Blacksmith Lapwing

[John Deakin]

Taken last evening from a portable hide on the mud flats of one of the Wildrness Lakes, South Africa. First time I have used a portable hide, will definitely be using it again.

D3, 500mm, f/4. RAW conversion in Capture NX, finished in CS3, minor adjustments and crop.

Since buying into the Nikon system, I have found that when using Lightroom to convert NEF raw files the colours can be adversely affected, so I downloaded Capture NX this morning and the colours are now true and a lot easier to convert. I would be interested to hear if other Nikon shooters have found similar ?

Thanks for looking

John

[Manos Papadomanolakis]

Great photo John,
I really like the light,details,composition and wing position,nice work!

[Gus Cobos]

Great composition and capture John,
The flight angle is nice and the details on the wings are superb...:D

[Glenn Bartley]

This is really great. Love the wing pose and details. Great work.

[Robert O'Toole]

Love the action, sharpness, colors and BG.

Yes C-NX has much more accurate color. Nikon makes WB changes to the RAW files that Adobe ignores. You can get the results with Adobe to match the camera Jpegs but it takes quite a bit of tweaking.

Also NR and some of the Features of CNX are great.

Robert

[Alfred Forns]

Hi John Excellent image Love the wing position, exp and detail !!! If anything might increase the contrast a bit !!!

Agree with you on the capture NX Does seem to give you the best conversion I have not been using all the time due to the workflow but any image I find exceptional will go through NX !!!!

[Paul Pagano]

Beautiful shot, one spot seems a bit hot but otherwise nice exposure. LR does the same thing to Pentax and Canon raw files. Strips the color down and you have to rebuild it back. Sometimes I don't mind except its annoying on a sunset. Not sure why LR does that.

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Great pose, details and setting. I might tone down the whites a tad.

[John Deakin]

Thanks very much for all your kind comments and feedback on using C NX. I was using LR with my previous Canon gear and didn;t find the same level of discrepency. I was getting quite frustrated when I switched to the D3 and D300 as you can imagine, however, using C NX seems to have done the trick thank goodness as I'm no software or PP expert :)

Axel, do you find after resizing that detail is lost in whites generally ? The original file seems to be ok.

Alfred, thanks for your suggestion re contrast, will give it a try. I used the Active D lighting facility for the first time in C NX for this image, it makes quite a difference, do you use D lighting at all 'in camera' ? or do you find it best to use it after in PP work ? Thanks

John

[Juan Aragonés]

Wow, wow:eek::eek: this is excellent. The light is sooo nice and the Bg is soo beautiful. the pose of the bird is fantastic and tack sharp. I am not a big fan of Capture NX because it works very, very slow to my taste but I love the U-point technology. I usually use ACR for RAW processing and I am quite happy with the results and the performance of the software.

[John Deakin]

Thanks very much for looking and kind comment Juan, appreciated, john