Trying to process some concert photos in Capture 1. Some of the photos appearance almost look like oil painting. Paricularly the ones with a lot of red in them. The camera was a Nikon D70. Any ideas why this is happening?

post an example ?

Normally caused by heavy-handed noise reduction – try checking the default settings and crank it down if required (I'd advise leaving it off by default and only using it when absolutely necessary – which is much less often than regular 100%-zooming would have you believe).

Tried the noise reduction thing.. seems to help. Turned it down to zero. Much better!

Is your monitor calibarated? Too much colour saturation added in the RAW processing can also cause that effect

have you used capture one before?
are you using the correct camera profile?
the default colour noise and banding suppression are quite agressive, turn it down in the preferences not just in the detail/sharpness pane.
colour balace. this may be 'as shot', 'auto' or 'daylight etc, try changing them around to get a better result. sometimes the daylight can be too cold or too warm depending on camera profile.

For Nikon RAW (NEFs) I highly recommend using Capture NX.

It is Nikons own software and it is the only RAW processor that can read ALL the camera settings from the file.

It does an excellent job of converting them and lets you save modified NEF files containing multiple versions of the same image with completely non-destructive and reversible changes.

I do all my editing in it and rarely ever use Photoshop.

http://www.capturenx.com/en/index.html

It's remarkable the number of people who do image editing on a PC whos monitor has not been calibrated, myself included. Having got a CRT and an LCD (both expensive ones) on the same PC at teh same time, even when I've done my best to match the two by eye, dragging an image from one onto the other shows up huge differences in colour and shading.

If you use Photobox then they will send you a "Calibration Print" which you can then compare to the same image on-screen. Worked well for me as a free "by eye" calibration.

http://www.photobox.co.uk/content/quality-advice/calibration

Most monitors don't even come close to displaying all the gamut of colours your camera records.
I'm quite tempted to buy myself a proper wide-gamut monitor and a calibration device.
Even something like the HP LP2475W would make a big difference compared to what I use now.