Post processing -- DPP, NX2, Lightroom

This is an ultra lightweight review of editing software from Nikon, Canon, and Adobe on a recent Intel based laptop running Windows XP with 2G RAM (Lenovo X61). Before we get to the review, let me clarify what post processing is. Post processing is an essential part of being a good photographer. Many people will argue that people in the old days simply turned their films to photolabs to develop naturally without any post processing, and that processing makes photos look unnatural.

The fact of the matter is during the early days of photography people had to develop each and every picture from negatives manually. They have to compensate for exposure (test strips), and create details by changing contrast filters, and burn and dodge to get the greatest details. People can try to redevelop Ansel Adams negatives but the prints will look lousy-- all of his magic happened in the darkroom and development process, and none can be reproduced faithfully.

As to pictures being unnatural-- first of all, there is no such a thing as natural pictures. The moment natural light passes through human made lenses, then gets recorded on film or sensors, then reproduced back to paper or LCD screen, it's anything but natural. Dynamic ranges will be completely off, colors will be changed, details will be lost.

The difference between processing yesterday and today is that yesterday, we processed in stinky darkrooms (or color photolabs), and today we process in the comforts of our homes with our computers.

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Canon DPP:
As with most Canon packages, Canon Digital Photo Professional is free with all of their DSLR cameras along with many other software utilities. DPP is lightweight in terms of disk and memory footprint and it is blazingly fast. The GUI is very intuitive. Unfortunately, it's for Canon exclusively so if you need to edit other RAW files, you're out of luck. Installation is a breeze though many fancy features are missing. One of the biggest features that is missing is cropping.


Nikon NX2:
As with most Nikon packages, Nikon NX2 is *not* free. It is 60 days trials and $200 to buy. It is free only if you buy the prosumer and pro camera bodies (e.g. D3, D300, etc). While the GUI is awful, it's actually pretty powerful. I like how you can select certain color/ranges, and selectively accentuate or diminish tones/color/contrast very easily. It's better than the magic lasso that Photoshop has (the last Photoshop I used was v. 7.0). I think it has pretty much all the features of Lightroom for 1/2 the cost, but has a very retro looking UI that's clunky (requires lots of clicks in weird places). It is SLOW SLOW SLOW. I've heard that it works best if you have Windows Vista with at least 8G of RAM. They say that Nikon's software is inversely as good as their hardware, and the NX2 GUI and the huge hardware requirement really shows.


Adobe Lightroom 2:
Adobe LR2 is becoming the industry standard tool for organizing thousands of photos and light editing. Many pros are skipping Photoshop completely because they only need to color balance and crop, and LR2 does these tasks blazingly fast. It is built for fast and efficient workflows-- from tagging pictures, ranking pictures, mass 1 step color correction, mass file generation, etc. It also allows very light editing such as spot editing, graduated ND filter, dual toning, curves, etc. LR2 trial is 30 days. I got my copy for only $130 during the "Oh no we can't sell anything we gotta lower the price" Amazon special, but normally it is $279 on Amazon and $190 on eBay.


In the end, I didn't want to use Apple Aperture because it's Apple specific. I liked DPP but it's not powerful enough. NX2 was powerful but it's a beast and it crashed on me all too often. Lightroom has its problems but it's the best out there today.