Other nice features
Once the images are in the browser, you can run through them at high speed, tagging the "keepers". There's only one level of tagging "tagged" or "not tagged" rather than the multiple grades (junk, poor, good, better, best) allowed in applications such as Bridge but tagging lets you quickly sort files into ones to work with and ones to ignore.
NVP also incorporates an FTP client. You'll need to set up the ftp site name, user name and password and of course you'll need internet connection but once that's all done FTP is as simple as selecting images in the browser and hitting the "FTP" button. This shows the software's roots in the professional work flow. When I shot London Fashion Week, there was a room for all the photographers to use. Within 10 minutes of the end of a show most of the photographers had scanned through their snaps, selected the good ones, captioned them and started an FTP transmit running - they can do all that within Nikon View Pro.
Not content with all the buttons on the tool bar, there are also a set of customisable function buttons. If you find yourself often opening a picture in Photoshop (rather than the recommended Nikon Capture NX) then you can assign this function to, say, F8 and with just one keystroke you can launch your favourite application. There's a shortish list of functions you can select from but all the sensible ones are there - move to a specified folder, copy to a specified folder, launch and application and FTP.
So...would you buy it?
Nikon View Pro offers some attractive features and is certainly a step up from the current version. However, in the pre release version that I viewed there are some omissions that let it down, certainly for professional users. There was some in depth questioning from both me and the other photographers in the room and it's clear that there are features that users would like that it can't provide. Some samples....
You can't sort the images on shooting time - only "modified" time. Many professionals shoot with more than one camera. Like a lot of them, I sync the clocks on all cameras before a shoot. When I come in, I simply sort the images based on the time they were taken. I can see the whole day in order regardless of which camera I took the picture with. Modified time is much less reliable - this should start out the same but can get changed even by the transfer process (so you have the order they were copied to the computer which is rather less useful than the time they were taken). One obvious way round this would be to rename the pictures when they are transferred to the computer BUT the new transfer built in to NVP is unable to rename files.
There is only tagging and not grading - you can mark a shot yes or no, but not "1", "2"..."9" etc. There are no batch processes - you can apply the IPTC template to a group of files but apparently not edit a single field on multiple files. You also can't batch rotate a group of files - and again the transfer will not allow you to rotate files as they are transferred.
Images can be viewed at "full screen", 50% and 100% size. There is no way for me to view at other zoom settings or zoom in to 200% (useful for checking critical sharpness especially on laptop screens).
Handling of jpegs and raws. Lots of cameras shoot both jpegs and raws together. If I browse through shots and delete the ones that are junk then I expect the application to delete BOTH the jpeg AND the raw. Otherwise it's double the work. It's unclear whether NVP does this or not. It is possible to decide whether you view the jpeg or the raw (or both) but they didn't appear to be handled as one image. This is certainly an area I'll be looking at when I get a review copy.
None of these kill the software but they are features that pros will require from it. Nikon have stated that this is their professional browser software but to me it seems more like a consumer product with a few pro features added on. Many of these features (such as ranking of images) are present in Nikon Capture NX and it may be that they have deliberately slimmed out of this product to give the speedy interface.
Continue reading on page 4 for the details on the competition out there and our verdict ->
Page 1: Overview |
Page 2: Performance |
Page 3: Other Features |
Page 4: Our Verdict
