NX 2 discussion & (hopefully) tips
 

following the flurry when it hit the download list, I have now changed (would like to have said upgraded) my mac powerbook to OS 10.4.11 which in turn enables NX 2.

Having run my 1st trial on a PC, I am disappointed that the interface is, if anything, even worse on mac than PC. Seems to assume one of those squarish monitors that you can lose 1/3 of height of on tool bars. Although some still float, they can no longer be re-shaped. As for the grey on grey sliders, polite words fail me, likewise on some of the near microscopic sub-menu text.

But it is evidently a more potent beast and really more of a rework than an upgrade. The modestly called 'quick fix' range, which I thought would be part of the browser toys ported over from View NX, is really seriously effective.

There also seems to be a change of emphasis from use of 'control points'/upoint technology to more serious selection and mask function enabling full range of tools to be deployed very selectively. I use to find upoint tweaks that looked fine on screen could show up and spoil prints. However, still too early to compare with what one could achieve with brush selection & full tool-set.

It is at present also possible to run 1.3 alongside for comparison (poor old computer, like taking a very old dog for a walk he enjoyed in his youth).

Will be very interested to see what further tweaks are made before it becomes more than a demo and has anyone (either of you??) found a route for feedback on it?

Keep up the good work on reporting your findings Chris.

I have been, and still am, tinkering in the workshop and dare I say it not taking many pics at all :eek: :rolleyes: . Any that I have have been easily handled by NX1.01, so I have not eaten into the 60 day trial period of NX2 by installing it yet.
A few screen grabs of the new interface would be interesting.

No idea on the feedback route though. If I remember correctly the first upgrade from NX1 v1.00 to v1.01 was about 6 months from release.

Don

NX2screen.jpg

A shot taken using flash in a situation when I really hate the cold colour resulting.

Top of screen right: 'Version' now allows one to toggle between original, last saved and current - very useful
Next down bottom of the 'Quick fix' pane. It includes the Master Luminosity (showing) & saturation as in LCH; then exposure comp (previously in RAW adjust) and Highlight & Shadow 'protection', very powerful adjuster algorithms & simple 'contrast'.

As the shape of the curve I have put on the master luminosity shows, I usually find something more precise than universal 'contrast' fix is needed - its the contrast within particular sub-sections of a pic that usually matter, not overall.

As the hard white light from flash was about the last thing I wanted, this is adjusted for the whole pic in 1st 'colour balance' adjustment. Various corrections made for subsidiary things far too bright or attention diverting. The High pass is confined to the small chess figures using the new selection/mask tool, but not convinced it is any better than brush for soft objects.

Finally, crop - this is best done much earlier, but unless you turn on a preference to keep everything live, for which they warn a high processor speed is advised, adjustments turn themselves off if you go back to 'quick fix'. This used to happen in 1.3, but can now be avoided by guys like Stephen with a fast desktop twin.

I have arranged the screen for my 15", ie I can't afford to lose anything. The tool pallettes now only float or dock, no minimise, but the vertical panes are left as in 1.3, confusing for newcomers I should think, but then the whole thing is probably a non-starter for them until some new tutorials come through. Tool settings appear above the tool bar, hence a space is left for it. On Portrait orientation pics, I shove these overlapping something, on mac half off screen possible. This is a huge down-grade for me, as previously the boxes were squarish and easier to place and temporarily minimisable to just the drag-bar.

The interface is identical for PC except that on PC the menu bar items are very small and way over to the left. Note semi-invisible grey on grey sliders, one of the most stupid new items, in fact a candidate for all time wooden spoon

Cheers Chris,

I saved your screen so I can have a good look later.

Don

The highlight protection is useful and seems to be better than hightlights in D-lighting of NX. However I believe its based on control points and some halo-ing can occur when used in extreme circumstances.

Control points seems better with greater separation when tones and colours are similar to the one working an adjustment.

I think its a bit quicker due to its refined user interface.

Perhaps we now have that NX was supposed to be, not that NX was poor in any respect.

I have tried using NX2 on an old Pana FZ7 pic, ie .jpg original. The only thing you don't get that you would from a Nikon .nef image is exposure compensation (and tweaks needed for newest Nikons). The pictogram in the 'easy fix' section is similar to levels in that it allows adjustment of over/under-exposure but without changing colour balance. The shadow 'protection' (= recovery in English) is still very good.

So anyone with half a mind to try an alternative to CS3 or new to post-processing altogether might well try it out while its on 60 day free offer.

For acclimatisation I recommend that if more than 'quick fix'is needed, control+B gets the colour balance menu whith sliders on blue-yellow, red-green & magenta-cyan axes and also includes further contrast and brightness correction. If only required for part of the image, choose 'selection control point' from the tool bar with shift key pressed down. This is roughly equivalent to selecting using a 'magic wand' tool but just works better if there is a strong colour boundary.

You can 'save as' .nef despite the original not being one and preserve your first rough efforts to fine tune later without getting a massive file as when using .psd. However you need say 10GB free space on the hard drive for NX to use as cache or it all slows right down.

Do ask questions here

can now get upgrade from 1.3 for £80 or total package for £130. Use correct Nikon site for your part of the world to avoid access key problems.

You can also use Nikon customer support system (after registering) to give feedback that will be forwarded to the programmers.

I think mine is to general effect that the mac version is so out of line with OS10 interface and other interface problems that I will revert to 1.3 if is not improved by the time my trial period expires. PC version is identical, but maybe you have a nearly square screen with room to waste on tool boxes you don't want and have a lower expectation of interface clarity.

The selection control point ('star' new item) may work well on pics with strongly coloured and delineated man-made objects, but seems pretty vague on landscapes and worse on seascapes. But, in the absence of tutorial, I will experiment more before giving up. Ditto auto-retouch (=clone/stamp) only useful for eg out-of-focus background, not realy upto serious use.

That leaves shadow protection (=recovery) as only serious advance against a lot of backward steps. I dare say that on a much faster machine there would be some improvement to see there.

Does it look £80 worth to you Stephen?

Thanks Chris for letting us know we can now upgrade from the trial.

I dont think the application is that different only the user interface has changed and made it much easier for me to edit the type of photos I specialise in.

I editted a few shots yesterday and found that I wasn't hunting around the screen for this and that menu. Everything was there for me. I also seemed to have more energy and patience to do more.

Is it worth £80 - NO!

Nonetheless I shall be upgrading, benefits are there but not worth paying for.

Warning - after editing some difficult pics in both 1.3 and 2, I have decided to go back to 1.3 on grounds of final quality as well as previous doubts.

However NEFs edited in NX2 do not come through with editing done in 'Quick fix' (and maybe other new tools). Although the QF pictogram looks like the LCH>'master luminosity', it acts independently. IMO, not as well, partly as it is smaller and partly as it does not have numeric corner windows giving exact values of edge sliders. LCH is the function I use most and can't afford to lose its quality.

Two days playing with NX2 and now I am well impressed.
Start of day 1 was a bit of a nightmare as I did not think the interface was too intuitive, and I'm not really good at ploughing through help files for each step I wanted to do, so I have tended to crash around. Trial and error job.

Perhaps it would be a good plot if we had a few explanitory screen grabs of various menu elements.

I will leave LCH to you Chris as I use selective curves so not up to speed on that one.

For the Bald Eagle shot I used control points and the mask function, so maybe I will start by doing a few screen grabs of that one.

Don

Masks Part 1
 

My starter for 10. This is info gained from a crash around the program so any other finds/updates are welcome. :)

Due to the number of grahics this will be a several part series.

Masks can be used to perform a wide range of selective image adustments, and more than one adjustment step can be added to a single mask.

First set of grahics attatched.

Don

Last one for today.

Attatched graphic shows the full range of adjustments that can be selectively, rather than globally applied.

Don

Thanks Don, you have open my eyes to something new. Something I knew was there but I continued to edit photos in the usual basic way.

NX introduced control points that made it easy to use layers and masks used by Photoshop. NX2 seems to have turned away from exclusive use of control points and moved in the direction of a more traditional approach but in an easier way to apply.

I'll study this with interest and would be fascinated to know whether its a high quality companion to control points alone.

I am looking on with interest Don and will be especially interested to see how you deal with the control point mask bleeding away bottom left. The worth of NX2 over NX 1.3 hinges on the quality of this tool, but I am yet to be convinced it does much that a quick 'brush around' with the brush tool would not have done; a rather similar situation that I was playing with on the dragon shot in the previous NX thread.

PS in the frame showing the mask tools isolated in a white surrounding area, have you done this using a copy+paste in another prog? Unless the PC version is different from the mac one, it is one of the big 'downs' in NX2 that I can no longer separate one group of tools like this from the main pallette, whereas in 1.3 I always do.

Later on perhaps you will also have worked out if the mask created this way can be reversed ie to (a) work on zone 1 (b) then do something diffrent on zone whole-pic minus zone 1. Again in NX1.3 a selection could be saved and passed on to use in further steps, so it needs to do something extra for my money.

The question of whether it is worth the money really depends on how much use you would make of the new features. The big snag I have found has been the lack of info on the net regarding NX2. A quick preview by Jason Odell then you have to buy his e-book. Nothing of real value on Nikons site yet, and then it took over a year from release for them to post a series of NX tips & tricks.

At least if we post experiences here, users of NX1 can decide if they feel the upgrade worth while.

On the mask then I used this a lot in NX1, but the moment you selected a tool to use the mask became invisible and you had to do the +/- brush by eye. I mostly put on the mask, then painted it all out, then used the + brush to selectively apply the effect. Because the mask was invisible I would often find areas that I had missed. CS was always a lot better in that respect as you could at least see a thumbnail of the mask. I never worked out how to see that larger than thumbnail though which has been a bit of a pain. This mask visibility thing has been well solved in NX2 as you can at anytime toggle between views on the full screen image.

Comming from NX1 there are odd things that I miss. In NX2 you HAVE to click 'New Step' to create that, otherwise you find you are in a previously closed step. In NX1 as long as you had closed the previous step the next tool you picked created a new step. Duplicating control points in NX2 can easily lead to creating a whole duplicate set. These are just two examples. Mostly a change in how you go about things solves these but until you realise the correct route then you can get a suprise. That is why I thought to post graphics as I go along.

More later.
If the weather holds then I am going for a sniff of hot steam oil and burning coal today :D :rolleyes: . Weeting Steam Rally.

Don

Chris,
The example I am using is the gallery shot of the Bald Eagle. So it will be in a graphic. In that case I applied a second point after applying curves.

All graphics are done in PaintShopPro7 so white areas around tool boxes are painted in.

Re moving tools around. That is something I will look into. Just been using default while I try to find my way around. Minimising the left side panels is good though. Quick and easy to view full screen and unlike my copy of NX1 they do dock properly when you revert. My NX1.1 was never quite the same when I reloaded it after my doomed upgrade to v1.2.

Don

The offical manual for Capture NX2 can be found here

It should contain everything we need to know about capture NX2

Foxy, I have the manual but find that you still have to rummage through it to join up the dots on the bits I am not familiar with. Perhaps thats what Jason Odell's e-book offers.
Never mind, we will end up creating the WPF book. :D :D

A bit bushed after the Steam Rally so just two quick graphics for today. These are to show the effect that slight displacement when placing the Control Point can have a huge effect on the mask that is created. I suggest fine adjustment of position of the Control Point is made at magnification greater than 25%. Remember it is easy to toggle between mask and no mask.

I have found changing magnification, and the viewable part of the image on screen, is far easier done in the Birds Eye View, rather than using Magnifier and the Hand Control.
In Birds Eye View the displayed image area can be dragged around easily.

Don

inspired by your efforts Don & finding a heap of Tewkesbury Abbey interiors I had laid aside, I thought I would try the selection control point out on the classic problem of blowing the window glass in order to get the interior decently exposed.

I entirely agree on the manual business, indeed it hadn't ocurred to me that there was a pull down menu from the little face. Seeing the mask as black/white is a huge bonus....and as your graphics show it can make a huge difference moving the point quite a small distance; equally in positioning on the most 'blown' section of stained glass.

I duplicated the nef accidentally (intending to duplicate a control point) on purpose having corrected basics in 1.3 then tried the difficult bit in both. The result is not straightforward as there are differences in final image not accounted for after the branch, but the first positive indication so far of distinct advantage.

Missed Marcle Steam rally :( from too many prior committments so no divided loyalty this end !

I may just have been tired yesterday evening but after Foxy's post re the manual, I had another quick trawl through it. Saw something really interesting - working on a black screen with menus that can be activated only to make an adjustment, or made visible for a series of adjustments. This is a feature I really like in PaintShopPro so followed the instruction - Top menu - View - and clicked Presentation.

PSP7 to return to normal screen view - left button click. To change view in NX normally go to Views and uncheck the curreny view, so I activated the control without further thought.

Here's the rub. The manual does NOT state that the top menu bar is inaccesssable in this mode, also that this is truely full screen mode so also no access to the task bar either. :eek: :eek: :eek:
You can only return to normal screen view through Manage Workspaces. Took me about 5 mins to discover that.

After going through that nightmare I will do a series of screen grabs of this today as it is a feature also new to NX2.

Chris, I do not have a pic similar to what you describe to play with. As all this will work on Jpegs perhaps you can post a 2000wide after basic correction we can play with.

Don

Before trying for screen grabs to demonstrate Presentation mode, I did a screen grab and printed the relevant page. If I had done that last night before going into Presentation mode I would not have had the problem I did.

So for those interested, here are the instructions, and I seriously suggest printing these first before selection of that particular feature. :rolleyes: :D

Don

I think I am getting there (or somewhere) slowly. I have actually printed a few pages of the manual to highlight.

I am trying to identify what is actually new and better in NX2 and not merely rearranged and now concentrating on the selection control point (SCP). In NX 1.3 we were able to use a 'colour control point' (CCP) within an area limited by eg a lasso marquee. I think the base mask can do something similar to limit the effect of the new SCP and stop the effect bleeding off over a wider area of the image than intended. But the hierarchy of 'overlay selection' 'base mask' and 'paint and fill mask' is taking some unravelling:mad:

The 'good thing' (when one masters it) is that you can then use the whole package of enhancements and not just the limited range within the CCPs - which I had abandoned as they tended to show badly in prints even if invisible on screen....

Now for combination of SCP and brushes...:rolleyes:

Chris,

The significant thing on masks as opposed to the Control points only is the range of adjustments available ( see grahic in post 12 ). So in your case you can selectively apply LCH within a mask set up using Selection Control point/points. You can then use the brush with varying opacity to rub out bits of that effect within the mask to suit.

Don

Presentation View
 

If you are short of desktop space or prefer an uncluttered layout this could be a solution.

Presentation View is initially activated from the top menu bar. View - Presentation. To alternate the view with the standard screen hit P on the keyboard. P again will return to presentation view.

Presentation View gives a larger screen view than Full Screen view. Its background colour is black rather than grey though. To move the image around the screen drag the Birds Eye view around inside its box.

Initially in the Presentation View, all tools are hidden. They will appear when the curser hovers over their normal position. Tools can be undocked and moved around the screen to suit and will then remain visible. Undocked tools loose visibility when the mouse curser moves off them.

Attatched is a resized full screen, grab, to illustrate. Notice that the taskbar has also vanished. In this screen grab the curser was resting on the minimised edit list hence its visibility. The birds Eye and Edit tools were undocked and moved, therefore permenantly visible.

Chopper is from yesterdays Steam rally.:)

Don

Ps Chris, I have just re-read your comments in post 3 so this may help you.

Selective Area Noise Reduction Mask
 

Another example of using a selective area mask. In this case targeted at noise reduction in the dark area of an image.
This example also uses control points to be selective within the mask due to the complexity of the area involved.

Don

Linking Adjustments in a Step
 

And here is another find. NX2 just gets better and better. :) :cool:

Once a mask has been created then a series of adjustments can be made to that mask within a single edit step.

Details in the attatched graphic. Its fairly tall so some scrolling needed.

Don

Thank you for tips aimed my way Don. I am not sure that the P & F views are that helpful, the final proof being in a print. Also it may be my computer running short of memory, but I find that boxes once brought up in P view do not disappear and, worse, remain in front of my dock when I bring it in from off of right of screen. However I have found less noisome arrangement of tool boxes, ie save/print off screen & main box half off screen leaving room for settings to its right. Also finding interface less offensive with use.

Am putting in a post on my task next.

screen shot shows part of choir of Tewkesbury Abbey (about 1/4 of total image) with stained glass windows end and right with bright sun full on. Anti-clock (1) top left has been corrected in NX1.3 for overall presentation of interior, but leaving windows at back & right 'blown'.
At this point I duplicated the .nef.

Bottom left (2) is attempt to compensate glass in NX 1.3 using my normal type of brush selection for the windows, ie big brush selecting window area, small brush correcting edges and removing selection from main mullions etc.

Bottom right (3) is 1st attempt in NX2. Using selection control point (SCP) 'neat' ie unmodified by other masks. I don't think the effect on the windows is any better, but, worse it has also bled out onto the surrounding masonry. This is where I took serious note of Don's comments, reread, damn it, even printed a few pages of the manual and embarked on SCP+ 'paint and fill' Mask. That is limiting the effect of the SCP to the glass only using brushes to remove its effect from surrounding masonry.

Once mask is in place, one can monkey around with adjustments ad lib. I started with Colorize, ie applying the light ochre showing towards top right of the panel as a wash. Then a play in my favourite playpen, LCH upping the chroma etc. Finally using 'Colour balance' to correlate to window on left which is out of sun and un-modified. Then a re-run on the right hand (south) window starting with same settings as east, then adjusting them. Dare say there is a more scientific approach, but the ability to tweak intuitively and indefinitely is the strength of NX for me.

That then completely removes the blown bits, reintroduces a reasonable replication of the glass tones and with correct gradation from no sun to full sun left-to-right. It prints without any sign of meddling. The mullion and tracery detail is rather washed out in places, but then I am sure it would have been in real life and pic would have been suspicious if 'perfected'.

Full pic as 2nd frame. (1/2 sec f10 18-135 kit lens at fl40) In the basic editing I have removed the barrel distortion but not attempted unskewing as the view is necessarily slanted upwards over the rood screen and to include the organ and rich ceiling and bracket decoration.
http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...attach/jpg.gif
http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...attach/jpg.gif

Neat job Chris.

I hope you do not mind as this is not applicable to your controlled edit, but I thought it would be interesting to have a quick go to see how much of the window I could get. This is mask/curves then minus brush the window at 20% in a single sweep.

Don

retouch brush NX2
 

this is much better than I thought at first - LH ex camera showing a mass of cables and some departing small birds, RH as edited. I have also printed this one (only A5 for a card) and can't detect any flaws. As instructions say, brush the whole offending thing, don't dab. It seems to understand what is being dealt with. If near something a bit distinctive, a 2nd pass helps, ie it uses edited origin, not original or has 'learnt'

(Tewkesbury Andy if you look in)

I have not tried that brush yet Chris. After seeing your results I must give it a go. Looks to be a handy tool.

So for retrieving detail in the end wall did you use Highlight protection in Quick Fix or go another route.

Don

In this case I started with brush as pic would be useless cables could be got rid of. Thereafter all quick-fix, but exp com -.67 then shadow prot 20% and a tweak of the curve; I usually start by getting the sky right and near zero highlight using double threshold, then look at rest of image - if it had been a more problematic one, I would have gone to LCH rather than tweak curve in quickfix.

New(er S/H) box came this morning so expect more who knows what further improvements. Was dreading OS10.5, but it is the first OS since 10.2 where the interface has actually improved, whereas 10.4 was a trough of despond. Speed will allow me to set NX2 so the adjustments stay active when one backtracks.

Have fun with your new toy Chris. :)

My machine is not up to Foxy's powerhouse :rolleyes: , so I have not set active adjustments on a backtrack.

Don

2 features I hadn't noticed prior to faster box:

1: starting off with a small 'trial selection' using +brush (a bit like the flower in Nikon tutorials), you can then set the adjustment (or a series of linked adjustments) on the basis of the trial. You can then carry on brushing ad lib and/or check the extent of the mask using mask or overlay. Trying to add or subtract after choosing an adjustment was the surest way of crashing the programme before! You can also dab/undo/redo and use pressure settings. Never realised how accurately a PP 'brush' could replicate real one. Nice when choosing exactly how much/little of an image actually needs sharpening. (Don't tell me, all Photoshop users learnt this in the cradle).

2: used to think the temorary reset of individual panes within LCH was something that just didn't work - it does, toggles between before and after

The F is very useful and a nice way of working as I do usually have a pretty messy desktop. It makes no difference to the the tool & support windows, they stay put quietly. In P, once tool boxes are invoked, they stay, and although the tools can be shown/hidden with tab key, once touched, the programmers have forced them to the front & only re-start will get them back to normal. In the meantime both menus and dock get part hidden behind them; useless (Bit of OS difference? Must get some feedback in to them as it is definitely incorrect for OS 10)

With both F & P the image can be moved with both scroll wheel (shift for L-R) or direction arrows. F also reverts with escape key and the near microscopic arrows at bottom useful for toggling between 2 or more pics for comparison. Getting rid of horrid scroll & header bars also actually increases size of the actual pic. Nice.

Thanks for drawing my attention to it Don.

Probably right about the OS Chris.
When I get a mo I will post a screen grab of the Windows view of F

Don

I have amended previous post as the occlusion of dock also extends to covering menus after invoking tools and pallete in P. Interested to see if that is the case with PC.

Is this the case if the dock has 'automatically hide and show the dock' selected?

Picture 1 = F
Picture 2 = P

OS 10.5.4

I do have the dock 'automatically show & hide' checked. But for clarity here is a dump of the worse effect on menus. It is in F mode for clarity, but after showing tool bar etc while in P mode. (no menu bar in P whatever you do, in fact not really a working environment at all IMO, just to see pic with black background)

I see, it not THE dock but a dock!

If the tool tile is left in its default position instead of the default position for NX(1) there is no issue, see screen grab.