Active D Lighting in the D300

Does this work for you? It seems to add noise to the shadows in some situations in my experience. How about High ISO noise reduction? Camera defaults set both of these to "N". Using JPEG.

Active D lighting is a feature I don’t use, and I shoot RAW.

AFAIK, both NR and Active D-lighting only work with Jpeg. Like Shun, I primarily shoot RAW and leave both turned off.

 

I did play around with Active D-lighting some when I first got my D300. I don't necessarily recommend Ken Rockwell as a main source of information, but when he got his D300 he thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you read his review of the camera, he shows some example photos with and without, so it's worth checking out for that reason alone.

 

FWIW, by current standards the D300 has a fairly antiquated sensor without a huge amount of dynamic range. Active D-Lighting does help this somewhat in high contrast situations. I record JPEGs on my D800(and just never use them) and leave it set off-the DR is high enough that I don't find it to appreciably help my JPEGs.

I haven't played with active D-lighting much (I always shoot RAW+JPEG), but I believe that the camera 'tinkers' with the exposure when it's activated.

 

I could definitely see a difference in RAW+JPEG exposures when ADL was turned on. However this might have been co-incidental. The big difference between ADL and plain-vanilla D-lighting does appear to be in letting the camera make some auto adjustment to the base exposure though.

 

"FWIW, by current standards the D300 has a fairly antiquated sensor without a huge amount of dynamic range. "

 

- A lot more than any slide film had (or has) though, and more than enough for most non-scientific or astro applications.

 

I really don't see what this apparent thirst for more-and-more 'dynamic range' is driven by. Shoot RAW and you can pull an amazing amount of shadow detail out of seeming pitch-blackness.

Edited May 7, 2018 by rodeo_joe|1

I remember reading that ADL works by, first, underexposing so as not to blow out highlights, and then pushing shadows in post. Added shadow noise is the inevitable result.

Last post is correct, which is why for raw files I kept it off - despite Capture NX2 being able to deal with the various levels of ADL, it didn't really work for me. For JPEGs though, in some cases it does the trick. Especially low-light/night photography seemed to benefit some. But still not as much as shooting a raw file, and processing it with care.

As for the in-camera high ISO noise reduction, if my memory serves me well, I kept that on "low" which was efficient enough to my taste. The D300 doesn't suffer much from colour in the noise, so in general the noise always looked pretty acceptable to me.

Even though ADL only affects JPG files if you use View NX2 or other Nikon software to read the Raw file, it starts at the JPG, and you can't get rid of it. It seems much easier to add it in post than to undo it.