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Since I use Lightroom for all image processing I can't really offer any suggestions for what you should do.

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Nikon D80, Nikkor lenses: 35mm f1.8 G AF-S DX, 50mm f/1.8 AF D, 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G ED-IF AF-S DX, 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED AF-S VR, SB800 flash
My photos on SmugMug

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something but aren't you making your work flow *way* more complicated than it needs to be? Why do you need to use CaptureNX and LR to edit your RAWs? Just use one application - as Phil said - LR handles RAWs but you need to make the edits in that app for them to be viewable in LR.

Also, I thought the whole point of a non-destructive work flow was that you don't edit the original RAW/NEF. Why do you want to edit them at all? I'm not familiar with LR so I probably have misunderstood something here but if it's anything like Aperture then the "changes" it makes to NEF files aren't really changes at all, they're just template settings that the application applies on top of the image so you can undo/chop & change the settings you've made to the image. With this in mind, it stands to reason that LR is only able to display the changes you've made to a NEF from within LR itself - not from other applications.

On the stacking issue - does LR not have the ability to select a "pick" from all the images in the stack that it will display as the top level image?

P.S. Feel free to ignore anything I've said here if I've completely missed the point.

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My Flickr

LR does work in a non-destructive way when editing NEFs. Basically it stores a table of changes to each image, allowing you to jump to any point in the editing sequence. You can also create virtual images to save waypoints in the editing process in case you want to go off at a tangent. I see the beauty of LR as being a self contained database and image processing tool.

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Nikon D80, Nikkor lenses: 35mm f1.8 G AF-S DX, 50mm f/1.8 AF D, 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G ED-IF AF-S DX, 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED AF-S VR, SB800 flash
My photos on SmugMug

Lightroom doesn't offer anything like the control of Capture NX when it comes to localized editing. I have exactly the same issues with Lightroom that Thomas has, which is why I uninstalled it. LR is all very well as long as your initial image is good enough to only need general editing. Otherwise it's Capture NX or Photoshop.

Zorro

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http://zorrofox4.deviantart.com/



Various lenses, SB800 & Manfrotto 190 with 460MG head

LR does allow you to control hue, saturation and luminance at specific points in a similar manner to control points in CaptureNX. For example, if you go to the HSL/Color/Grayscale tab and select Saturation then click on the dot at the top right the mouse pointer changes to an up and down arrow head. You can then go to a point on the photo, press and hold the left mouse button and drag up or down to increase or reduce the Saturation for the color beneath the mouse pointer. It really works very well.

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Nikon D80, Nikkor lenses: 35mm f1.8 G AF-S DX, 50mm f/1.8 AF D, 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G ED-IF AF-S DX, 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED AF-S VR, SB800 flash
My photos on SmugMug

The prob is, that I'm very content with the capabilities of CaptureNX, and I know quite well how to apply them.
I'm testing LR NOT for it's editing capabilites but for it's catalogueing, tagging, flickr-uploading. Now I'm just learning, that LR does not display the changes that I applied to the NEF via CaptureNX .

As for stacking: yes, if you manually stack, you can determine which pic of the stack is on top. But, unfortunately again , with auto-stacked NEF+jpeg, you have no chance to bring the jpg to the front . And to avoid auto-stacking by LR, you have to first sepearate the NEF from the jpg or download the sets from your camera by hand because separated pics in different folders cannot be stacked

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Thomas (beware: Nikon-fanboy and moderator!) My Lens Reviews, My Pictures, My Photography Blog
D800+assorted lenses

Out of interest, how does CNX apply its' settings to the NEF file? Does it physically save the info into the file (therefore editing the original NEF) or does it keep a record of the changes you've made separate?

I'm trying to figure out how you expect Lightroom to *know* what settings CNX has applied to the NEF file if they aren't actually saved to the file directly?

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CaptureNX is non-destructive.
But: Interestingly when you read a new NEF into LR, it shows it's original "outlook" for a few seconds , after which I assume LR applies its "development" (even if you have everything set to default)
Only then does the NEF look like it had never been touched by CaptureNX.
I would be happy, if LR just takes the NEF as is and not apply anything to it unless specifically told so.
Or if it just could put the jpeg of the stack on top.

Question for me is: Is Photoshop also non-destructive to RAWs and does LR display changes made through Photoshop correctly? In this case it is just another case of closed system with a preference for tools from the same manufacturer

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Thomas (beware: Nikon-fanboy and moderator!) My Lens Reviews, My Pictures, My Photography Blog
D800+assorted lenses

For the record I never open a NEF in anything other than Capture NX. From there it gets saved as a TIFF.

Zorro

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http://zorrofox4.deviantart.com/



Various lenses, SB800 & Manfrotto 190 with 460MG head

On the import dialog in LR you can chose to apply the preset "General - Zeroed" on import. This does nothing to the NEF, importing just the raw data with no brightness changes. If you set the develop setting to "None" LR does do some brightening of the photo. Weird I know but it's how it works.

I don't like to recommend other forums here but you might like to ask your question at http://www.lightroomforums.net/. They are much more experienced than me and there may be someone there who uses CaptureNX with LR.

Edit: There appears to be a thread on this very subject: http://www.lightroomforums.net/showthread.php?t=156

I've just done some searching as well. This may help you out:

http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/ ... files.html

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Nikon D80, Nikkor lenses: 35mm f1.8 G AF-S DX, 50mm f/1.8 AF D, 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G ED-IF AF-S DX, 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED AF-S VR, SB800 flash
My photos on SmugMug

Thanks for the links, Phil. I'll follow up on those.
Btw: My initial testing with ACDsee Pro 2 showed the same results: RAWs are imported ok, but after a few seconds the pic changes back to it's original version. But I didn't play around long enough to find out whether this automatic process can be stopped.

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Thomas (beware: Nikon-fanboy and moderator!) My Lens Reviews, My Pictures, My Photography Blog
D800+assorted lenses

Deinstalled ACDsee, separated the NEF/RAWs into one seperate folder labelled "originals" and forgot about handling those in LightRoom.
Now I'm only dealing with single jpgs, let LR import them into the yyyy/mm/dd folder-structure and get on with tagging and trying all the other sorting-mechanisms of LR.
Still not decided to keep it...

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Thomas (beware: Nikon-fanboy and moderator!) My Lens Reviews, My Pictures, My Photography Blog
D800+assorted lenses

Ok, finally I've found a way to at least use stacking in LR in a more productive way.
---Disclaimer: as I work now with LR 1.3.1 I cannot say whether this was already possible with 1.2---
Wha you have to do is touse an option in the import menu to seperately load RAWs and JPGs. You can then load them into the same folder, but they display separately, side by side. Then use the auto-stacking-feature to stack those pairs together. This time the jpg turns out to be (automatically) on top. But you can also put the RAW (or any other pic) on top of the stack.
So now that you have "auto-stacked the JPGs and RAWs together, you can either work on the jpeg with LR, or with CaptureNX on the RAW.
I use the slider to show the RAW, then use "show in Explorer" (as the direct start of captureNX does not directly work with the RAW) and imeediately start CNX from there. After you have worked on your RAW (and saved those changes) save again as JPG. And you're done...
Returning to LR will show the changes you've done to your JPG (but not those to your NEF). You stack the NEF back "under" the JPG and can view (and further tweak) your updated JPG in LR.

Ok, for now I think that's the way I'm gonna work with both file-types and both software-packages...
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Next thing I'm going to find out is how LR does with changes to the meta-data (like tags) of a stack: only apply to the top-image (the JPG) or also inherit those changes to the RAW/NEF???
So stay tuned...

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Thomas (beware: Nikon-fanboy and moderator!) My Lens Reviews, My Pictures, My Photography Blog
D800+assorted lenses

Yup, there are strange things that happen in LR:
- If you give a photo 1 star, only the top of the stack receives this evaluation
- But if you filter that folder for only showing photos with at least 2 stars your complete stack (valued 1 star) will disappear! Even when you assigned 3 stars to the "underlying" NEF
- and: If you filter your folder for only showing photos with at least 1 star and your underlying NEF has 0 stars you will not see it, if you "unstack" the stack. I was really dumbstruck, when I first encountered this effect. So watch out!

Just wanted to let you know, if you work with LR...

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Thomas (beware: Nikon-fanboy and moderator!) My Lens Reviews, My Pictures, My Photography Blog
D800+assorted lenses

I never knew lightroom had such a feature until I read your post, I had to google it to find out what you were on about!

If you want to view an underlying photo that "fits" the filter criteria you have set, you need to expand the stack first and then apply the filter settings.

It's all too troublesome for me, I'm probably not going to use this stacking feature much.

Having used Lightroom for some time now, what is your overall opinion of the program Thomas?

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Graham
Flickr