"Reginald P. Smithers III, Esq." wrote in message
...
RG wrote:
"Tom Francis - SWSports" wrote in
message ...
Check out the new CS4 tutorial...

http://www.msjphotography.com/

Heh. Adobe's been looking over the fence to see what Nik Software has
been doing with their U-Point technology in Capture NX as well as their
own Viveza product. Being able to do local edits in a raw file is a huge
benefit. I've been spoiled by this ability for over a year now in CNX.
It's a cool thing and it's good to see Adobe put it in ACR.

I started working on the 2008 ebook today. It's beginning to take shape.
I've got about a hundred photos to resize and downsample, but I was able
to put together a master concept and design in InDesign today.

RG

I was thinking about upgrading Capture NX, it looks like for a few dollars
more, I get CS4.

If you are a Nikon shooter and you shoot raw, I consider CNX essential, and
the upgrade to CNX2 is worth the cost. There are any number of reasons that
I believe CNX is the preferred choice for nef files. Most of them could
arguably be achieved in Photoshop, but with more effort. However, the main
reason for using CNX for your nef files is the way CNX stores the edits
inside the nef file itself. When you perform edits in a nef file, the raw
data itself is never altered. Rather, the edits are nothing more than a
list of instructions on how to interpret and process the raw data. When you
re-save the nef file, all the original data is there, unmolested, as well as
all your edit steps, listed in the order they were performed. There are two
key points here. First, the original raw data is always available in the
nef file. This means that you don't have to archive a separate file to
preserve the original raw data. Second, should you ever want to re-visit
the file and take another approach to editing the image, you can pick up
wherever you were in the process when you last saved the file. This means
that you don't have to start from scratch on a re-do. You can go back to
any of your original edit steps and alter those steps individually, delete
the individual steps entirely, add new steps, or if necessary, delete all
the edit steps and indeed start from scratch. You can even save different
versions of the edited image inside the same raw file. For file storage and
management, it is a godsend.

Here's an example of how this works for me. After I got back from my trips
this year, I edited all the photos over a period of a few weeks after each
trip. I'm getting ready to produce another ebook, similar to the one I did
last year. I emailed a bunch of photos to Tom a while back, to get his
input as to his favorites as well as any editing suggestions he may have.
Well, Tom took the challenge very seriously and had a ton of commentary.
Not surprisingly, his eye caught a number of things mine didn't. As a
result of his input, I re-visited about 50 photos. All of these required
very minor tweaks, and the ability to go straight to the nef file and jump
right back into the editing process exactly where I left off was a huge time
saver. I was able to effect the tweaks I was looking for, and yet not
disturb the essence of the image as I had originally envisioned it. Without
this option, I would have been left with two undesirable options. One, go
back to the original raw file and start from scratch. This would have not
only taken considerably more time, but there's a fair chance that I wouldn't
have been able to duplicate the original edits and the resulting image would
have been altered by much more than the specific minor adjustments I was
after. The second option is even worse, and that would be to open the
full-res jpeg file that I saved from the original edit and then perform the
tweaks on the jpeg file and re-save it. You certainly know the quality
issues of re-saving jpegs. This same ability to re-visit your editing steps
can be accomplished in Photoshop, but only if you save the edited file as a
..psd file, and those are huge. And even then, you can only re-visit the
Photoshop edits, not the Camera Raw edits.

There are times when CNX just won't accomplish a certain task, but it's
rare. For those times, I perform all the edits I can in CNX, then save a
tif file and open it in Photoshop. I find that I often will need to go back
to a file and either re-crop it or re-size it for a certain project I am
working on. It's nice to be able to go to the fully edited nef file and
perform the re-sizing or re-cropping and then save a fresh jpeg, rather than
performing those functions on the original jpeg. All of this only has
meaning if you shoot nef files, but if you do, I find it a compelling reason
to use CNX as your primary image editor.

RG