Nikon Picture Control Settings

[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

[Scott_Witcher]

wow, look at that tumble weed go by... Does anyone have an answer for me???

[LarryRyder]

I don't believe anything except Nikon capture will preserve any settings except white balance and I am not sure if all the 3rd party RAW applications even preserve white balance. I rarely shoot RAW because of this, I try to nail it in camera and don't like starting over and I am too cheap to buy Capture.

[Dennis_Vied]

Wow, tumbleweeds, huh?

I think what you're seeing is the default settings of LR and ACR. They will attempt to correct to what they "think" is the correct white balance. You can adjust these settings as you like, but the default may not be good for all circumstances.

I would not put any store in how they look on the LCD, except to see that the histogram shows proper exposure. As good as the new LCDs are, I would only trust what I see on my "trusted" monitor. That's basically why I always shoot RAW, as I can adjust to a satisfactory WB.

[MichaelMoenning]

Nikon's Capture NX2 will import your camera settings and adjustments and render a preview image that reflects the settings from the Camera at the time of image capture. Adobe and other RAW converters will not import the camera settings and adjustments and therefore the NEFs are opened with a neutral starting point.

HTH and sorry about the tumbleweeds!

M

[Terry Zorich]

I believe the Picture Styles are applied to the embedded JPG which is used for playback on the camera's LCD screen. As others have mentioned here, Adobe's software apparently does not make use of those settings.

This place is quite deserted, unfortunately. I pop in every week or so, but there's so little going on.

[billsstills]

when I shoot with either my D200/300 I shoot straight jpegs then I download them onto my laptop and drag them into an external hard drive... I take the external hard drive to my new main computer and I can see the photos.
All of my photos look great, warm straight out of the camera then I may edit a couple to use for the internet whether for my web site or display here.
If I open them in any Photoshop platform they immediately look dull... If I open them with the crap(super slow) NX2 they look fine. Re-sizing photos here is done with elements 2.0 rather than PS3 for fast easy workflow but regardless it's a give and take experiment to successfully use any post software regardless of NEF or JPEG/TIFF.

Even though this place is a little slow I still get quality feedback I may not get anywhere else.


Bill.