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Nikon Capture NX ads to that mixture a whole new concept of color control points called “U Point Technology” which allows you to adjust color values of individual areas of an image by setting up control points for each main area - one for blue sky, one for clouds, one for your subject’s face, one for the grass, etc. Each of these points automatically masks the rest of the image so that you can adjust just the area you’ve selected. This is excellent, and it really does work, quickly curing color problems that would have taken hours of selecting, masking, adjusting, blending etc in Photoshop to get the same result. U Point alone is a good reason to buy Capture NX, and Nikon have made some attempts to market Capture NX as a general imaging application for non Nikon users who could work with TIFs or JPEGs but not with RAW. For that reason all the logos are “Capture NX” not Nikon Capture, but, whatever they call it, Capture NX only supports Nikon RAW files. On the plus side the U Point features are unique and I have already used them to improve the sea color on a couple of my biggest selling images - adding control points to the sea in one image allowed me to adjust only the areas I wanted without affecting the rest of the image. It took minutes. Not only that, the end result was better than I’d achieved using Photoshop. The changes blended in perfectly - even around the very complicated outline of an oil platform. “U Point Technology” really is something special, and at the moment only available in Nikon Capture NX.
That’s a shame really, as I can’t help thinking that Capture NX isn’t really where it belongs.
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