Finishing

Almost all photos need some tweaking in photoshop. White balance can be a little off, exposure is a little under or a little selective doding and burning is needed to make the subject pop. Below (and below that) is an example of a more finished image.

I usually use Bridge to do a quick edit and crank out a gallery for review. For final tweaking, I'll bring the image into Nikon Capture NX, which is a Nikon specific RAW development program. I tried it reluctantly because it was just another program to learn and I enjoy shooting much better than sitting in front of a computer. It runs a bit slow, but it has amazing control over the RAW files. You can do changes to specific parts of the RAW file as if you were working on a JPG in photoshop.

Amazing. Worth the price of admission.

For example, in this image I wanted the subject to jump more so I added "control points" to the background and darkened it. The same with his shirt. Then I added a control point on his face to give it a touch more brightness. Something like this is impossible to do in ACR. Changes occur globally. But with Capture NX you can edit RAW files as if they were jpgs.

Now if it would only run a little faster on my 'puter.