ACDSee Pro 2 and 2.5

Any viable alternative to capture nx2?

• 

  planetf1
  Member

  Hi,

   I'm a recent SLR owner and opted for a Nikon D90 -- which I think is great.

   

  I'm looking at different sw packages for adjustments & metadata management  but have hit a snag.

  So far nothing I've looked at appears to support Nikon's advanced d-lighting (ADL) except their sw packages.

  ADL appears to work by reducing the exposure by 0.3, 0.7, even 1 stop if there is potential to blow highlights. Then, when producing the jpeg a correction curve is applied. This either occurs in-camera, or the same processing occurs in NX2/ViewNX when producing a jpeg from the RAW.

  In order to maximise the flexibility to correct images after taking I'm shooting raw. 

  First pass I can use NX2 to produce decent quality jpegs which account for ADL, and also benefit from chromatic aberration correction & respect other in-camera settings with 0 effort. Of course this isn't always what is wanted but it's a good starting point

  When using Lightroom 2 I noticed ADL etc is ignored, so images are underexposed until corrected manually. Also there's no easy way without looking to know which images are impacted. ADL can be disabled, but then that looses a nice auto capability (ok so can look at blown highlights, reduce, retake, repeat as good practice).

   

  My question is how ACDSee handles this

   * Does it pick up in camera settings to use as defaults for JPEG processing
   * Does it a) detect b) process correctly ADL affected RAWs
   * Does it apply correct abberation correction based on lens.

   

  Sadly I think the answer is no -- this really is going to make me stick with NX2 even though slow. The images just develop better.. Frustrating. 

  Posted On August 28, 2009 - 03:14 PM (2 months ago) (Permalink to this post)
• 

  Marc Sabatella
  Moderator

  ACDSee Pro picks up "some" JPEG settings to use as defaults in its RAW processing, but none of the specialty stuff like ADL or automatic lens correction.

  Posted On August 28, 2009 - 06:31 PM (2 months ago) (Permalink to this post)
• 

  tibu
  Focus Group

  NX2 processes the raw better for everything. The Portrait control does a way better default tweak on the RAW file than ACDSee does.  I use it a lot for people pictures. From what I have heard is Nikon has some info in their files they don't share, so other Raw converters just don't cut it.

  Landscape images I am fairly okay with what ACDSee does. But for people I find the intial pass undesireable, so I inted to use NX2 for the initial conversion to JPEG, save the RAWS as master copies and tweak the JPEGs using ACDSee.

  However, I simply need more time with ACDSee RAW. The up and coming v3 is very nice for editing. I may run some tests and find a default I can save that will closely match what NX2 does with the portrait control (and maybe eventually I will make presets for other scene types).

  For now, my plan is NX2 for conversion and any additional tweaking I want to do with the origijnal RAW and ACDSee for everything else. I'm going to keep the RAWS in the same folder as the JPEGs, and catalog only the JPEGS for the database. So if I ever in the future search for something and want to tweak it further I will know where the RAW is.

   

  Posted On August 28, 2009 - 07:17 PM (2 months ago) (Permalink to this post)

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