There was an interesting blog post on Thom Hogan’s site this week, celebrating Nikon’s Capture NX2 4 year anniversary. He compares NX2’s developments over these 4 years with those of the competition. You can all more or less guess the outcome: NX2 has hardly seen any development and enhancements where the competition, especially Adobe with Photoshop and Lightroom, has made significant progress.
I admit that all of this may be very fine and true, but I continue to say that NX2 has some unique features and capabilities – which you can all find on the various websites and forums – that still makes it for me the preferred editing tool. Especially in combination with Nik’s Color Efex Pro plugin – actually the only one it properly supports – it gives me all I need. Sure, better workflow integration and better user-interface are more than welcome. But would it allow me to do better editing? The answer, at least for me, is no, it wouldn’t. So, as long as Capture NX2 continues to provide me the tools I need, it remains my product of preference.
The question is, of course, will Nikon be able to keep up with all the PC developments that are happening? Given how long it took the to support Windows 7 64-bit environments and also given that Windows 8 is to come out soon, you can only pray some bright people at Nikon do something about this and release Capture NX3. Until then, I’m still very happy with Capture NX2.
I agree, I’ve tried LR and also beta test Corel’s solutions (PSP and AfterShot) but I still keep coming back to NX2 (with Color Efex 3) for my editing. I hope Nikon isn’t planning on abandoning NX2 as the editing process – particularly the u-point technology – is what stands out to me in NX2 over the competition.
Out of curiosity, what are you hoping to see them add in NX3? I know I would love to have access to more of Nik’s products.
Same experience here. After several attempts at different editing tools, I keep coming back to NX2, because it’s so simple and easy to use. Indeed the U-Point technology is very addictive.
What I would like to see added is exactly the thing you mention: better integration with more Nik Software products. Currently I use Color Efex Pro 3, but I’ve tried 4 and I really love it. Also would like to see Silver Efex to be integrated. And also a more up-to-date user-interface would be appreciated. Companies like Apple show us every day what a difference design and looks can make.
My concern is that with competing editing tools further evolving, the gap in terms of features and functions is growing, while at the same time new technologies come around, eg. Windows 8 will appear one day. How long will it take Nikon to support it? This all leads to a growing suspicion Nikon’s not really investing in further development of the product. I do hope Nikon will prove us all wrong some day soon!
With Google’s acquisition of NIK software, I’m not very optimistic about the future of NX. If Nikon decides to take full control, integration with future NIK products would be more unlikely. We’ll have to wait and see…..some more.