The Importance of Post Processing Software

Post processing software is indispensible today. With cameras being digital, you have to process you digital files. Having good PP software which gives not only excellent IQ, reliable results and excellent user interface is therefore critically important.

Here are several important ways how NOT to do it...

Taken from a couple of quotes from Lloyd Chambers, renowned online author, software engineer (20+ years), blogger, camera equipment tester, Apple PC user and photographer tells of what he thinks of Nikon's Capture NX2 RAW image processing software.


Where NX 2 falls flat is with overall usability, and it is downright painful working with batches of files where each file needs some tweaks of its own. This author is hard pressed to think of a worse user interface design in a RAW file-converter. The user interface design seems to be a literal translation of some engineer’s stream of consciousness thinking about the code and data structures, as opposed to thinking about how to ease the workload on the user. The NX engineering team should study Apple’s Aperture, or Adobe’s Lightroom for example. This author, having been a software engineer for 20 years, would lay odds that the NX team has never consulted a skilled user interface designer.

To solve the batch selection issue, one must manually move desired images into their own folder. Worse, Capture NX attempts to batch-processes both NEF and JPEG files of the same name. Removing the JPEG files should not be required to batch-process a group of NEF files! And here’s the kicker: once a batch job is started, no more batch jobs can be added; you must wait. Given the folder orientation for batch processing, how does one process 10 folders... dump all the files into one huge folder? No, one waits and waits for the batch to finish. That is not batch mode, it’s waste-time mode, a colossally infuriating design.

In contrast in Canon's Digital Photo Professional, you select the photos you want to batch and hit Command B and you're done. And while the DPP worker is at it, you can continue working and add new batch processes which will immediately start working. How easy is that?

And here's the real show-stopper with Capture NX...

Make the tiniest change to a NEF (RAW) file and you lose—your time, your disk space. For example, change the white balance and save the NEF. A 14.3MB NEF file inexplicably becomes an 18.6MB file—30% larger. Worse, it takes 5-10 seconds to save (on a quad-core 3GHz Mac Pro with a 4-drive striped RAID capable of 350MB/sec). Do the NX2 engineers really think this is the way it should work? Canon’s DPP can save settings for hundreds of files in the time it takes NX2 to save them for a single file—and you don’t lose gigabytes of disk space in the process.

Worse, your file is put at risk of data corruption due to overwriting the original file. This is not an idle concern; Nikon itself warned of data corruption with Capture NX and Mac OS X Leopard (now allegedly fixed)! Your file date is modified as well. Capture NX violates a fundamental data-integrity rule: never write over an original file. At least with Canon’s DPP, space is set aside in advance for the settings, which makes it fast and low-risk.

The storage issue is a major nuisance, the potential data corruption a serious concern, but the performance issue is a show-stopper. Working through large numbers of images, one just can’t waste 10 seconds per file for a save (which includes answering the inane dialog about saving).

This is insane... it violates just about every basic rule of data integrity, efficiency, and common sense.

And now with the latest release of Capture NX2.2.0, it gets worse than "worst"

Run a batch job and the programme uses about 7% of only one of the CPU cores of the new MacPro. Or as the author states 0.4% of the available processing power of that computer. Thus, it takes 30 minutes or so to process 15 NEF files.

Lloyd Chambers calls the programme manure. Humm.... makes me wonder if Nikon even tested their software..... I shudder to think. It reminds me of Canon's QA of its L lenses.

But at least now with DPP3.6 released, more features are being added and more importantly, the programmes generally works well and its interface works pretty well too. Most of all its easy to use, fast to use and makes use of 2 to 4 cores efficiently, and it uses hyper-threading too. BTW, DPP3.6 is only available on the Japan website for now.

The problems with Nikon Capture NX 2 are so bad it actually makes it worthwhile to be shooting Canon. At least I feel better now and I'll give Canon time to launch better lenses and cameras which actually work as advertised while I enjoy my Canon EOS 50D and Powershot G10 cameras.