slow, and tended to crash all the time. Since I also had the Adobe Bridge from CS2, I went ahead and switched to that.
So anyway, when Capture 4.4 came out, I decided to give the app another try. Now allow me to give some full disclosure.
When I had Capture 4.1 I had the following setup:
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AMD Athlon XP (running at about 2.0 GHz)
1 Gig of RAM
128 Meg AGP Video Card.
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When using Capture 4.4 I have the following setup:
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Pentium D (dual core, each core running at 2.8 GHz)
4 Gig of RAM
256 Meg PCIE Video Card
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Observations:
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#1 - Capture has been optimized much more efficiently. I recognize that that my newer system is better designed for Capture, since it hogs memory and resources, however Capture 4.4 actually appears to run faster for me than Adobe Bridge. Since I shoot RAW capture has an additional advantage over the bridge, namely that my viewer is also my raw converter.
#2 Color rendition looks better and, in my honest opinion, simply shatters ACR/Bridge. I know that is subjective, but I honestly like the color rendition that Capture puts out after raw conversion, despite tweaking I still cannot get the same result out of ACR or Rawshooter Essentials.
#3 Controls and Eas of use is much improved.
#4 Crashes are now nearly non-existant. I have had one, since using it again, but at the time I had so many apps running with so many different things, that I'm not suprised that one of them died.
In short, I believe that Nikon had finally delivered a product that is worthy of its cameras.
In short Capture 4.4 finally seems to give Nikon users a product up to the same
thanks for the evaluation from the PC side of things. NC seems to go thru phases, VS2 was pretty good , version 3 was great till they added the dLight feature which was called DEE at that time. Since then it has taken a while to get back up to speed. I have always preferred it over all others , tho I have tried others and still use ACR for quick work, I always come back to NC for the critical , important work
thanks for the evaluation from the PC side of things. NC seems to go thru phases, VS2 was pretty good , version 3 was great till they added the dLight feature which was called DEE at that time. Since then it has taken a while to get back up to speed. I have always preferred it over all others , tho I have tried others and still use ACR for quick work, I always come back to NC for the critical , important work
J
Maybe I'm just lazy, but Now that Bridge is a seperate product from Photoshop ACR has been appealing less and less to me. As much as everyone hated the Browser in CS1, it had one fantastic benefit, it was built directly into photoshop. I hate having to pull up bridge to broswe my photo shoot, and then have to pull of Photoshop to actually convert anything for working use. Unless I know exactly what .nef I'm goign to process before even looking at them, I would just as soon pull up one and only one thing to process work.
As a Canon Convert, my first introduction to Nikon Capture was 4.1, so I wasn't avware of the versions prior to it, thanks for that bit of perspective.
"For Nikon Capture: Change Nikon Capture's temporary data folder to a different physical drive than the drive where the program resides. This provided the most dramatic performance enhancement I've ever experienced with Nikon Capture. It used to be that if I opened more than two or three Raw files at a time in Nikon Capture and tried to work with them in Photoshop at the same time, my system would nearly grind to a halt. After I moved Capture's temporary data folder to a different physical drive, working in Capture & Photoshop at the same time became dramatically smoother, faster, and easier."
"For Nikon Capture: Change Nikon Capture's temporary data folder to a different physical drive than the drive where the program resides. This provided the most dramatic performance enhancement I've ever experienced with Nikon Capture. It used to be that if I opened more than two or three Raw files at a time in Nikon Capture and tried to work with them in Photoshop at the same time, my system would nearly grind to a halt. After I moved Capture's temporary data folder to a different physical drive, working in Capture & Photoshop at the same time became dramatically smoother, faster, and easier."...Show more →
