Is there a good workflow to have ViewNX do lens correction and then simply output new RAW file?
The great thing about the jpg options in most cameras (well, at least Nikon) is that they include the appropriate lens corrections. If you use RAW, however, you have to apply lens distortion corrections yourself.
As we know, Aperture sadly has no lens correction built-in. You can add the PTLens plugin but that is an external plugin which means that if you apply it, Aperture writes a new TIFF file with the correction baked in. If you also want to do some image corrections such as saturation, white balance, etc..., you should do that first while the image is still in raw format. But if you also want to do some cropping and straightening, you need to do that AFTER PTLens because the plugin assumes it is working with an original image. So then you must wait for the plugin work to be done and then apply final cropping and straightening. If you then need to make a change to saturation or highlights or whatever, you have to go all the way back to square one, then re-run the plugin which saves another TIFF file and then redo the cropping and straightening.
If you are dealing with a couple of images, that is not a big deal. But if you have a set of 100+ images, this becomes incredibly tedious.
After doing a little bit of research, it appears that Nikon's ViewNX should be able to apply the lens correction and save out a new .nef raw file. I could then bring that into Aperture and do all standard correction the usual way. I tried to do this but it seems that ViewNX is incredibly clumsy and crumbles very quickly under the weight of any large number of raw files. It has frozen my machine with a spinning "Processing" message numerous times even though I did not ask it to "process" anything.
Does anyone have a good workflow to automate this lens correction process over a large (150) number of files in ViewNX? Or is there a better way to do this?
I suppose I could just run PTLens first and then simply do everything on the TIFF files but I hate losing possibly critical information when it comes to lifting shadow details etc later on.
Thank you for any help.
Bo
iMac 24", OSX 10.8.2, Aperture 3.4.x, Nikon D600 nef files, ViewNX 2.6.x
Safari-OTHER, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1)