New Nikon Workflow with Lightroom

Question

Just thought I would share my new workflow with everyone, in case anyone is not happy with the raw conversion provided by Lightroom and would rather use Capture NX to do the raw conversion on their files, but still use Lightroom for cataloging and ranking their photos (as well as exporting for web, etc).
1. Copy all photos from memory card into a folder on your computer.
2. Import the photos from your filesystem, using the "Copy photos to a new location and import" option. This is so you can work with a copy of the original, rather than the original.
3. Do your normal process for choosing which photos you would like to take the time to process, and which you would like to just throw away. I use the pick/rejected flags for mine.
4. Filter your photos by flag status, so only the picks are showing.
5. Export your picks to a temporary folder somewhere. This is where you will do all your Capture NX processing. I call this folder "Lightroom to Capture Transfer". You want to choose the option to export the original file. I created an export preset called "Export For Capture NX" with these settings in it to make it easier in the future.
6. Open the "Lightroom to Capture Transfer" folder in Capture NX using the built in file browser, and do all your raw adjustments to exposure compensation, white balance and noise reduction. All of which I find works better in Capture than in Lightroom. Save all your changes back into the same NEF file since Capture can save to the NEF format. Remember this file is just a copy of the original so we don't need to worry about making changes to our original raw file here. NOTE: Do NOT apply any sharpening here inside Capture since sharpening should be done at the end of your workflow. I shoot with my camera sharpening set to "None". If you haven't done this, you should set all your photos to sharpening "None" as part of your batch process in step 8 below.
7. Set up a watched folder in Lightroom called "Lightroom Auto Imported Photos", and enable Auto Import.
8. In Capture, create a batch process you can use to convert all your adjusted raw NEFs to tiff format. You will point the batch export to your Lightroom watched folder. As Capture batch converts all your raws to tiff, Lightroom will be importing them into your catalog.
9. Now you should have a folder inside your Lightroom catalog called "Lightroom Auto Imported Photos". Open that folder, select ALL the photos in the folder and hit "P" to mark them all as picks. Trust me on this one. =)
10. Now within Lightroom, drag all the photos at once into the folder containing your imported photos from step 2. You should see all your tiffs beside all your raw NEFs. And since you have a filter turned on to only show your picks in this folder, all your other non pick original raw files will be hidden.
11. Again, select ALL the photos in this folder and "Stacking -> Auto Stack by Capture Time." In the dialog, drag the slider down to 1 second. This should for the most part stack all the same nefs with the corresponding tiffs. Unless you were doing a ton of burst shooting. In which case you can manually stack them. Lightroom seems to always put the original NEFs on the top of the stack.
12. Select all the photos again, and "Stacking -> Move Down in Stack". This will bring all your processed tiffs to the top of the stack, and hide the nefs. This is exactly what you want. From here on out, you will be working on the tiffs.
13. Do any final processing to your photos inside Lightroom. Saturation, cropping, spot removal, etc. I also do all my key-wording here. NOTE: I do not do ANY sharpening inside Lightroom because I've found the sharpening just doesn't do it for me personally. I will do all sharpening later in Photoshop after I export them from Lightroom. Your mileage may vary.
14. Once my photos look the way I want, I then export them to JPEG. I have set up a Photoshop droplet fo

Answer 1

14. Once my photos look the way I want, I then export them to JPEG. I have set up a Photoshop droplet for Lightroom that will then do all my sharpening after export.
That's it! I know it sounds like a lot of steps, but once you've done it a couple of times it goes by really quick. I'm really loving most things about Lightroom in terms of its cataloging and export options. But the image quality of the Lightroom raw conversions just isn't there yet. I've found by integrating both Capture NX and Lightroom I can get top quality results while still gaining advantage of Lightroom's many nice features. It took me a few days of exploration and experimentation to nail down the optimal workflow for my needs. Hopefully this will help some others out and maybe give them some ideas of their own toward a better workflow.
Please feel free to share your thoughts or own experience on all of this.
Thanks to Tony Long for his suggestion in this thread, which caused me to go on a search for the optimal Lightroom/Capture workflow: http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?7@@.3bc719df/3
If you are interested in taking a look at the final output of the workflow listed above, please look here: http://photos.unsavory.com/p634883589
Cheers everyone!
-©aine