ian_reed

<p>I would personally suggest FastRawViewer – it’s extremely fast, and allows one to prepare for the conversion by setting white balance and exposure correction. Plus, it has over- and underexposure indicators, so you’ll be able to see where you went wrong there. Also, you can check your focus with it as well. (It has a focus peaking function) It also has a nice "propagation" feature.</p>

<p>Noise is a result of underexposure and over processing. Some RAW converters are better, in terms of voice, and some are not so good. You need to try different RAW converters to see which one suits you better, because how much noise you tolerate is highly subjective, and also depends on the presentation. Printers to tend to smear noise, while LCD displays are not so forgiving.<br> To avoid aperture being stopped down too much, I can suggest the following focusing procedure; I always focus on the far most highly detailed object, and then start to stop aperture down, until I have everything I need in focus. You can check the results on the computer using the Focus Peaking feature of FastRawViewer.<br> As Ilkka already mentioned, for landscape work, and especially with D7100, it’s better to stay at base ISO, use a stable tripod, remote release, and deep hood on the lens. To control the camera during a shoot, I take my laptop with me whenever I can, so I can use it as a remote. This also lets me check the results on the screen for proper exposure and focusing.<br> My exposure strategy is like this; I spot-meter from the highlights I want to keep (obviously not from the sun), and add 2.5 to 3 stops to spotmeter recommendations. I load the photo into FastRawViewer to check that my highlights are correctly exposed (on the edge of being blown out). After determining the correct exposure for the highlights and checking that it is indeed correct, I add another 4 stops from that exposure and make another exposure, this time for shadows. This strategy pretty much uses the full dynamic range of the camera, and allows for very simple post-processing with hard masks. This technique is pretty much an imitation of Fuji S5Pro 400% dynamic range expansion.<br> The whole point is to take just 2 shots – one exposed to just take the highlights, and another one exposed 4 EV higher, that is, for shadows. You can try substituting 4 EV with 5 or 6, but you will see that the image starts to look unnatural, and doesn’t really provide any improvement. But you should still experiment, because as Wehrner von Braun said, “1 good test result is better than 100 expert opinions.” </p>