Rick--You are correct. The whole purpose of Viveza is to bring the U-Point system of control points for basic contrast/saturation corrections to Photoshop users. You've already got that in NX2.

To reiterate the disadvantage of the Viveza approach is that it is "after" Camera Raw so you're operating on the de-mosaiced and initially processed NEF once it has turned into a bitmap.

Thank you for the clarification David. That makes it an expensive plug-in when NX2 is only ~$125 from Amazon.

Rick, NX2 is slower because you are working on a very large NEF 16 bit file and all the changes you make are being saved back to that file along with the original image. Since the NEF file has all the info off the sensor, you have about four stops to play with and that means the U-Point controls more info. It is slower, but the results are extremely better.

I use Lightroom for proofing changes and NX2 for the final print. Just for the speed when doing a lot of images.

By the way, you can use NX2 on tiff and jpg. It's faster then NEF.

Billy

Thanks Billy for your explanation. Software will catch up to the demands of a working stiff with clients that want immediate results and proofs. With NX2 I spend more time waiting for the image to render than the time I spend actually working on the image.

Just for fun yesterday I took a quick RAW shot with my 14mp Kodak 14nx and opened it with Kodak's proprietary software PhotoDesk. Working within that old early software on the RAW was noticeably faster than working with smaller files on newer NX2 software. I guess that I was spoiled by PhotoDesk and what it was able to accomplish 8 years ago on slower machines.

I do love what I can do with NX2, U-Point, and Nikon files. The results can be remarkable. I am done complaining. U-Point is very cool and it has changed the way I work on my files.

Rick--If it is the U-Point that you really like from NX2 and you find it really slow, you might try the trial of Viveza in Photoshop. Per earlier posts in the thread it doesn't kick in until after you do the ACR piece so it may not do exactly what you want, but I suspect it runs faster since Adobe owns all the pieces (one issue with NX has been that Nikon traditionally does the 'secret sauce' raw stuff while nik does the image processing stuff and I don't think that helps performance any).--David

David,

I don't know what I like anymore.
Everything in my photography business is different than it was before and it keeps changing right in front of my eyes. My mantra now is "change is good" but I'm not sure if I agree with it 100%.

My past bread and butter work demanded jpgs. I took a lot of images and only worked on a small percentage of them. Now I am shooting a more limited number in RAW and working on a very high percentage of them. It is taking some getting used to.

Rick--Certainly one key to the "new way of life" with Raw files is to keep it simple. When I do workshops I really try to stress sets of corrections that can be done in under 1-minute. Otherwise you could spend your whole life mucking with images.

Of course for folks doing what you do, even one minute may be way too much by the time you multiply that by the number of images you need to process. In that case it really does need to be nearly automatic or maybe a few seconds each.--David

Lightroom writes the raw file changes to a side file and that makes Lightroom really fast and you can produce jpgs in a batch. I use it for all my weddings. I use NX2 for portraits and difficult files. But just for regular work and when I need to produce a lot of jpgs for printing, then Lightroom does it.

The trick of course is to shoot it right and you don't have to make many changes. I just try to get as close as I can.

Nik has great tutorials on their site for NX2 and Viveza and other products. And Adobe has plenty on Lightroom. And there is Lightroom Killer Tips.

Billy