So, I’m playing around with Nikon Capture, a great little program to keep handy if you use a Nikon type digital SLR camera. I always shoot in RAW format, which has better image reproduction than JPEG does – the files are 12bit colour channels instead of 8 bit, leaves for some wiggle room in post-processing. Nifty things I’ve found so far are the various colour controls – set the white point, set a black point and pow! watch your dynamic range come alive in the photograph. You can set controls for various colours to achieve effects like enhancing a blue sky, or bring out the white in a wedding dress. I’m having so much fun in there that I’ve set my camera to default to Adobe II for the colour mode – best suited for post processing applications.
One thing to note, however – Nikon Capture is one program that doesn’t handle Windows XP’s “Data Execution Prevention” mode very well – I had to put exceptions in to handle it, or every file I opened rendered instead an error message “Unable to open file xxxxxxx”. Apparently, Photoshop CS2 is another program that doesn’t like DEP either, but I haven’t seen the ill effects of that yet.