Complete Guide to the Nikon D200- P23 pptx

Gray Point if you want to click in the image on a neutral area and have color casts removed.. This opens a tool area that allows you to change a number of camera settings Exposure Compe

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 posterizationF

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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

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Posterization: gaps in data in a tone ramp Shows as gaps in histogram

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

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

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

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

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

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%

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)

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

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

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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

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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

In the second tool palette, we have an additional set of options:

The White Balance tool allows you to set a color

temperature setting (and actual Kelvin value; as shown here

I’ve bumped Cloudy up a bit using Fine Adjustment) You

can also select a neutral area of your shot and use it to set white balance:

Hint: the Start button is necessary to begin the process of

selecting a pixel or pixels in the image to use as the neutral reference

Three controls live in the Noise Reduction tool, and they all

do different things:

• Color Noise Reduction: this function is used to reduce the

colored patterns noise takes on when you use high ISO values The D200 doesn’t really produce much chroma noise, and I find this tool useful only at ISO 1600 and above

• Edge Noise Reduction: this function tries to remove noise

from distinct edges, which, theoretically, makes those edges more distinct

• Color Moire Reduction: this function only works on NEF

images and it has limited control Still, it’s worth a try if you find an image with moiré in it

But I’d generally say avoid Capture’s Noise Reduction tools

if you can The programs I mention in “Other Manipulation Tools” (see page <H707>) do a better job

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 sometimes, folks

Vignette Control only works with NEF images Nikon

doesn’t tell us much about the Vignette Control, though

their documentation seems to imply that the control varies to correct the amount of light falloff exhibited by the lens

detected in the EXIF data Based upon my experience with it, it’s only marginally accurate at that, though it’s far better than nothing Don’t expect huge differences that are easily visible Most lenses on the D200 have far less than the 15% center-to-edge difference that would be easily visible to the naked eye

We’ve now come to two of the more important controls

Advanced Raw is tricky, so be careful Most people turn it

on to allow post shooting exposure compensation (top

control) What they don’t notice is that the controls

underneath all say Unchanged (I’ve used my normal set here, so only Color Mode is Unchanged in the dialog I

show) It’s easy to interpret the word “unchanged” as meaning nothing will be done, but that’s not correct What it means is

that the camera setting will be used for that item So if you set

Sharpening to High on the camera, Unchanged means High! Don’t fall into that trap Indeed, this is one of the

controls where I strongly suggest that you save and load a standard set of values, as I have here

Note: If you used prior versions of Capture or also use a D1, you

need to note that the current versions of Nikon Capture show the Hue adjustment value differently than the D1 (and all versions of Capture up through 2.0) On those products, the Hues were specified as a value from 0 to 6; in Capture 3.0 and later, Hues are shown in values of -9 degrees to +9 degrees Here’s how the two equate:

Old New

120 degrees apart (see “Hue” on page <H296>)

Our last tool is a four-parter: the LCH tool (Lightness,

Chroma, Hue)F

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This tool comes to Capture from the Nikon Scan software, where it has been available since version 3 (thus, it’s not a new tool just coded, but a mature one)

You’ll note that the Master Lightness portion of the tool looks exactly like the Curves tool Yep, it works the same way, so you already know how to use it Whereas Curves works with RGB data, LCH works with Luminance and Color

data (sort of the CIE Color Lab mode, only expressed a bit differently, as we have no A and B channels) Normally,

you’re only going to pick 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

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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