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Thursday, November 6, 2008

Thoughts on the Nikon D700

Having been busy with work as usual the past few weeks, I did not have much time to try out my new camera and find out its strenghts and weaknesses. My initial impressions were that full frame lens now suffer more from vignetting due to light fall off in wide/big aperture settings. Focussing is much improved, being both faster and more accurate, even in low light! Lens calibration function is a God-sent to me. Details are great and of course not forgetting the class leading low light performance as of now. Colours are punchy and accurate, except for the reds which I find too saturated for portraits of Asian skin. I need to post process the colours for asian skin tones to make it less reddish and magenta. I do not know if its the white balance setting which I set to Auto but I doubt it, because the white balance seems to be quite accurate most of the time. I have read online about the reddish hue due to the more saturated reds. For portraits I needed to set to "Neutral" Picture Control Setting to get more accurate skin tones. Even at "Standard" the skin tones are too reddish for my liking. But I believe I have the solution to this inconvenience. I just downloaded from the Nikon webpage the Picture Control Curves for "Landscape", "Portrait" and the various "D2XMODE" to replicate the colour balance of the Nikon D2x. Initial tests around the house shows promising results, having a more pleasing colour balance in my opinon. I would be doing more personal thorough testing of these promising Picture Control options soon. Its like having a new camera everytime you change with the different settings!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

are you using the picture controls in Adobe Lightroom 2.2? or in CaptureNX2?

I installed the picture controls for LR and have to agree they make all the difference in the world.

DX2 Mode 1 for natural shots
DX2 Mode 2 for better portraits
DX3 Mode 3 for that ultra-vivid consumerish look (that I tend to like a lot)
Landscape Mode is also useful... for landscapes
Portrait Mode seems to soften skin tones and might help with non-caucasian tones (my subjects are usually as whitebread as buttercrust....) I'm interested in doing more street photography, where skin tones are much more diverse (and interesting)

lozzmann said...

Hi Bokehman,

I just started using DX2 Mode 1 just the other day for my macro shots. So far I have to concur with your assessment of it.

I think I will be using it as the default profile from now on.

I love reading your blog, especially checking out the really cute girls.

Regards

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