My .02:

One of the great things about shooting raw is the ability to forget about in-camera settings and just shoot.

Its easy enough to set up camera calibration profiles and presets in Lightroom, to get different looks - it has a lot more flexibility than your camera has.

In my opinion, what's missing in Lightroom in this regard is sophisticated auto(intelligent) styles, although the auto-tone feature is next best thing.

My advice: Learn to use Lightroom and forget about your in-camera settings.

More free advice: I set up my camera settings to optimize my ability to assess inherent color and tone at the endpoints of the histogram (basically, neutral profile with pumped saturation).

More often than not, my pictures look better in Lightroom after just the default settings are applied. I never change camera settings anymore (other than for basic exposure...).

Rob

What modifications did you do in the camera to the Nikon Profiles that you can't duplicate in ACR?

Try Camera Landscape with saturation to +12, sharpening - Amount = 70, Radius = 1.6, Detail = 25, Masking = 30.  For D Lighting you will have to adjust Fill and/or Exposure/Brightness.   These are just suggested starting points.  I am playing around with these for my D700.

In addition to the above try clicking the Auto button in the ACR basic panel,  then reset contrast to 25 and adjust brightness to the value you need for the image - leave the sharpening and saturation as listed above. 

Hard to tell how far off you are without screen shots but screen shots might make it worse since I have confirmed proof many times over that what you see in your browser window is not necessarily what I see in my browser window regardless of who calibrated their monitor how and the theory of how you or I think things are supposed to work and are working versus how they are actually working...

Anyway, if you want to avoid having to figure out all the ISOs your camera is capable of producing in auto-ISO mode, just use a plugin like:

- BulkDevelop: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/bulk-develop (to apply luminance noise reduction based on ISO and exposure setting)

- CollectionPreseter (to apply develop and/or metadata presets based on whatever criteria you can define as a collection)

Rob

Maybe you need to take one step at a time to determine the settings required in Lightroom to duplicate NX2.  I have not tried to duplicate D-Lighting of NX2 in ACR (Adobe Camera RAW - I use CS5).  If you like the Nikon Colors, you don't need to use Adobe's DNG Profile Editor or X-Rite Passport software to generate a custom profile.  First shoot an image with the camera paramenters all at nominal, D-Lighting off,  and the Nikon Profile you want - you mentioned Landscape.  Open the NEF file in Lightroom with all parameters set to nominal and select the Camera Landscape profile - you may need to turn off lens correction in Lightroom if the camera did not do any lens correction.  This should be a very close match to what you get from the camera.  You can use this NEF file in both Capture NX2 and Lightroom - modify the Picture Control profile in NX2 and then see what you have to do in Lightroom to match the change.  If you increase saturation in NX2 Picture Control by +1, then increase satruation in Lightroom by +12 to +15.  If you increase contrast in NX2 by +1, change contrast in Lightroom from +25 to +45 and decrease Saturation by -5.  I don't know if anyone has generated a table of settings in Lightroom to match NX2 Picture Control Settings for Contrast, Saturation, Sharpness, and Hue (values of -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3) , but that would be very useful in doing what you requested. 

Cristiano,

I have no experience with D3X (nor D3), but I have extensive experience with D300 (in both NX2 and Lightroom).

My experience is that NX2 tends to render shadows with less color, and highlights with more color.

Other than that, the color differences between the two are primarily due to differences in handling tone, and of course camera settings that NX2 sees and Lightroom doesn't.

Note: One big thing is active d-lighting. To isolate the more "intrinsic" differences, start by turning active-d-lighting and custom picture settings off - there may be others on the D3X I am not aware of... Also, color noise reduction is always on in NX2 (there is no way to turn it off), and what Nikon calls "Color Noise Reduction" is more like Luminance noise reduction in Lightroom.

PS - I find the NxToo Lightroom plugin helps to straddle the fence.

My opinion: I usually like the Lightroom rendering better because of (in addition to superior noise reduction...) the richer looking shadows, which sometimes need to be tamed using split-toning. However, its one of my ongoing challenges in Lightroom to have rich, saturated, detailed highlights, when desired.

How are things going with the DNG profile editor? - I usually prefer my tweaked versions of the profiles over the Lightroom provided defaults. I wish I could customize based on luminance as well as saturation and hue, but still, 2/3 is better than 0/3...

Good luck,

Rob

I *think* one of the driving forces in Vit's profile creation software was the need to adjust color based on luminance that is missing from the DPE (and X-rite), and may be one of the key differences in NX2 vs. Lightroom rendering.

Hi Cristiano,

Thanks for reporting.

People use NxToo in a wide variety of ways. I use it mostly to put finishing touches on Lightroom processed images, but some people use it so they can take advantage of Lightroom's DAM and other features yet process raws exclusively with NX2, still others use it just to extract previews for Lightroom instead of shooting raw+jpeg...

If you have found the limits of the DPE then you are well on your way... - I shot a 24 color chart and applied it to my favorite Lightroom profiles to get started, then I refined them over time (still am refining them) by loading various images into DPE and tweaking. I have also created a couple variations with different tone curves...

Vit is my hero (Noel's too I think). He sent me a profile so I can process Canon S5 raws (with the help of the CHDK firmware hack) in Lightroom and have right colors. He is truly "the man" when it comes to profiles.

I don't think Adobe is planning to attend much more to camera settings in Lr4 (paraphrasing Eric Chan), but there will no doubt be other compelling features. Dunno if there will be an NX3 to compete.

Cheers and all,

Rob

Cristiano, take a look at these images

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RL8EN3L0

I downloaded a raw test image from www.imaging-resource.com site and developed it with both NX2 and ACR using Camera Standard profile from Adobe

Files in this archive are:

D3XhSLI0100.thumb.jpg - jpeg image embeded in the nef file (standard picture style, sRGB)

D3XhSLI0100_NX2_Standard.jpg - image developed with NX2

D3XhSLI0100_ACR_CS.jpg - image developed with ACR

For me, all of them look very similar. Indeed, there is less diference between ACR and NX2 image than between NX2 an in-camera image !

Hm ...

I'm a Canon user (and not a serious photographer like you), and I'm confused with Active D-Light settings in NX2

So, when I open mentioned test image from imaging-resource site with NX2, I have no Active D-lighting option under Camera settings in the Edit list. Exif tag in nef says Active D-Lighting was off

When I open your _DX30026.NEF, I have Active D-lighting option under Camera settings in the Edit list. And the file has 2 exif tags connected with this:  Active D-Lighting off and Active D-Lighting mode unchanged

And here is the interesting thing: when I select Active D-lighting off in NX2, shadows are darker than when I select Unchanged. And setting Low gives the same shadows as Unchanged. Do you know whay is this? I presume that you had Active D-Lighting in camera set to low, then you opened this nef with NX2, changed active d-lighting to off and saved it

However, developing this nef with NX2 and ACR gives me similar result under this conditions:

- NX2: everything at default, except Active D-Lighting changed to Off and Camera & Lens Correction turned off

- ACR: default settings - exposure 0, blacks 5, brightness 50, contrast 25, medium contrast tone curve (as it was described several times), profile Camera landscape ...

However, there are some differences - shadows are slightly brighter with ACR than with NX2. It's a known issue that with this profile type and size shadows can't be matched very accurately. That said, there is nothing specially wrong with it - if you use different settings for D-Lighting or change some other parameter, you also get different result - there is nothing 'correct' or 'wrong' with that ... Another thing - upper 0.25 EV of histogram is cut off with this profile, that can lead to highlights blown slightly earlier, which is also known issue. These issues are known to people from Adobe and will be fixed in the future. But the rest of this picture looks very similar in NX2 and ACR