Nikon Picture Control (just not satisfied).

M

M.Hinch

Senior Member
Is there anyone else like myself, just not satisfied with the preprogramed picture control settings? Have you tweeked any of there individual settings to your liking? Any suggestions? Planning on spending a weekend playing around until I can come up with likable setting for each, (landscape, portrait, natural, and bold.)

Michael
 
J

Joseph Bautsch

New member
Michael - In order for the in camera picture controls to work you either have to be shooting in jpeg or down loading the shots to a Nikon post processing program. Eduard is giving good advice. The in camera picture controls are very limited in capacity and scope. And that may be the source of your frustration. Shooting in RAW then using one of the third party post processing programs will give you the maximum benefit of digital shooting.
 
G

goz63

Senior Member
Shooting in RAW gives you the most flexibility and in my opinion safety as well. You can spend all day tweaking and playing with a photo and then save it, but it does not over write the original, it creates a copy so you always have a "digital negative" to go back to if you want to do something else. Even the areas it does change can be reversed by going back to the original settings. You also don't get compression loss with RAW files so you will have better image quality and less noise. JMHO
 
L

LensWork

Senior Member
When I got my first D300, I shot a lot of test shots before ever shooting any paying job with it. I shot color checker charts, zone system scales, etc, with every variable of the included Picture Control settings looking for the combination that would yield the the most faithful color saturation, widest tonal range, best shadow and highlight detail. After all of these test shots I found that starting with the Neutral Picture Control with the following settings, gave me the base results that I was looking for:

Sharpening: +5
Contrast: +1
Brightness: +1
Saturation: +1
Hue: 0

I only shoot in raw, and I use the above settings (saved in-camera as "Custom" Picture Control) for virtually all my shooting. This provides me with a good starting point from which I then can make any necessary adjustments needed on an image-by-image basis in NX2, but this "Custom" setting is a good base for most of my images.
 
R

Ranie

Senior Member
LensWork said:
When I got my first D300, I shot a lot of test shots before ever shooting any paying job with it. I shot color checker charts, zone system scales, etc, with every variable of the included Picture Control settings looking for the combination that would yield the the most faithful color saturation, widest tonal range, best shadow and highlight detail. After all of these test shots I found that starting with the Neutral Picture Control with the following settings, gave me the base results that I was looking for:

Sharpening: +5
Contrast: +1
Brightness: +1
Saturation: +1
Hue: 0

I only shoot in raw, and I use the above settings (saved in-camera as "Custom" Picture Control) for virtually all my shooting. This provides me with a good starting point from which I then can make any necessary adjustments needed on an image-by-image basis in NX2, but this "Custom" setting is a good base for most of my images.
Click to expand...


The way I understand is when you shoot RAW, whatever picture control settings you made to your camera, it wont matter. Unless you shoot JPEG+RAW where in the settings you made will affect the JPEG file but not the RAW file.
 
Eduard

Eduard

Super Mod
Staff member
Super Mod
Ranie said:
The way I understand is when you shoot RAW, whatever picture control settings you made to your camera, it wont matter. Unless you shoot JPEG+RAW where in the settings you made will affect the JPEG file but not the RAW file.
Click to expand...

Like most manufacturers, Nikon extends the EXIF information in a proprietary manner. The Camera Control settings are stored in these un-published EXIF fields - even in RAW files. The only software product that reads them and can apply them automatically to your RAW files is Nikon's Capture NX2.
 
R

Ranie

Senior Member
Eduard said:
Like most manufacturers, Nikon extends the EXIF information in a proprietary manner. The Camera Control settings are stored in these un-published EXIF fields - even in RAW files. The only software product that reads them and can apply them automatically to your RAW files is Nikon's Capture NX2.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the heads-up there Eduard. Im not aware of that.
 
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