Nikon Picture Control Settings

[Scott_Witcher]

Hello everyone,

Thank-you for the feedback... Sorry for the tumble weed remark, last week was an extreme example of Murphy's law.

[Roger_Martin]

Originally Posted by Scott_Witcher

I have been having a problem with getting skin tones to look just the way I like them. Ultimately I would go into Photoshop and use curves adjustments to dial in the correct numbers and get the proper result. Sometimes the skin tone was quite off in some of the NEF files, so I thought I should check my camera settings so I'd have less work in post. So I did 7 self portraits holding a color chart and I tried all the picture control settings on the D300 plus the downloadable portrait and the 3 D2X settings. They look different on the camera LCD but when I opened them up in lightroom or ACR they all looked the same. Am I doing something wrong here or is Adobe going to give me the same thing to start with regardless of my picture settings???

Thank-you in advance to those who respond,
Scott

I recommend that you load two cards in a D3 and shoot both NEF and fine JPEG.
If your in camera settings are correct, you will not be able to improve the NEFs to equal the JPEGs 99% of the time with PhotoShop.
Well maybe only 98% of the time.

[Terry Zorich]

Originally Posted by Roger_Martin

I recommend that you load two cards in a D3 and shoot both NEF and fine JPEG.
If your in camera settings are correct, you will not be able to improve the NEFs to equal the JPEGs 99% of the time with PhotoShop.
Well maybe only 98% of the time.

BUT...if your 'in-camera settings' weren't perfect - and for many (most?) shooters, they RARELY are - JPG's created from NEF files will be better than in-camera JPG's 99% of the time. Well, maybe only 98%...

Here's my testimonial on the NEF/JPG subject:
Among other things, I shoot weddings. I used to shoot JPG all the time. With JPG's, I used to have to open up 4-5 files at a time and try to improve them, one file at a time. It took several hours to do all the files from an average wedding. And for shots where there was strong backlighting, I was stuck with an image that just wasn't as good as it could have been.

Now, using ACR in Lightroom or in Photoshop CS3, I can correct and convert NEF (or Canon CR2) images from a wedding in 60-90 minutes. My time is valuable, and shooting in RAW saves me a ton of time. My images look a lot better than when I was shooting in-camera JPG's. And for those shots with strong backlighting (for example), the additional exposure latitude of RAW files means I can export two or more JPG versions of a given shot and create a composite shot that simply wouldn't have been possible with a JPG.

Here's another reason I believe RAW files are better than JPG's: Non-destructive editing. With RAW files, you can always go back to the original, unedited version. And you can do this without having to store multiple versions of files. To do this with JPG files, you'd have to archive the original JPG's somewhere and load the original version.

But perhaps the single best reason to use RAW files is the ability to set the color balance AFTER the shot is taken. When shooting JPG's, you'd better have your white balance pretty darned close in the camera. But with RAW files, you don't have to think about white balance before each shot is taken. If you've ever shot a wedding, for example, you'll realize that you simply don't have time to set the white balance before taking each of your ~300+ photos. (And you'll also know that setting a custom white balance is only good until you move to a different location.)

Shoot RAW. Improve your workflow and your final images.

[James Haba]

Nikons Capture 2 is just what you are looking for. I don't think any other program will see the special adjustments made with those settings.

I use this method all of the time and can I just say . . sweet.

[Terry Zorich]

As I understand it, Capture 2 will convert NEF files to JPG's, but it isn't going to do what the OP was looking for.

[James Haba]

Originally Posted by Terry Zorich

As I understand it, Capture 2 will convert NEF files to JPG's, but it isn't going to do what the OP was looking for.

If he is looking to display the raw files with the "settings" that Nikon provides, correct any color/ white balance problems, adjust for contrast brightness, adjust picture sharpness, adjust saturation of a specific color, resize and then convert the image to sRGB . . . . capture will do it all . . . and in my opinion do it better than photoshop etc.

It is not the fastest program by far . . . photoshop is still very useful however because it does functions that NX 2 just does not have.

[Terry Zorich]

I got my threads crossed; ignore my previous post!