Complete Guide to the Nikon D200- P23 pptx

V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 661 Gray Point if you want to click in the image on a neutral area and have color casts removed. • Apply exposure compensation. Select Show Tool Palette 2, if necessary, from the View menu. Click the Apply button for Advanced Raw (D). This opens a tool area that allows you to change a number of camera settings (Exposure Compensation, Sharpening, Tone Compensation, Color Mode, Saturation, and Hue Adjustment [see note at end of section]). Drag the slider or enter a value directly to the right of the slider. Note that you’re not actually changing the exposure, though it will look like it. What you’re doing is adjusting the linearity curve by which data is taken from the raw file and converted to pixels. If you “increase exposure” you may see noise become worse as the low values are shifted into visible range. If you “decrease exposure” you may see posterization F 158 of highlight data as Capture tries to deal with fitting too few captured values into a larger portion of the exposure. • Work with dozens of other tools. Color Balance, Noise Reduction, Size/Resolution, and Vignette Control are amongst the other tools that allow you to manipulate the NEF image directly. The entire list is actually quite impressive, though Nikon has managed to strew these tools willy nilly across palettes. Don’t worry; we’re going to go through each tool individually, so that was just a broad sweep through what you can do. Note: Nikon Capture is not a full-featured image editing program. It has a nice set of tools that allow you to make most of the changes to how the raw sensor data is processed into an image, but it is not a substitute for a full-featured product, such as Adobe Photoshop CS2. Personally, I use Nikon Capture only for its unique tools (camera control, interpolation of NEF images, and post-image manipulation 158 Posterization: gaps in data in a tone ramp. Shows as gaps in histogram. V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 662 of exposure and white balance on NEF images), and use Photoshop CS2 for almost everything else. Note: Changes you make aren’t permanent if you save your work as a NEF file. Nikon Capture saves the tool settings but doesn’t change the original data. If you save your work as a TIFF or JPEG, obviously the effects of your changes are permanently embedded in the image data that’s saved. Individual Palette Tools Since many of the help file messages in the Capture Editor are essentially “the widget tool allows you to control the widget,” I’m going to step through each of the tools one by one and try to put a bit more meat on the table than Nikon did. First up is the Curves tool. We have four primary things we set with this tool (plus we can do the same for individual channels): • Black point. The black triangle on the bottom of this control allows you to set what will be “black” in the output. If you had used the full exposure range of the camera, it would normally be 0, but as you can see on V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 663 this example (sand dune in Death Valley), there wasn’t much scene contrast, so I can pull the black level all the way up to 106. Normally you’ll pull the black level up to the bottom point of your histogram data. You can also use the black dropper icon to set the point by sampling from the image. • White point. Like the black point, but now we’re working the right hand (white triangle). Normally you’d pull this down to just above the top of your histogram data. You can also use the white dropper icon to set the point by sampling from the image. • Gamma. The middle gray triangle is the gamma point, which controls the definition of what middle gray is. You don’t move this control as often as the others, but sometimes you’ll enter a value slightly larger than 1.0 to boost midrange values on dark images. You can also use the gamma dropper icon to set the mid-point by sampling from the image. • The “Curve.” The straight line that goes from the black point up to the top of the graph above the white point doesn’t have to be straight. You can click on any point on the line and then use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move that point up, down, left, or right. What you’re changing is the relationship between input value and output value. By default, an increase of 1 in the input value is an increase of 1 in the output value. When you start changing any of the options in this control, you break that relationship and create a new one. In general, many D200 images look a bit “better” with a very slight upwards curve in the upper highlights. There are more controls and many more nuances in the Curves control than is fitting to describe in detail on a book about the D200. If you’re doing more than I’ve just described, you’re considerably deeper into image processing than we’ve got room for in this already long tome. V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 664 Next on our list is the Color Balance control. The temptation for novices is to use this control for image corrections because it seems simple (brightness, contrast, red, green, blue) and sort of mimics what they’re used to on their televisions. My word of advice: leave it closed and inactive. These adjustments are crude, and there are better ways to do every one of them. Brightness and contrast are better controlled with Curves, and the colors are better handled by both Curves and the LCH setting, sometimes both. V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 665 The Unsharp Mask is next on the palette. Nikon Capture uses different values and definitions for this tool than does the Adobe Photoshop Unsharp Mask filter (this is true for a few other image editing programs, as well). Here’s how the two compare: Nikon Name Nikon Range Adobe Name Adobe Range Intensity 0-100% Amount 0-500% Halo Width 0-100% Radius 0-20 pixels Threshold 0-255 Threshold 0-255 Example: A setting of 20%, 5%, and 0 in Nikon Capture is approximately the same as a setting of 100%, 1 pixel, and 0 in Photoshop. (If you don’t remember what each item does, go back and re-read the section on Sharpening earlier in the eBook [see “Sharpening” on page < H328>]). I’m not a big fan of Capture’s sharpening, though some like it a lot. It definitely has a slightly different “texture” to the effect than does Photoshop’s similar tool. As you’ll discover in “Other Manipulation Tools,” I suggest that you get a dedicated sharpening tool, as you’ll get more control over the process. V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 666 The D-Lighting tool is the replacement for DEE in previous versions of Capture (Dynamic Exposure Extender). D-Lighting is a second way of altering exposures in Capture (Curves was the first; there will be more). In a way, D-Lighting is a method of building a curve that deals with just the shadow area, just the highlight area, or both. (Note that you have to click the Better Quality radio button to see all the controls in this tool.) This control is cruder than Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight adjustment, but still effective. Usually you’ll set the Highlight adjustment to 0 and then try dragging the Shadow adjustment control. Moreover, I find that you can really only effectively use this control for shadows or highlights, not both simultaneously (if that’s what you need to do, use Photoshop’s controls). Without D-Lighting With D-Lighting Note: It pays to have Curves open and visible when you’re playing with DEE, as the histogram will be updated and provide you additional feedback. V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 667 Capture does an excellent job of resizing images, if you need that (though it only goes to 200%). Indeed, some people think that it does a slightly better job than Photoshop’s bicubic resampling. First, enter the dots per inch for your printer (most inkjet users should enter 240); note that before you enter the dots per inch, you may need to change the width and height units to something other than pixels. Then enter a new value for Width or Height. The Scale value will tell you how much the image had to be scaled to meet your demand. Note: To cancel a resizing, click on the " icon for the tool and select Reset to 100%. V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 668 The Bird’s Eye option isn’t really a control, but a navigational tool. When you’re zoomed in on an image it shows you the location of your zoom and allows you to drag the red box that shows your current location to another place on the overall image. Information tells you the position and value of the pixel at the current cursor position on the main image. That’s useful, but there’s an even more useful ability: if you want to compare two (or more) points, click on the crosshair icon, click on a point in the image, and now as you move elsewhere in the image you’ll be able to see how the values differ: A little crosshair icon is placed along with a matching number on the image so you can remember which point is which (right-hand image, above). V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 669 Color Booster is a saturation control, but with a bit of a difference. If you select a Target Type of People, skin tone colors won’t be boosted but others will. If you select Nature, all colors are boosted. New in recent versions of Capture is Photo Effects. Like a number of Capture’s tools, it’s actually quite versatile, but not well explained or self explanatory. First, Effect allows you to change the image to monochrome. The thing that throws some folk is that Tinted doesn’t seem to tint the image (hint: you have to then use the color sliders at the bottom of that tool). The top slider is Brightness, the bottom three sliders V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 670 are the equivalent to Photoshop’s Color Saturation tool and adjust the complimentary color spectrums (Cyan/Red, Magenta/Green, and Yellow/Blue). Note that you can use these color sliders even if you don’t choose an effect. Egads, we’ve now got dueling brightness and color controls! That’s one reason why I suggested earlier to use a default of all tools turned off. Only turn on those you use to change an image. It’s very easy to get multiple tools turned on that make similar (or even the same) adjustment to an image, which can make it tough to make subtle adjustments. Our last tool on the first palette is Red Eye Correction. F 159 You’ve got two choices: let Capture do it automatically, or click on the eyes and let Capture do it automatically. The difference is that in one case you help Capture find the eyes (it might correct something small and red that isn’t an eye), in the other you trust Capture to do the right thing. As good as the all-automatic version is I suggest that you always use Click on eyes. 159 Okay, the UI designer in me has to make a comment. When you turn this tool on it is initially off. Yep, it’s got two “off” controls. It really seems like Nikon doesn’t have a real UI designer working on this program. The “wizard behind the curtain” is doing all kinds of interesting and wonderful image alterations for us, but telling him what to do and when to undo is a lesson in disorganized user interface. [...]... it’s underexposed in the lower areas (note the black bar up the left side of the histogram) The horizon line is also a bit off (downhill left, though the hills behind the falls are a bit misleading) I’ve got a lot to do to make this into a usable shot Normally, you’d work with the Curves tool to “fix” the tonal range adjustment of the histogram Instead, I’m going to use the LCH tool for this image and... few other colors Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 685 V1.03 I’m going to use the Hue and Chroma adjustments in the LCH Tool to fix them (I’ll go a little further than I normally would just to make the change obvious): You should see that top of the sky is more blue than before (though still not quite right) and that I’ve toned down the bright orange of the clouds a bit I’m going to. .. Photoshop uses to open NEF images instead of Photoshop’s native raw converter If you want to use Photoshop’s converter instead of Nikon s, you have two choices: • Choose the converter to use in the popup in the Photoshop Open dialog (Photoshop CS and earlier), or the Open As dialog in Photoshop CS2 You want to select the Camera Raw option • Remove the Nikon plug-ins Remove the plug-ins with Nikon in their... one or the other to use (Curves or LCH), not both, as they interact, and you can get lost in the sub effects they have on each other 160 Yes, I know I said four parts The lightness control now comes in two forms: Overall Lightness and Color Lightness I guess no one at Nikon wanted to rename it the LLCH tool Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 675 V1.03 If the first part of the tool looked... job H Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 672 V1.03 If you took a dust reference photo, here’s the tool that allows you to use it Click on the Change button and point to the dust reference photo you want to use This function sometimes takes a long time to process And you’ll sometimes see the downside: occasionally you’ll get a message like this: See: you still have to clean your sensors... Grid Lines from the Image menu): Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 684 V1.03 Now, let’s straighten Pick Straighten from the Rotate submenu on the Image menu You’ll see a dialog: Click the Draw Level button, then click and drag a line along something you want straightened Capture automatically enters the rotation amount in the dialog Click the Okay button to complete the action You’ll... opened this section, you can see that I had a couple of other images that had the same poor look I could save the settings I made to this image and then apply them against the other images and get similar results Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 687 V1.03 Photoshop NEF Filter Nikon supplies a NEF import filter for Photoshop with the D200 As noted earlier, it is installed when PictureProject... put all the information about the Capture tools together by walking through a NEF image I took on a recent trip with my D200 I’m going to pick an image that is a little unusual so that I can show off how some of the tools can 161 make short work of an otherwise tough image F I generally start in Nikon View, using my folder structure to quickly get to the image I want to work with (look at the title... balance, for example the NEF filter doesn’t (it only allows rotation, gross white balance changes, and exposure compensation changes) For most settings, the plug-in simply looks at the EXIF header information to see what the camera settings were and uses them to interpret the data when it opens the file Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 688 V1.03 If you use Nikon s Photoshop NEF filter... at the bottom of the display The sky has a little more brightness to it, revealing some minor detail we couldn’t see before But the color is still something that looks like it came from a Crayola box If you look carefully at the jungle greens, you should see that there’s a lot of orange down there, too I suspect a White Balance problem, so we’re off to that too next Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the . sliders at the bottom of that tool). The top slider is Brightness, the bottom three sliders V1.03 Thom Hogan’s Complete Guide to the Nikon D200 Page 670 are the equivalent to Photoshop’s Color. got a lot to do to make this into a usable shot. Normally, you’d work with the Curves tool to “fix” the tonal range adjustment of the histogram. Instead, I’m going to use the LCH tool for. D200 Page 673 If you took a dust reference photo, here’s the tool that allows you to use it. Click on the Change button and point to the dust reference photo you want to use. This function