I am fairly certain that the negative reviews of this product are not made by serious photographers. While the first version of Capture NX was slow and had some significant annoying traits (Like defaulting to the Pictures folder every time one attempted to save a file with the Save As command...which was fixed after I contacted Nikon and explained that this was a dealbreaker.), the current version is the most powerful and revolutionary photo processing software available.

This is not Photoshop - and it is not intended to be that. Photo manipulators should not spend the money on this software. However, if you are looking to process photographs in ways that mimic a good darkroom, and enable a true workflow environment, this program is what you want. It actually is quite intuitive, if you are thinking like a photographer.

The feature set is quite powerful, once you have learned to use them, and in truth that does take some time. The problem is, I believe, that their is not a huge user base at this point, so the knowledge as to how to use the program is not nearly as widely disseminated as is Photoshop. However, now that I have learned it I find it MUCH, MUCH easier to do what I want with it.

Some critically important benefits:

• Ability to work on the original NEF file without losing any information
• Versions allow one to save crops, reductions, experiments, work in progress all in the original NEF. The only thing other than the NEF you need to save are jpegs of the final product(s)
• Access to every aspect of the captured image information and Nikon's Raw processing - which frankly puts Adobe's and most everyone else's to shame

On my MacBook Pro it flies - as opposed to the last version which was not a Universal Binary. I strongly recommend this program. It will not turn bad photography into art, but it does allow someone who knows what they are doing to extract the image from the raw data as quickly and as seamlessly as I can imagine it ever will be.

I agree that previous versions of Capture really weren't worth the money. NX is.

*The only things I would like added at this point are 1) The ability to add a watermark and 2) The ability to modify/adjust the rules for upoint. Beyond these I don't really need a thing.