Being a Canon man I’ve never been tempted by Capture NX before, but the press launch last week convinced me I should give it a whirl. Despite the name, it’s a proper digital photography workflow package with tagging and powerful processing tools, and the new version is being aimed more at the mainstream than professionals.

Unfortunately though, I’ll never use it, for one simple reason.

The interface is slick and – although it’s been prone to the odd out-of-memory crash which I’m sure will be fixed by the time it’s available to buy – has some neat tricks like highlight and shadow protection, excellent auto-selection tools and a damn good spot-healing brush. For more on that, look out for a full review later this week.

But the reason I’ll never use it in anger is the fact that it doesn’t support RAW files other than Nikon’s own. So I can’t use it with my thousands of Canon shots. To be fair, Canon is guilty of the same thing with its Digital Photo Professional (DPP) application, but the difference is DPP comes free with its digital SLRs. Capture NX2, on the other hand, will be retailing at around £120.

Nikon itself clearly wasn’t awfully comfortable in answering my question about why it won’t support other RAW formats. The official response was limited to pointing out it works fine with JPEG and TIFF image files, so people can use it with shots taken on other cameras if they convert them first. But that’s hardly the point and renders the majority of the most useful tools like the highlight protection useless, or at least far less effective. NX2 doesn’t even support Adobe’s halfway house, the DNG (digital negative) format.

Digital SLR manufacturers have a powerful weapon in preventing brand defection. Most photography enthusiasts have a hefty investment in lenses and accessories that don’t fit other makes of camera. A Nikon user will tend to stay that way: the same applies to Canon accolytes.

But that logic – which Nikon seems to be applying to NX2 – doesn’t always make sense. Supporting other file formats will help people come to NX2, and Nikon will make money on the sale of the software; not supporting them won’t somehow prevent defection to Canon. If someone’s already made the decision to abandon five grand’s worth of hardware, a piece of software costing a hundred quid is neither here nor there. It’s useless as a lock-in device.

Other sectors of the software industry saw the logic of this years ago and pretty much everyone benefitted. If Nikon – as it claims – wants its software to be a worthwhile standalone tool rather than an accessory for Nikon cameras, it needs to do the same.