Hello to all.

[Tony Hills]

Hi everyone.

Just joined the forum.
I'm just having to migrate from Nikon CNX2 to something "new" as the D810 is not supported.
Not liking changes, I initially tried the raw2nef software from Bagnon, which works well.
Looking longer term, sooner or later Nikon software will die, their latest NXD is very poor and
I can only hope one day, Nikon let go of the "secrecy" of the NEF format.
That said, I find LR every bit as good at conversions, with one caveat, shadow recovery!
If I have a problem image, my flow is raw2nef, edit in cnx2, save as TIFF and edit in LR if
I need to.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this change over !

Tony.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Morning Tony, welcome to the forum! I'd love to see an example of that poor shadow recovery you're having trouble with.

 

[Tony Hills]

Good morning Victoria and thank you for the interest.

The images that give me problems are those I take for the local sailing club.
I'm shooting South, so partially into the sun, distance does not help.
But, essentially, faces are in shadow.
Enclosed NEF, 100% crops fro LR & VNX2, CNX2 vwould do a little better.

Thanks.

 

[Tony Hills]

Sorry, no NEF as it will not upload, or DNG.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Have you tried playing with the different profiles in the Calibration panel? You might find one comes a little closer to your ideal.

 

[Tony Hills]

Have you tried playing with the different profiles in the Calibration panel? You might find one comes a little closer to your ideal.

Yes, I have. Sometimes it can help.
I will see how it goes when I get more used to LR.
Thanks for the help Victoria.

 

[tspear]

Have you tried to load the raw into Lr?
Then use a local brush and use the shadows feature? I have faced the same kind of issue and this worked fairly well.

 

[clee01l]

Welcome to the forum. I have a D810 and have been shooting and importing RAW NEFs since they were first supported in LR. I think everyone agrees that NX-D is a worthless POS. I happen to hold the same opinion of NX2. You can skip all of the preamble and just import your NEF directly into LR.
Once you fixed the data in TIFF, you lose any hope at balancing the range of lighting conditions and WB.
The D810 has a range of 4 - 5 stops And LR alone is quite good at taking care of that range. Your TIFFs are probably limiting you to 1-2 stops.
To begin, turn off ADL in the camera. (Most Nikon experts will recommend that you do this even if you do not process using Adobe's RAW Converter.) Adobe ignores these micro ISO Adjustments because they are not stored in a regular EXIF Structure where they are accessible. And ACR can do as well if not better than ADL + NX-D
Unlike modern recommendations, Expose slightly to the left of center so that your image is slightly under exposed. You can bring out detail in underexposed areas but you can never recover blown highlights
Then Import the NEF into LR and make sure the Camera Calibration profile is set to Camera Neutral.
In the basic Panel, choose Auto Tone. Auto tone tends to over expose the image. So, immediately after Auto Tone, Lower the exposure at least 1 full stop or back to zero. You have 5 controls to tweak now to bring out the detail in low lit areas.
Use the "J" shortcut key to toggle clipping on and off. Using the Whites slider for gross adjustment and the Highlights slider for fine control, reduce the white clipping to zero. Some white clipping can remain if you are intent of recovering the shadows and not concerned about bright direct sunlight.
Use the Blacks slider for gross shadow clipping and the Shadows slider for fine control.
The fifth adjustment control is the Clarity slider Boost it to at least +25 . This ay introduce clipping again so fine tune this clipping with the Highlights and Shadows sliders.

Something else you might try when you shoot is to shoot a quick burst of 3 brackets exposures. (Even with the Action shot above) you can then use the HDR merge function in LR.

 

[PhilBurton]

Welcome to the forum. I have a D810 and have been shooting and importing RAW NEFs since they were first supported in LR. I think everyone agrees that NX-D is a worthless POS. I happen to hold the same opinion of NX2. You can skip all of the preamble and just import your NEF directly into LR.
Once you fixed the data in TIFF, you lose any hope at balancing the range of lighting conditions and WB.
The D810 has a range of 4 - 5 stops And LR alone is quite good at taking care of that range. Your TIFFs are probably limiting you to 1-2 stops.
To begin, turn off ADL in the camera. (Most Nikon experts will recommend that you do this even if you do not process using Adobe's RAW Converter.) Adobe ignores these micro ISO Adjustments because they are not stored in a regular EXIF Structure where they are accessible. And ACR can do as well if not better than ADL + NX-D
Unlike modern recommendations, Expose slightly to the left of center so that your image is slightly under exposed. You can bring out detail in underexposed areas but you can never recover blown highlights
Then Import the NEF into LR and make sure the Camera Calibration profile is set to Camera Neutral.
In the basic Panel, choose Auto Tone. Auto tone tends to over expose the image. So, immediately after Auto Tone, Lower the exposure at least 1 full stop or back to zero. You have 5 controls to tweak now to bring out the detail in low lit areas.
Use the "J" shortcut key to toggle clipping on and off. Using the Whites slider for gross adjustment and the Highlights slider for fine control, reduce the white clipping to zero. Some white clipping can remain if you are intent of recovering the shadows and not concerned about bright direct sunlight.
Use the Blacks slider for gross shadow clipping and the Shadows slider for fine control.
The fifth adjustment control is the Clarity slider Boost it to at least +25 . This ay introduce clipping again so fine tune this clipping with the Highlights and Shadows sliders.

Something else you might try when you shoot is to shoot a quick burst of 3 brackets exposures. (Even with the Action shot above) you can then use the HDR merge function in LR.

Cletus,

Until I read this thread I had Active D-Lighting ON. (Nikon D3). There is a lot of good info here. Reading the rest of your post raises the question in my mind:

What is the best set of menu choices for a Nikon RAW shooter, for processing by ACR and Lightroom? Should this question be a separate thread, so all the information can be collected in one place? ... eventually a blog post by Victoria?

And not just for Nikon either.

Phil

 

[clee01l]

I think a "best settings" is model dependent. It becomes a very broad topic and at best subjective. There are probably professional photographers that would never shoot with my defaults, But my defaults work for me and generally, I'm pleased with the results. Keeping in mind that RAW images are unprocessed. Until they are converted to RGB they have no color space,white balance, are toneless and somewhat noisy. Settings that you choose in the camera setup are applied to the tiny processor in the camera to produce a JPEG. It is this JPEG that you see on the camera back and as an embedded thumbnail in the NEF header. If you choose to create a JPEG in the camera, these settings are used to generated that full size JPEG. I set the Colorspace to the smaller envelop (sRGB) because I don't like that silly leading "_" in the file name as it only applies to the JPEG produced by the camera. So, for me I set AWB and Camera neutral in the camera to have JPEGs that look reasonable on the camera back or that initial thumbnail in the LR Library. That is all I care about in Camera settings. I choose the ISO setting to match the scene and rarely exceed ISO3200. Shutter speed and aperture are critical for the best image under the conditions that dictate the best choice. Probably the most important setting for the D810 is getting the focus right.

 

[PhilBurton]

I think a "best settings" is model dependent. It becomes a very broad topic and at best subjective. There are probably professional photographers that would never shoot with my defaults, But my defaults work for me and generally, I'm pleased with the results. Keeping in mind that RAW images are unprocessed. Until they are converted to RGB they have no color space,white balance, are toneless and somewhat noisy. Settings that you choose in the camera setup are applied to the tiny processor in the camera to produce a JPEG. It is this JPEG that you see on the camera back and as an embedded thumbnail in the NEF header. If you choose to create a JPEG in the camera, these settings are used to generated that full size JPEG. I set the Colorspace to the smaller envelop (sRGB) because I don't like that silly leading "_" in the file name as it only applies to the JPEG produced by the camera. So, for me I set AWB and Camera neutral in the camera to have JPEGs that look reasonable on the camera back or that initial thumbnail in the LR Library. That is all I care about in Camera settings. I choose the ISO setting to match the scene and rarely exceed ISO3200. Shutter speed and aperture are critical for the best image under the conditions that dictate the best choice. Probably the most important setting for the D810 is getting the focus right.

Cletus,

I'm sure that some settings for your D810 have no meaning for my D3 or should be applied differently. That said, it seems that anyone using LR should not enable Active D-Lighting. Or is the a counterargument?

Aside from Active D-Lighting, are there any other settings, at least for Nikon cameras, that should always be ON or always be OFF, or always be set at a certain value, Like Camera Neutral? That's what I'm driving at. I knew so much about exposure and light balance and "funny" colors under the wrong white balance for Kodachrome, and that's all obsolete. Same with home-developed Plus-X or Tri-X. I'm still "relearning."

Phil

 

[clee01l]

Cletus,

I'm sure that some settings for your D810 have no meaning for my D3 or should be applied differently. That said, it seems that anyone using LR should not enable Active D-Lighting. Or is the a counterargument?

Aside from Active D-Lighting, are there any other settings, at least for Nikon cameras, that should always be ON or always be OFF, or always be set at a certain value, Like Camera Neutral? That's what I'm driving at. I knew so much about exposure and light balance and "funny" colors under the wrong white balance for Kodachrome, and that's all obsolete. Same with home-developed Plus-X or Tri-X. I'm still "relearning."

Phil

I thought this was covered when I said,"Keeping in mind that RAW images are unprocessed. Until they are converted to RGB they have no color space,white balance, are toneless and somewhat noisy. Settings that you choose in the camera setup are applied to the tiny processor in the camera to produce a JPEG." ADL tweaks the photo site values and introduces a compensation factor such that a program like CNX2 or CNX-D can boost the shadows and dampen the highlights. Other post processing apps like ACR/LR, Capture1 On1 etc. do not use these compensation factors and only process using the values recorded for the tweaked photo sites. Aside from that most experienced Nikon users that shoot RAW recommend turning off ADL because even with the software that does honor the compensation factors recorded in Manufacturers notes, it does a lousy job at boosting shadows. Until RAW image data is converted to RGB, it has no color space. So setting the in camera color space to aRGB or sRGB only affects the JPEGs produced by the camera and has no effect on the RAW values at each photo site.
Nikon's Picture Controls like Canon's Picture Styles are instructions for the in camera processor to produce a JPEG. They are also used by CNX2/NX-D to render the same image from the RAW as the camera produced JPEG. LR has reverse engineered these proprietary adjustments and mimics them in the Develop module Camera Calibration Setting as a Camera Profile in addition to their own Adobe Standard Profile. It does not matter what Picture Control setting that you use in the camera when shooting RAW as it is never applied to the NEF. It does matter for the JPEG produced by the camera including the embedded thumbnail in the NEF header. Those are the only three settings that you need to concern yourself with when shooting RAW and only one of these (ADL) affects the data written to the RAW photo site.

 

[Tony Hills]

Hi Cletus, tspear.

I do load the RAW into LR, where it converts to DNG.
ADL I do not use & usually expose 1/2 stop regardless.
Moving subject so a burst of 3 bracketed probably no good.

I will try your method Cletus.
If you try to "brush on" more shadow extraction it has no effect, increasing exposure 1/3 to 1/2 stop does
emulate the results from CNX2.

Rome was not built in a day (or a week)

Thanks.

 

[clee01l]

Moving subject so a burst of 3 bracketed probably no good.

Try it, You might be surprised. I'm talking about sail boats not racing powerboats. As long as you track the subject it should work. LR will map each HDR image to overlay precisely. it takes into account ghosting AND it id does not work, you still have the middle image in the bracket that you can process normally. This middle image is all that you would have anyway if you did not use a bracketed exposure.