I started out using Capture NX but after discovering Aperture 5 years ago, switched and never looked back. I couldn’t see any difference if the processing of the Raw image. Joe McNally loves Aperture (not saying that it is all he uses) so that is a pretty good endorsement, and he is strictly a Nikon shooter.

I shoot RAW exclusively and haven’t touched the Nikon software since I bought Aperture last year when it dropped to 80 bucks. In fact I don’t even think it’s still installed. Don’t know why some would think only the NX software would work.

I think only Capture NX is capable of interpreting the NEF’s so they match the embedded and LCD screen displayed JPEG’s exactly.

Other than that you can have some lens distortions and possibly vignetting, ( I think, it’s been a while), corrected automatically.

Absolute picture quality may be marginally better - I would get a trial and do some exhaustive comparisons for for critical quality.

There was a time when Capture One was the absolute best 3rd party convertor and ACR and Aperture lagged a little. Although Capture One is still really good the difference today if any is marginal.

For my money the workflow advantages of Aperture far out weigh any minor technical improvements in image quality. Unless you’re doing scientific image analysis or architectural work I wouldn’t bother.

My Tuppence

While I agree that only the camera manufacturer software can exactly duplicate what the camera captures as far as jpeg rendering and/or in-camera supplemental processing for RAW images … I have yet to see any software from Nikon that is conducive to a medium to high volume workflow. It is a burden to accomplish any kind of workable solution in the long term.

Secondly, while I do appreciate the overall image and tonal quality rendered by Nikon software … I was never really pleased with the color rendering offers, especially for portraiture … skin tones always seemed to lean very red/magenta. I totally realize this is a personal preference … but third party solutions seem to be better able to rectify this concern than the proprietary software … at least for my work.

All third party RAW rendering has to be reverse engineered, without the “secret sauce” for in-camera custom settings that was coded by the manufacturer … this will never allow third party options to exactly match what the camera can be adjusted to apply. In my opinion, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

All that said … the workflow benefits that options like Aperture, Lightroom and Capture 1, far exceed any possible perceived image quality expectations from the proprietary software … in fact I prefer very much the initial color rendering in Aperture over Nikon software by leaps and bounds.

As was shared earlier, there are more than a few top tier pros that utilize Aperture for their workflow … and it is more full-featured than many other available options … so yes, David, you can use Aperture from import to print and not suffer any loss in the process …

FWIW,

I started using Aperture about 3 years ago, specifically for its processing of NEF files. At that time, I was only interested in how it handled high ISO images and it beat all the opposition. I did some deep pixel peeping in many apps, over about 4 days and Aperture produced the cleanest files with the least noise.

Things have changed a little since then and ACR has made a big improvement in high-ISO, whilst perhaps still holding the edge on low-ISO, but … I don’t care because it’s a teeny difference now and I hate LR’s UI. Capture One was good, but not as good IMO as LR and Aperture. Some others were good in some areas with some images, but fell down on other images.

I can tell you that today, Aperture produces better tiffs from a Sinar DNG than Sinar’s own software (which is 100% DNG compatible). So the guys from Apple are still hard at work.

I occasionally use NX2 for lens correction, but it’s a horrible piece of software outside of that. Slow … agonisingly slow … and clunky. Hopefully Aperture 4 will bring lens correction and that will negate any need to wander off campus. :)