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Adobe Camera Raw

Posted 04/02/2010 at 10:56am | by Loyd Case

Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) isn’t a stand-alone app, but rather an add-on built into Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Despite its add-on status, ACR offers a rich set of features for tweaking raw files. You can easily adjust exposure, make lens corrections, fix white balance, and do some basic image editing. When you click “done,” Camera Raw creates an XMP file (also known as a “sidecar file”) that reflects the changes you made nondestructively; the actual raw file hasn’t been altered. However, once loaded into Photoshop, any changes made are destructive, and you can’t save the file as a raw file—not even a DNG-variant raw file.

While ACR offers settings for both luminance and color-noise reduction, their overall impact can be hard to discern. ACR’s noise reduction certainly isn’t in the same class as Bibble’s Noise Ninja. And since ACR is itself an add-on, it doesn’t have its own set of aftermarket filters. Indeed, at its heart, ACR is really just a one-dimensional app for modifying the specific properties intrinsic to raw files. It’s got some limited image-editing tools—like crop and straighten—but its real strength lies in easily adjusting basic photographic attributes, like exposure and white balance. Its feature set is limited.

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Nikon Capture NX2

Posted 04/02/2010 at 9:56am | by Loyd Case

Unlike Canon’s bundled-in editor, Capture NX2 is an added-cost option, though Nikon will occasionally include it as a freebie with DSLRs during sales promos. The pricing might be justified for members of the Nikon nation, as Capture NX2 offers considerable sophistication when editing Nikon-sourced raw files.

The original Capture NX had an obtuse user interface, but the latest version cleans up many of the UI issues. How you go about editing images still takes some effort to learn, but once mastered, certain types of edits are much quicker to make than in a traditional app, like Photoshop.

The number of options can be overwhelming, and it’s easy to wander into the weeds and get completely lost. However, Capture NX2 is a nondestructive editor, making it easy to revert to earlier versions. Every setting has an undo button, and if you load up a saved file, there’s even a way to revert to the original. Capture NX2 saves all the changed data in the main NEF file (Nikon’s raw-image file format), so the saved file is larger than the original raw file shot by the camera.

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