Custom Picture Controls :: Really Fun Stuff ::

I recently ran across a video that discusses using customized Picture Controls for Nikon cameras and I’ve been having some fun playing around with them. This is a really neat feature and if your body shows the option for “Manage Picture Controls” in the PHOTO SHOOTING (camera icon) menu you can try them out. Once you install a custom PC using it will be no different than using one of the default Picture Controls (Landscape, Vivid, Portrait, etc.) already on your camera. These custom PC’s work with JPG’s only, which is fine with me, so what I do is set my camera to shoot raw + JPG as Matt suggests. Bear in mind when viewing the raw files on your camera, you're actually looking at an embedded JPG (which has had the customized Picture Control applied to it), so you won't see the difference the Picture Control is making.

The point of these custom PC’s is they emulate popular film stocks (Fuji Provia, Kodak Tri-X, Agfa Optima, et al.) or create customized looks with things like color-gradients and contrast adjustments. Some of these controls make very subtle adjustments, some make very dramatic adjustments. Now, I’m not interested, personally, in debating whether or not one can actually reproduce the look of film, much less any particular film, on a digital body or how accurately any particular custom PC duplicates the look of a particular film and all that. If you want to have that sort of discussion please make your own thread, or take the discussion to someplace like DP Review and geek out over stuff like that to your little heart’s content. I’m finding some of the customized Picture Controls fun to play with and that’s why I’m making this thread. And lastly, before someone feels compelled to point out the obvious, yes; I do understand these PC's are not doing anything I couldn't do myself using PS/LR or what have you.They're just a fun, fast way to get some dramatic looks without the effort.

If you’re interested in trying this Matt Granger has a short video that will explain how to download, install and use customized Picture Controls. It’s super easy: download the PC, save it to your SD card, load the PC into your camera body, select the newly-loaded PC in the Shooting Menu like you would any other and then get to shooting.

Watch Matt’s five-minute video here: Get That Film Look With Your Nikon DSLR

You can download customized Picture Controls here (this is the site Matt mentions in his video): Nikon PC (dot) com

The Nikon.PC website displays how each of the different PC’s will affect your JPG image, with before/after shots of a lot of different subject matter (Landscapes, Still Life, Portraits) so you can gauge which Picture Controls might work with the sort of shots you take. I haven’t had enough time to experiment with many of the color-based controls yet, but I’m loving some of the more dramatic B&W conversions.

Cheers!

EDIT: A couple example photos. I was shooting hand-held but I did my best to duplicate the framing. These are straight-off-the-card JPG's; only the Picture Profile changed.
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I know you mentioned this but... I went thru the whole create your own, and played with them a year or three ago... and after the cuteness wore off, I went back to wasting time and just shoot RAW...

FredKingston said:

I know you mentioned this but... I went thru the whole create your own, and played with them a year or three ago... and after the cuteness wore off, I went back to wasting time and just shoot RAW...

Click to expand...

My philosophy is... If I'm going to process, I'm going to process the raw file. If I'm shooting raw + JPG (I never shoot soley in JPG) it's with the hope of avoid processing altogether; so I'd like the JPG to be as close to perfect as possible because as often as possible because I'm not going to spend (waste) time processing JPG's, I'll process the raw file instead.

I like some of the more contrast-y B&W conversions because from what I can tell Nikon's "Monochrome" profile desaturates the image and little else. It's also nice to have options to show people right on the back of the camera sometimes when doing portraits since most people can't seem to visualize in black and white. Then there are a couple profiles that mimic Canon bodies (with a warmer red- yellow bias) that I really like. After some tweaking one of those may be my new default (color) profile for those times I do decide to capture JPG's.

Here are a few I found interesting
note that the top section are defaults