Custom picture controls

[alastairmoore]

Hey guys,

 

Do many people use custom or standard picture controls with their d300 (or D3/d700/whatever other nikon cameras support picture

controls!)? I've been reading the Magic Lantern D300 book, which discusses picture controls and suggests while they can be used, they'd

recommend post processing as opposed to picture controls. Any thoughts? I get the idea that the general school of thought is to do as

much in the camera as you can. Custom picture controls seem like a useful feature but something you could spend a bit too much time

messing around with for different subjects as opposed to just shooting and dealing with later.

[wpahnelas]

i used them for a while, but eventually came to prefer "neutral" with maybe a little sharpening -- or whatever you find yourself tweaking regularly. generally, i'd have to say i agree with the advice in your book.

[simon_hickie1]

I've been experimenting with these and found Neutral, Sharpening 4, auto contrast, & + 1 saturation to give a pretty good result. I'm now trying Standard, Sharpening 4 and auto contrast to see how that works. Auto contrast is a key thing for me - something that worked pretty well on the D80.

[mauricio_orozco]

I like this feature in the D300 and I agree with William and Simon. I use standard most of the time and sometimes, vivid with sharpening +6 and that's it. When I started to use the D300, I pumped the saturation in vivid but honestly, I did not like the results, so I switched to standard +5 sharpening only and I am getting pretty good results. I will start using neutral but only for portrait and leave standard for everything else.

[bruce_margolis]

For very general shooting, I might use Standard but I mostly use the D2X modes. This week I began playing with the newer Portrait/Landscape modes.

 

One of the nice things about NX2 is you can change the picture control in post processing. Well, at least you can with RAW shots. Never tried it with JPEGs.