Nikon – “Where does Photoshop come in?”
A message posted on April 14, 2005 on the Adobe User To User Forum for Camera Raw by nunatak (screen name) said:
“hi everyone …
nikon emailed me a link this morning. in clear convincing language, they helped delineate for me the usefulness of Photoshop. some of their stronger arguments were:
“Where does Photoshop come in? As graphic arts software, it’s great for removing a telephone pole, or adding a drop shadow, or affixing a caption to your photo. But if you’re using it to crop or straighten an image, or adjust contrast, brightness, saturation and curves, or to apply filters, you simply don’t need it.
Photoshop is excellent for graphic artists; Capture is designed for photographers.”
just wondering if there were any Nikon shooters whom agreed?”
The short quote above was really just a small sample of what Nikon had to say about Photoshop. Here is the entire paragraph:
“Where does Photoshop come in? As graphic arts software, it’s great for removing a telephone pole, or adding a drop shadow, or affixing a caption to your photo. But if you’re using it to crop or straighten an image, or adjust contrast, brightness, saturation and curves, or to apply filters, you simply don’t need it. Capture does all that and more. And remember, whatever change you make to your image in Capture becomes not a change to the image file, but a set of instructions that goes with the image file. Because of that distinction, the original instruction set and RAW image data are never replaced or overwritten. Simply close the file and the original stays original. You can, of course, do a “save as” to TIFF or JPEG from the original NEF if you need to. So we’re not saying you shouldn’t use Photoshop, just don’t use it first. Photoshop is excellent for graphic artists; Capture is designed for photographers. And Nikon engineers have designed Capture to work with the pure Nikon image, saved as a NEF, right out of the camera. Capture is as specific to Nikon cameras as a Nikkor lens or Speedlight.”
We suggest that PhotoshopNews readers read both the Nikon promo as well as the message thread in the Camera Raw forums. However, we should tell you that it was very difficult to find anybody who agreed with the promo including current and former Nikon photographers.
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April 16th, 2005 at 4:36 am
Last time I checked ACR left my original NEF capture data in tact, even when converting to DNG camera default is still available. I thought one of the many advantages of RAW capture was the fact the the RAW capture is locked and cannot be over written, regardless of the processing software?
April 16th, 2005 at 9:24 am
just wondering if there were any Nikon shooters whom agreed?”
First, it might be a good idea for the Editorial Staff to have a grammer/syntax guru onboard. I think you mean “. . . shooters who agreed?”
The promo has a point, although
April 16th, 2005 at 9:40 am
just wondering if there were any Nikon shooters whom agreed?”
First, it might be a good idea for the Editorial Staff to have a grammer/syntax guru onboard. I think you mean “. . . shooters who agreed?”
The promo has a point in this sense:
1. Nikon Capture uses the custom tone curves in use in the camera for NEF (Nikon RAW) files. ACR uses a kind of one size fits all camera default curve.
2. NC does do a very nice job of rendering a NEF in terms of detail, color, and tone values. ACR, on the other hand, when it comes to the color accuracy (uncalibrated), rendering detail, and overall tone, is probably the least capable “major league” RAW converter on the market. Although slightly better than NC at retrieving highlight detail, in comparative terms, it does not do a particularly good job of rendering the image overall.
That said, I think PS CS is an outstanding product — it has the best overall photographic toolset and interface of any product I have used; it has the best batch processing features; and its performance is outstanding (NC is notoriously slow on many computers).
I do use ACR often — because much of the photography I do does not require “fine art” rendering of the image. I use NC for such pictures, and more recently Raw Magick, which, because it renders using floating point calculations, is unsurpassed for converting Nikon RAW.
Stan Robins
April 16th, 2005 at 9:48 am
While I agree with you, Stan, about grammar/syntax, it’s ony fair to PSN to point out that the error was the original poster’s in the Adobe forum. Maybe the PSN staff should have put a [sic] in and allowed us all to feel superior?
I’m not sure one shuld take the original promo so seriously. It looks like marketing hype and camera makers don’t have a hope of matching Adobe’s ability to develop user-friendly and sophisticated image editing software. Most Nikon shooters want Nikon to make their money out of cameras, output DNG, and stop pretending they are in the competition with Adobe. Canon users probably feel just the same.
April 16th, 2005 at 9:55 am
Follow up - meant to say “it’s only fair” before anyone corrects me.
I thought I’d read the the new version of ACR supports curves? Certainly I feel its highlight recovery is a strength.
April 16th, 2005 at 10:34 am
I don’t care what Nikon says. I just switched to Canon. I was never satisfied with the Nikon Digital System.
April 16th, 2005 at 11:33 am
Why do we have to pick one? I use both, depending on what I am doing.
I use NC and process a shoot’s images using their batch mode to add sharpness, boost contrast and adjust other factors as required (white balance, exposure, etc.). This gives me a good indication of the “potential” of each image, and is great for generating low-rez jpg’s with global tweaking applied, for use on the web or small print sizes like 4×6, where it’s not worth doing a full-blown fine art workflow, since you would never see the results.
For fine art targetted prints, I use ACR only….and custom tweak each setting to get the best output possible.
Seems like an obvious ploy by Nikon to justify their Capture product (which I have and use extensively as I noted) versus PSCS/ACR.
Nikon would be better served by listening to their loyal customers, almost all of whom use PS, and providing an Adobe Plugin version of Nikon Capture, documenting their proprietary format better so that 3rd parties can push the limits of what is possible, and also adopt DNG. They should focus on what they excel at, and software development (woefully) is not included in that!
Proprietary solutions in the internet age are not going to survive in the long term.
My 2 cents worth.
….Andrzej
April 16th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
Nikon has it backwards. Purely a case of Dain Bramage. I love the equipment but the software is shall we say stinky (none of the manufacturers can touch Photoshop). We don’t need Capture but we require Photoshop. No its not a just graphics program, it drives our industry. If Nikon and the others would give Adobe the specs for the raw conversions it would even be better. They could work together instead of making Adobe and others figure out the way the files should be processed. None of Nikon software is worth spending money for. The 3rd party software people beat them every time. The 3rd party makers know that they are in competion and must be the best at something. They don’t have a captive group of users. They will spend their money for waht ever makes them the most productive. Software like PixelGenius, Noise Ninja, PhotoMechanic and Nik are critical to making images better and improving workflow. They complement Photoshop and make it even more powerfull and useful.
April 16th, 2005 at 3:59 pm
It would make it far far easier if you could just save the files as DNG format on your camera, at least then you could choose NEF or DNG.
Or a better option, just make the NEF plugin in better! I cant beleive it has so few options!
April 16th, 2005 at 4:48 pm
I use several RAW converters, but always finish my work in PS.
I would love to see a Nikon Capture PS Plug-in. That might be the ultimate system for Nikon users.
Capture does a good job with the RAW conversions and I use the d-light tool a lot. It is however very slow and clunky, certainly on my PC.
Will be interesting to see how the new ACR performs in CS2. If it meets my needs, it would be nice to be able to do everything in one application.
As well as NC, I’ve been using RawShooter (which gets better with each new version) and RawMagick (gets more complicated and resource hungry with each new version).
Of all of these, I’d say RawShooter shows most promise so far as a standalone RAW converter.
April 17th, 2005 at 1:01 am
I will tell you, I find it pretty hard to live without Capture. It’s a brilliant program and the shots come out much different than with Adobe’s Raw Converter. I use PS all the time - I love it, but Capture is what Capture does. My two cents.
April 17th, 2005 at 9:13 am
ohh..good news cause i was going to buy Michael Kieran Color Correction book
Ammar
April 17th, 2005 at 9:34 am
Here’s an additional piece of info on the direction Nikon seem to be taking their loyal customers: Nikon’s White Balance Encryption
April 17th, 2005 at 2:32 pm
Chill guys! Just a little Nikon marketing hype. When it comes to marketing hype, Nikon aren’t a patch on Adobe. Nikon are a relatively tiny company. Cut the little guys some slack, or you’ll soon all be captive to a monster monopoly.
April 17th, 2005 at 9:10 pm
hey …
don’t blame photoshop news for my bad grammer. eye like it that way!
May 2nd, 2005 at 11:42 am
One of the features we are overlooking though is that NC saves history states. I would sure love to see this feature in PSCS. Especially for saving PSD’s which are by their very nature WIP files.
March 15th, 2006 at 6:47 am
We don’t need Capture but we require Photoshop. No its not a just graphics program, it drives our industry. If Nikon and the others would give Adobe the specs for the raw conversions it would even be better.