The Sports Photo Guy

In the never-ending war between Nikon and Adobe, Nikon upped the ante with the D300 and D3 by introducing their “Picture Controls,” rendering Adobe’s Camera Raw plug-in less than perfect for NEF conversion.  Adobe’s answer: Camera Profiles.

Currently in beta, Adobe’s Camera Profiles and DNG Profile Editor give shooters the ability to apply close approximations of Nikon’s Picture Controls and also develop their own custom profiles.

Here’s a tricky night shot I recorded as an NEF applying the “Vivid” Picture Control.  The default rendering made by Capture NX2 is shown below:

The challenges ACR 4.x has with D300 NEFs is illustrated by the below image, rendered by ACR 4.4 with the “Auto” settings applied.

The Camera Profile “Standard” doesn’t change things too much, as shown below.

But apply the “Vivid” profile, and voila!  We’re much closer to the Capture NX2 result.

It will be interesting to see more conversions as I apply the Adobe Camera Profiles to more of my work.  Up until now, I have been wedded to a two-application workflow for D300 RAW images–opening in Capture NX or NX2, then transferring to PhotoShop for detail work.  If Adobe’s Camera Profiles can work their magic on NEFs consistently well, however, I think many photographers will welcome returning to PhotoShop and Camera Raw for their NEF work.  Of course, that will only prompt Nikon to apply new tricks in their never-ending battle to commoditize the image processing software market.