8. Useful Software for the Nikon D60

Unless you only take pictures and then immediately print them directly to a PictBridge-compatible printer, somewhere along the line you’re going to need to make use of the broad array of software available for the Nikon D60. The picture-fixing options in the Retouch menu let you make only modest modifications to your carefully crafted photos. If your needs involve more than fixing red-eye, cropping and trimming, and maybe adjusting tonal values with D-lighting, you’re definitely going to want to use a utility or editor of some sort to perfect your images. After you’ve captured some great images and have them safely stored on your Nikon D60’s memory card, you’ll need to transfer them from your camera and Secure Digital card to your computer, where they can be organized, fine-tuned in an image editor, and prepared for web display, printing, or some other final destination.

Fortunately, there are lots of software utilities and applications to help you do all these things. This chapter will introduce you to a few of them. Please note that this is not a “how-to-do-it” software chapter. I’m going to use every available page in this book to offer advice on how to get the most from your D60. There’s no space to explain how to use all the features of Nikon Capture NX, nor how to tweak RAW file settings in Adobe Camera Raw. Entire books have been written about both products. This chapter is intended solely to help you get your bearings among the large number of utilities and applications available, to help you better understand what each does, and how you might want to use them. At the very end of the chapter, however, I’m going to make an exception and provide some simple instructions for using Adobe Camera Raw, to help those who have been using Nikon’s software exclusively get a feel for what you can do with the Adobe product.