Playing with NX2

[Gwenise]

Hello All...Im new to Photography and the forums. heres a pic I fixed with Capture NX2.

Before


After


Thoughts?

[Gwenise]

Before


After

[Matthew_Scullion]

I think you have done a good job with the 1st photo, fixing the shadows and underexposed sections particularly. It doesn't look overdone. Did you use the shadow Protection tool in NX2 for this?

I personally think in both photos the colours are slightly oversaturated. If you agree and you wanted to, you could try turning down the saturation on the whole image using the Quick Adjust panel or using Color Control points to do it on the individually oversaturated areas e.g. baby's pink hat/orange float.

Good job though and glad to see a fellow NX2 user.

[Gwenise]

hello Matt...Thanks for the input. Looking at the photos after your comment I think you are right..the colours are a little over saturated. Im still trying to understand how to use NX2 and I have been looking up tutorials on youtube (tcampbell711's Channel - YouTube). As for how I fixed the first photo, I did it so long ago I honestly dont remember...and I only saved it as a Jpeg so I cant even go back and see what I did.
Heres a revision of the first photo..what I did was created color contrl pts. for the yellow and orange..I then protected everything else around those colors so they would not be affected when I changed the saturation. Thoughts??

[Matthew_Scullion]

Yep - that's how to do it. The color control points are very good aren't they. I personally prefer your revised photo.

re: saving only as JPEG, I always try to keep both the JPEG and the RAW. You can Google some workflows that people have worked out to do this easily along side your photo organising tool of choise. I use iPhoto (on Mac) to organise my photos and found a good workflow written up by someone where I can launch NX2 from within iPhoto and save my non-destructive changes over the RAW as well as a "published" JPEG. If I want to ever get back to my changes, I choose "open original file" in iPhoto and I can get back to the RAW with the iPhoto changes in. This works pretty well for me and means I always have the original file.

As regards tutorials - also worth checking out the Nik Software web site, there are some good ones on there.

Cheers.