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Shooting Menu: Picture Control-High ISO NR

Lesson 16 from: Nikon D5600 Fast Start

John Greengo

Shooting Menu: Picture Control-High ISO NR

Lesson 16 from: Nikon D5600 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

16. Shooting Menu: Picture Control-High ISO NR

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu: Picture Control-High ISO NR

Okay, scrolling down to the next page is the picture setting control, and this is something that we saw before in the information panel. And this is where you can choose the sharpness, the color tone, the saturation, of your JPEG images. Now, if you shoot RAW, this will affect it on the back the camera. Which is kind of neat, because if you wanna shoot black and white, it'll show you what you're doing. And so there's gonna be a number of adjustments that you can get into here and so I wanna do a little demo on this one as well. So let's take a look on the back of the camera here. And so what we're gonna do is hit the menu, scroll down to picture controls, and so real quickly let's do a monochrome photo. So if I set this in monochrome, kinda the cool thing is I can throw this into live view, and now you can see what the world looks like in black and white. So if you wanna shoot black and white work, I think this is a neat option because now you get to view the world in black and white a...

nd that might change how you compose your image. So, if we were to dive in here under any of these particular ones, I'm just gonna go into standard, actually I go to the right, I'm gonna go to the right 'cause you'll see down here at the bottom, look for these controls, little tidbits, go to the right for more information. So what we can do in here is we can control all of these different aspects of the way our JPEG image is being recorded. Now I'm not gonna go into a long detail on how each of these works in here. But pay attention to other information, like you see where it says plus A, and so if we hit the plus button down here, it is automatically going to adjust the contrast according to what it thinks it needs, and I can just simply press that button and turn it on and off or I can come over here and dial it down or I can dial it up. And I believe, if you notice this other little indicator down here on the left, if you said, oh I just want it up a little bit here, you can do all of these in quarter increments. And so if your JPEG images are not looking quite right, you can adjust them exactly the way you want them here. And so if you're not getting what you like out of your images, you haven't adjusted your images. You haven't adjust your settings in here. And so this is very cool 'cause you can really get some fine tune control in there. The fact of the matter is I never do that on my cameras. Partly because I shoot RAW most of the time, but the standard JPEGs are fine and I can tweak and adjust them from there. This is mainly designed, once again, for people who are not adjusting afterwards. Either you don't have time or you don't have the equipment to do it afterwards. But if you are shooting JPEGs and they're just not quite right for you, adjust 'em and make 'em right for you. So, there's a lot of work that you could put into setting up all your picture controls. If you had multiple cameras like this and you wanted to transfer all the data from this camera to another 5600, you could do that. You could load all of these settings up onto a memory card, put it into another camera, and load those settings up in there. And so you'll just be able to go in and choose which ones you want, you can save 'em in all. And so not too many people have multiple versions of a camera like this, but there are some industrial uses where you have multiple cameras shooting and you want all of them to have all of the same settings. And so this just enables you to copy all of the picture settings from one camera to the next. The color space is the total range of colors that you can record in a JPEG image. When you shoot RAW, you get something called Adobe RGB Colorspace, which is a fairly large color space. The JPEGs are normally in an SRGB, which is kind of the way the internet works, at the current state of time. It doesn't have the full range of colors, it reduces the colors just to have a smaller bandwidth. But if you plan on editing your images, if you plan on printing them, if you wanna get the most out of your JPEG images, you'd wanna change this to Adobe RGB. You inherently get it, once again, when you are shooting RAW images. Active D-Lighting is something we talked about earlier in the class. This is where the camera shoots a single photo and adjusts the contrast levels to try to lighten the shadows and hold back the highlights from getting over exposed. We have a number of different settings in here. I kinda like leaving this just turned off just to get the straight information from the camera. Some images look better with this turned on, some images look better with it turned off. And so either you're gonna have to turn this on and off in camera, or you're gonna have to adjust afterwards if you want the absolute best quality from any picture situation. HDR, once again, is for JPEG only. And this is where the camera shoots multiple exposures, it shoots three photos at different shutter speeds, generally speaking, different exposures, so that it's capturing information from the highlights and the shadows. And this will typically do a better job than the Active D-Lighting and a very high contrast range. But once again, you must be careful about subjects moving, you can't be moving, you should be on a tripod. And if you are photographing any subjects that could be a problem as well because their movement is gonna be different from one frame to the next. So landscape and architecture are the best uses. The release mode, when you press down on the shutter release, there is a button on the front side, left side of the camera that allows you to do this. But you can access this information and change it from the back if for some reason that button is not available, perhaps you have your camera in an underwater housing or mounted in a place where you can't reach that button, you can do it back here. When you take a long exposure, what happens is it's a long exposure, let's say it's 30 seconds. And with long exposure noise reduction turned on, it will process that image for about the next 30 seconds and you won't be able to shoot photos you won't really be able to do anything with the camera for that next 30 seconds while the camera is processing this information. And it does this in order to reduce noise of that image, because when you have the sensor turned on for a long period of time, it's more likely to pick up extra noise. Now I've always kinda wondered how much effect does it have. And so of course I wanna run the camera through a little test, and so I shot a 30 second exposure in my studio with just a single light bulb on. And I really didn't have much problem with noise. And when I turned noise reduction on, I didn't really see any notable difference at all. And so you may want to do a test on your own to see if it works with you and the types of things that you shoot. But from what I've been able to tell from highlights to shadows to noise detail, there is no significant help by having this turned on. But the detriment is that you're outta luck for 30 seconds beyond your shooting time. And so you've just gotta stand around and wait for your camera to process, and if it's not doin' anything that's helpful, not anything you can't do later on, I say turn it off. So that's why I'm recommending to turn it off. High ISO noise reduction deals with a similar problem of noise, but this time with high ISOs. Noise at high ISOs is a definite issue that we all deal with and it's why we try to keep our ISOs as low as possible. So I went in to do a little test. I shot this first test at 12,800, and as you can see on the image on the left I do have noise, and by turning the noise reduction on it does reduce the noise quite a bit. However, it does start to mar some of the details. And so setting this on higher is not necessarily better, it depends on where you think the best balance is. Some people are gonna wanna leave this turned off and adjust for it as necessary per image in post production. Some people might wanna leave it on low or normal. But I'm thinking that most people probably aren't gonna wanna leave this on high all the time because you are losing some detail in order to reduce that noise, and so it is a bit of a balancing act as to what the appropriate level is.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Nikon D5600 Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

Margaret Lovell
 

I received my D5600 as a Christmas gift, and while I picked up a few things on my own, this class was wonderful. I learned more than I would have picked up just by reading a book about the camera. Thank you, John!

John Acklen
 

John is a fabulous teacher. So clear and easy to follow. I will take many of his classes as I learn photography! Thanks John!

Adrian Todd
 

Really great review as there was some features of my d5600 I wasn't too sure about. It's probably one of the best instructors I have come across as he's explains things in simple terms that I am able to understand.

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