Spotlight On . . . NTI PhotoMaker v1

Available mainly as a program bundled with desktop PCs, notebook PCs, digital cameras and printers, NTI PhotoMaker v1 appears to run well under Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional. Unfortunately, we had some serious problems making full use of PhotoMaker v1 under Windows Vista Home Premium. Not to be confused with MicroFrontier's PhotoMaker or Direct Logic System's Easy PhotoMaker, NTI PhotoMaker is a simple digital photo project creator designed to help you choose and sort digital photos to create a slide show which can then be emailed, burned to CD, published as an HTML file or just saved as a file. After assembling the photos for a slide show you can also add narration or a music file and even opt to automatically fit music to the length of the slide show. Transition effects can be chosen to make slide changes more interesting. Basic editing is available to adjust brightness, crop, reduce red-eye and rotate photos. PhotoMaker works nicely until it's time to burn a slide show to CD or DVD when running on a Core 2 Duo processor in Windows Vista. Even after several product reinstallations we could not burn a slide show to CD or DVD. However, running PhotoMaker on a single core Pentium 4/2.8GHz Windows XP Home PC, allowed us to create and burn a small slide show as a VCD. We then tried burning a DVD of the same slide show, but PhotoMaker stalled halfway through the process. We tried reducing the already small number of photos in the slide show from 25 to 10, but the DVD burn still failed. PhotoMaker v1.0 has an intuitive user interface and lots of potential, but it needs bug fixes and compatibility updates. 2 out of 5 stars

Spotlight On . . . Nikon CaptureNX

CaptureNX is a non-destructive RAW photo processor developed specifically for Nikon by Nik Software. CaptureNX runs on Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X Tiger. Experienced digital photographers use a consistent process after every photo shoot. Copy photos from camera to computer; cull and delete the junk; tag, rank and sort; adjust white balance, brightness, color, etc., as needed; convert to TIFF or JPEG and file everything away; back up all the files; crop, adjust, alter and otherwise process selected shots. Using a consistent digital photo workflow often requires a couple of different programs to get everything done. For many serious Nikon photographers, CaptureNX is the software of choice for getting RAW photos through the crucially important initial workflow processes. I found that CaptureNX actually does a better job of handling dynamic lighting, sharpening and noise reduction than Photoshop CS2. A few problems have crept into NX which did not exist in the previous version (4.x). The Windows version is a slowpoke unless you've got a real fast dual core system with 4GB of RAM. The Mac OS X version is noticeably faster at thumbnail rendering, screen draws and editor updates among other things. I did some base measurements and found that LAB values don't seem to be converted properly to Adobe RGB. CaptureNX offers something called U Point Color Control Points which let you select image areas to enhance without having to use of masks, selections or layers. The software handles all Nikon digital SLR files (including D80 NEFs). CaptureNX has the potential to be a very good product, but the Windows version is marred by some glaring bugs and a lack of horsepower. 3 out of 5 stars