Nikon's ViewNX

I recently discovered that Nikon now has a software product called View NX. It appears they added this product in October, and in my opinion it fills a major gap in the consumer level RAW workflow. At least for Nikon shooters. If you shoot RAW the most painful part of the workflow is the conversion from RAW to some other format. And if you have to adjust anything - say, white balance - it can become really painful. If you use Photoshop Elements, it becomes really daunting because you have to view and edit each image, one by one. There may be some short cuts, but they only lessen the pain a little.

Enter ViewNX. It is a RAW viewer and a companion product to CaptureNX. Best of all, it is a free download from Nikon's site. They have a Mac and PC version. (I just checked the new version of their site and it is not easy to find the download now, so you need the link above.) ViewNX lets you view your .NEF files in thumbnail format. It has basic controls that let you adjust white-balance and exposure compensation while viewing the thumbnail, or you can launch a utility to do some fine tuning.

What makes this so great is that you can see all of your .NEF files at once and make basic compensations right there. You can select more than one image, make an adjustment and it is applied to all selected. Then, when you are satisfied with your files, you can select multiple files and convert them to .jpg or .tiff format. That's right, you can batch process your RAW files and you don't have to spend a dime to do it.

Now this product won't compete with Lightroom and the likes. But it beats the other free RAW processors that I've run across hands down and definitely a time saver for any basic Nikon workflow.