Images great on camera LCD , disappointing on Home Monitor

[luigi_recine]

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<p >Hey Everyone</p>

<p >Just shot a Wedding this weekend everything went great.</p>

<p >I just have one question the Images great on Camera LCD , but I was disappointed when I saw them on my Home Monitor. The camera LCD looked bright and had great colour. I wish I could get the proof images on my home monitor to look closer to my camera LCD monitor with out a lot of hard work .</p>

<p > </p>

<p >I shoot a Nikon D2X w 17-55</p>

<p >I only shoot RAW, Jpegs look worse</p>

<p >I process images in Adobe Lightroom</p>

<p >I have a calibrated monitor, Sony Artisan </p>

<p > </p>

<p >Any thought from anybody . Am I doomed to go through and tweak each and every image, or am I missing somthing in my work flow.</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Lou Recine</p>

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[alvin_lim5]

<p>Hi Lou, what I would usually do is to calibrate the settings in my camera so that the colour and brightness of the LCD is as close to my monitor as possible. It usually does the trick for me.</p>

[User_276104]

<p>I believe the consensus is that camera LCDs are brighter than most monitors and cannot be fully trusted to judge a photo.</p>

<p>As far as the D2x, I've found that JPEGs made from NEF files with Capture NX look better than what the camera produces. I saved some actions for batch processing - nothing fancy...just basic color, sharpening, contrast & saturation from the Base Adjustments menu - and things look better.</p>

[dan_south]

<p>Hi Lou,<br>

<br />I feel your pain. I love Lightroom, I really do, but every time I open a Raw file (NEF) in Lightroom I want to write a nasty email to Adobe.</p>

<p>If I open my NEF files in Nikon's ViewNX or CaptureNX 2 software, they look fine. If I open the file in Lightroom, the colors are all washed out.</p>

<p>A simple (but inelegant) solution is to convert the NEF files to TIFF files in CaptureNX 2 (or ViewNX) and then import the files into Lightroom. The colors will look the way you expect them to.</p>

<p>If you really need to process the NEF files in Lightroom, you might need to download a camera profile (or make one yourself) that gives you the colors that you want when Lightroom imports them. Lightroom has some D2X profiles built in; you can access them in the Develop section. If you find a profile that you like, you should be able to select it as in option when you import your NEF files. I'm not 100 percent certain that this will work for you, but it's worth a try. Converting everything to TIFF files will take up a lot of space.</p>

<p>Maybe you could send an email to Adobe's help desk to see if they have any tips for raw file conversion (that doesn't wash out your colors).</p>

[hawkman]

<p>Capture NX2 will solve your problem. </p>

 

[luisarguelles]

<p>I've experienced something similar with Lightroom from my D80: When you use RAW (NEF), Lightroom imports the files and for a little while they look great. Then a second task triggers in LR and then every picture loses punch. My interpretations to this is that LR reads the adjudments of the camera (vivid, sharpening, etc.) but then leaves the files as "uncooked" raws. On the other hand, if I shot in jpg, the colors are perfectly conserved.</p>

<p>I suspect there must be a trick in LR to keep the color adjustments from the camera for RAW files, but I have no idea where to click with the mouse!</p>

[pete_su]

<p>The issue here is that the camera puts proprietary meta-data into the RAW file for the "picture settings" that effect contrast, color saturation and so on that Lightroom ignores. The preview you see in the camera is processed using these settings, but processed image you get in LR is not.</p>

<p>The reason you see the picture change in LR is because Lightroom initially displays the embedded JPEG preview, which is also processed with the in-camera settings. After a bit of a delay, this preview is replaced with the Lightroom-processed preview, and the color balance changes.<br /> <br /> There are two ways to mitigate this problem:</p>

<p>1. You can get the in-camera image settings to back off the saturation and contrast a bit to better match the Lightroom defaults.</p>

<p>2. You can use the Lightroom camera profiles to better match one or more of the canned settings that are available in the camera. But if you do this and then move the picture settings off of the canned set the images will no longer match.</p>

<p>IMHO these picture settings are a pretty transparent way for Nikon to try and get you to use their crappy workflow tools instead of something that's fast and usable.</p>

[alvinyap]

<p>Aren't raw converters almost like a different developer for film? Every raw converter renders a raw file differently, so it's not very fair to question why lightroom doesn't render the file similar to the output of the camera.<br>

Capture NX should be an exception because (please correct me if I am wrong) it uses similar a similar rendering engine as that of our nikon cameras, so the jpeg output between camera and nx should be very close.<br>

You may want to try out the preview version of Bibble 5 - it's still in preview, not even beta, but the way it renders skin tones is very very good. I use Bibble 4 at the moment, love it to bits :)<br>

Alvin</p>

[nico_.]

<p>No need to blame Lightroom. As Peter suggested: Go to "Camera Calibration" in the Develop Module and select the matching D2X mode instead of "Adobe Standard". You can save this as a preset and have it Lightroom apply upon import. The D2X modes mimic the original Nikon camera profiles very closely.<br>

I think you need Lightroom 2 for this to work. If didn't upgrade yet, it's one of many reasons to do so.<br>

I did love Bibble as well especially for its plugins but I somehow doubt they will get their software in order. The preview has been out for something like 9 months now and I can't see myself going back to bibble and even redo my old settings since Bibble 5 wont translate the old v4 settings 1:1. Shame on them!</p>

[hawkman]

<p>Unfortunately it is not just a matter of "picture style", it is a matter of accurate color rendition.<br>

ACR has a particular problem reading the correct WB from NEF files, this is in part due to the fact that Nikon encodes their WB in a proprietary way, or at least this is what Adobe blames Nikon for, Here in a polite way Adobe is stating that Nikon and them, have their own separate visions for "RAW" but they "cooperate" for the sake of their common customers<br>

<a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/nikonraw.html">http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/nikonraw.html</a><br>

As of the now, ACR camera profiles cannot fully replicate the exact output of NX2 and have some issues with NEF files most noticeable of which is color cast in neutral areas of the photo. Here is one issue that I reported to Adobe a while back (which had been reported numerous times before) <a href="http://forums.adobe.com/thread/468122">http://forums.adobe.com/thread/468122</a> I followed up with them and even sent a bunch of NEF files per their request, but didn't hear back. </p>

 

[walterh]

<p>Arash it really depends what you are shooting but for most of my shooting setting WB is very quickly corrected e.g. by reading any gray or white object. I can imagine that it is an issue for some people but may not be a problem for others.</p>

<p>Regarding the artifact you show in the lower link looks not like anything I would suspect to be caused by the RAW converter. Could it be caused by light sources? Perhaps a 50Hz or 60Hz line flickering of some of the lights?</p>