Today I have been working in NC and as I have been getting more involved in the so called digital realm, my own post processing is also something to learn and study. Part of the learning is on the technical side which I generally do not have the patience for. I used to feel that it was a penalty for not "getting it right when in the moment". Although today I have found that it is nice to take an image that you made, and make it into something still within your vision, but uniquely different than what you "saw". I have located prior the ability to save "templates" of often used tasks within NC such as saving output to half size.

 Normally I would have just typed in 1000 x 1504 (or half the image size of 2,000 X 3008). Once you type this in once , you can click on Settings> Size/Resolution and click on Save. Then all you must do when you want to use this 50% size reduction is to locate it on the toolbar you can click on Settings> Size/Resolution> Thenameofyourfile.(Example you can click on Settings> Size/Resolution >50%). The next thing that I found that I enjoy as I love B&W was a small tool in pallete 3, called Markers. Now let us spend some time remembering how we use to do it. Open a photo, and save as a copy, then open the copy and alter, modify, sharpen etc. Save this copy. Don't rename it or you will spend for ever trying to locate the original after you learn something new in the digital darkroom, yeah right that has NEVER happened! Using the old method you could have 3,4, or possibly more images on your HDD (hard disk drive) of the same image with different presentations. Ekkkk what a damn mess.

 Some people will say but I did that in Photoshop with layers! Well yes and no, you still would have kept the original, and then all the layers added to the copy add space, and try going back to a place you were at with a photo 3 years ago if there were many steps... I have layers and layers on some of my panos! takes me 5 minutes to figure out what scheme I had used in my workflow. Lets get back to tool pallet 3 and the tool called Markers. Markers is like a bookmark you insert during processing a photo at any later time you can click on the bookmark and "see" what you had at that time. OMG You mean I dont need 4 copies of the same image?! What is really nice is that by saving these bookmarks or Markers, with the image, you can very quickly return to the "Original File" Yes the only one! And locate the exact representation of the image, within the original image, without increasing the file size of the original one significantly! NEF is an excellent tool for anyone, especially the people who have not "mastered" everything photographic, as well as those who think they have

... Sniff sniff, I smell a debate!

Thomas