Nikon ViewNX 2 – how it really saves the day

I know Foton has previously shared his experience with Nikon ViewNX 2, but I thought I too will throw in my two cents on the subject after spending the last 2+ hours working with it (yes, I am about to go blind).

So I took the family to Treetop Trekking (http://www.treetoptrekking.com/) on Saturday and snapped about 270 pictures in a mere 2 hours (yes, the commute was longer than the time we spent there).  With my family divided into two teams (my wife and my son gone onto the “bigger kid” course while my little daughter stayed at the kiddie course), I was running in between the two courses and try to keep up with the action.  This is my first time using the D5100 in an environment where snap-action is everything and no time to fuss around with the various controls on the camera.   The high contrast lighting in a wooded area provides another source of challenge for photography.

As I reviewed the pictures in-camera, I realized I would need to call upon the power of photo-editing software to correct some of these challenges. 
Out of the 260 pictures, I had to remove 100 of them due to poor focus (as smart as Nikon’s Autofocus-Area technology is, it messed quite of few the shot by focusing on the wrong area and, given the action nature of the activities, I had no chance but to snap at them and hoping for the best) and poor framing (quite a few of the shots were taken in such haste that I didn’t mange to get the subject in the right places) and modify another 53 to correct over/under-exposure and enhance colour.  Actually the D5100’s Automatic mode did much better than the statistic might suggest as quite a few of the 53 shots were messed up my several attempts to make do with Manual and Aperture Priority modes.

Anyhow, I was really impressed with ViewNX’s ability to enhance pictures.  For those that were “flat”, a simple Colour Boost – Nature did the trick.  For the over-exposed pictures, I was also to salvage them pretty well by a combination of Exposure Compensation, Highlight Protection, and Colour Boost.  The under-exposed pictures were much better once I apply a combination of D-Lighting HS and Shadow Protection.
The interview did take a little getting used to, but I was zipping along once I figured out the following:

1. Always copy the pictures to the local disk before working with them.  The Class 10 200x SDHC cards are still no match for the 7200 RPM hard disk.
2. Use keyboard shortcuts to tag picture for batch processing.  I tagged all the pictures with similar problems with a number (simply highlight them and press a number key), then apply the same base settings to them from the filter view (i.e. all the pictures tagged with “1” are the ones need to be treated for over-exposure, “2” are under-exposure, and “9” are bad ones to be deleted).
3. Simply click and hold on the area where the focus of the picture should be and ViewNX will zoom in to 1:1 and allow easy confirmation on the sharpness of the subject.

With a AMD Phenom II 810 quard-core processor on my desktop, the CPU wasn’t much a problem, but ViewNX is still a 32bit app and it failed to take advantage of my 8GB of RAM (in fact, it ran out of memory 2-3 times in the process and I had to restart the problem to continue).  Nonetheless, I am very happy with considering the price I paid for it.   Most importantly, its ability to read and leverage Nikon-specific tags on the NEF file (Nikon’s Compressed Raw file) did make things a lot easier.
I am sure there are some very nice features I could get if I were to upgrade to Nikon CaptureNX or one of the Adobe products, but this is very good for the purpose of correcting/basic enhancement of pictures.

@Foton – you need to get a faster computer, ViewNX did all the enhancement and file conversion all in a few seconds (5-10 seconds for enhancement, a little longer for file conversions) per file on my desktop.