NX Concepts & Terms

Capture NX: NX is Nikon's premier NEF/RAW editor. You can quickly and easily adjust and correct white balance, exposure, picture control, noise reduction, sharpening, brightness, contrast, saturation, crop, rotate, and many other Adjustments. And while Capture NX is capable of editing JPEG's, you can only maintain a high quality if Nikon's NEF/RAW photo format is used.

NEF: NEF stands for 'Nikon Electronic Image Format', which is Nikon's RAW photo format. It stores (most of) what the image sensor inside your camera records. Typically a photo (JPEG) is produced from this raw sensor information inside your camera. But a NEF allows you to delay and perform that processing on your computer. Or create both a JPEG+NEF for the best of both worlds (JPEG for convenience, NEF for it you need to edit the photo). This gives you the incredible flexibility to change photo processing decisions later. Advanced NEF Info

If you shoot NEF (or even JPEG+NEF), be prepared for the hard disk space storage requirements, if you save all of your photos. In the 'Technical Notes' section of your Nikon DSLR manual, there should be a 'Memory Card Capacity' section -- which you can use to help you estimate long term hard drive space requirements.

Change Camera settings after the fact: You are on a new shoot all afternoon, come back to the office, and discover that all pictures were taken with a slightly modified Standard Picture control, and a slightly incorrect custom white balance preset. Do you have to reshoot? No, instead just use Capture NX and change every NEF (batch process) to the settings that you really wanted to use. Problem solved.

Undo capability: Any changes that you make to a NEF (or JPG/TIFF) can be reversed later (even years later), provided that you save to/over a NEF. If you save the photo as a 'JPEG', all edits are 'bound' to the photo and lost. So, your NEF is your proof copy. Always edit/save to a NEF. Just remember, first save to a NEF, then if you need a JPEG, use 'File' 'Save As...' as the last step (or save to JPEG for several NEF at once as a batch process).

Capture NX - The 'Edit List'

When you open a photo for the first time, you will see a window that looks similar to the image that you see to the right. Namely, Capture NX, with your photo, with a lot of toolbars around it.

One of these toolbars is the 'Edit List', which is a fundamental feature to understand within Capture NX. The edit list contains all of the changes made to your photo.

Adjustment: A single enhancement made to a photo, like contrast, brightness, color balance, unsharp mask, noise reduction, photo effects, etc. Each Adjustment can be refined to have a specific Opacity (transparency) and blending technique.

The Nikon Capture NX manual talks about "Adjustments" and "Enhancements". I suspect the developers chose "Adjustment", while the PR and documentation people thought "Enhancement" sounded better. I use "Adjustment" because when you click on 'New Step', you see "Select Adjustment", not "Select Enhancement".

Step: A Step consists of one or more ordered Adjustments, all of which apply to a Selection (all or part of a photo) specific to the step. There will be a next to the step that you are interacting with.

You can think of a step as a 'layer' of changes, which normally replaces the prior layer, but the layer can also be 'blended' with the prior layer.

Selection: The default Selection for a step is the entire photo (see 'All Selected' in the step to the right), but can be changed to most any complex shape by using the Selection tools (brush, lasso, polygon, rectangle, oval, gradient). A selection can be 'Feather'ed to facilitate a more natural blending of the Adjustment edge with the photo.

The 'Edit List': An ordered list of Steps, which will be applied to your photo. The first step is always 'Base Adjustments' (added by Capture NX; can not be deleted). Each step and/or Adjustment can be turned on or off via a checkbox, or even deleted (only the steps you add; via a right click), allowing you to undo changes made to the photo.

Base Adjustments: Always the first step in the Edit List. A list of common (plus NEF specific) adjustments typically made to photos. The order in which the adjustments within Base Adjustments are actually performed is 'undefined', and Capture NX will perform them in the order which results in the highest quality photo. The 'Selection' of 'Base Adjustments' is always the entire photo.

New Step Button: The 'New Step' button at the bottom of the Edit List allows you to add a generic step to the edit list. As you can see to the above right, you must click on 'Select Adjustment' to select which specific Adjustment to make at this step.

Also, new steps (by default) have a Selection of the entire photo ("All Selected"). Just use the Selection tools to modify the selection.

Dynamic Range: The ratio between the smallest and largest light intensity values that can be recorded, commonly expressed in photography in terms of EV. Even the first computers with only 16 colors had black and white, meaning they had a large dynamic range, so 'dynamic range' is only the first part of the story.

Tonal Range: The second part of the story is tonal range, which is the number of tones (or shades) in a particular dynamic range.

RGB: RGB stands for 'Red, Green, and Blue'. Computers (and your digital camera) reference any color as a specific combination of three primary colors, red, green, and blue. RGB from Wiki

Luminance: It describes an amount of light (or brightness) without regard to color (chrominance). Think old black & white television.

Chrominance: Or, chroma for short, describes a color, without regard for brightness (luninance).

HSB: HSB stands for 'Hue, Saturation, and Brightness'. HSL from Wiki

LCH: LCH stands for 'Luminosity, Chroma, and Hue'.

White Balance: If I take a picture of you outside in bright sun, or inside under incandescent or florescent lighting, the RGB colors recorded (of you) by a digital camera change slightly. The process used to correct that color shift is called 'white balance'. Most photos can benefit greatly, even from subtle white balance changes. White Balance from Wiki

Neutral/Gray Point: A neutral (or gray) point is often used to correct white balance problems -- but a point (or region) that you select. Basically, you need to select a point in a photo that you know should have no color to it (but it probably does have a color cast to it in your photo). That means white, any shade of gray, and even black. This is a critical concept to understand. As you look at a photo, regardless of the current colors you see, you are selecting a point (or region) that you know 'should' have no color to it. That is all the information that is needed to correct most white balance problems.