Nikon D200 sharpening

It really depends on what you have the camera set for. The D200 seems to be very conservative in NORMAL.

I am now using VIVID as an optimisation setting in the camera, and the default RAW parameters in Aperture.

This works well except for bright sunlight / high contrast where I use NORMAL, and in Aperture I compress the levels.

Then I add sharpening to taste for some shots.

Michael

Ahoj Radke,

If you are shooting RAW then you can ignore the image optimizations, sharpness, saturation, contrast, and WHITE BALANCE at the time of shooting. They have no effect on RAW files--you determine all those parameters when you develop the RAW. That's one of the best things about a RAW file--you can't mess it up (except exposre and focus) at the time of shooting.

That said, there are two places that you might be sharpening your image. The RAW Fine Tuning and the Sharpening control panel. Right now I would sugest make an album of about 6 images that have a variety of detail from fine detail to coarse detail. In the Real World Photoshop books this is called high-frequency or low-frequency images. Set the sharpining in the RAW Fine Tuning to a place that looks OK for all the images.

If you over sharpen here the fine detail will be wiped out, if you under sharpen the coarse detail will look soft. Save this as a new camera default setting. This will be applied to all images you import from a D200 camera.

The Sharpening adjustment panel (control + S) is where you can boost the sharpening on an image by image basis. Since the coarse-detail/low-frequency images probably look pretty good with just the sharpening from RAW Fine Tuning then this will probably be used mostly for fine-detail/high-frequency images to boost the sharpening a bit more.

This is how I am running my setup now for my D200 and D2x. Aperture is still so new that I may change this a bit as I learn better how the different tools interact.

Thomas

OK Thomas this is huge.

I REALLY interpreted the D200 manual as that it encoded the optimize settings into the NEF, and that they are interpreted by the RAW processor, and result in an altered default rendering. Of course I understood that you can then change these with much more range than with JPEG.

So, your post gets me thinkin I am imagining things.

I go back run some test shots and ... the reason I need to punch up levels on sunny shots, is SOLELY because the D200 is soft, and that the optimize image selection is doing NOTHING

Now, I know I should feel dumb, but I just wanted to thank this forum, and you for again another tidbit that will help my work.

Great stuff!

Michael,

If you shoot a Nikon camera and use Nikon Capture software to develop the RAW files then:
- Nikon Capture will read embedded info in the file to adjust the RAW processing settings.
- This is just metadata tags and doesn't change the RAW file that is recorded just the processing done later, it can all be overridden.

If you are working with Aperture and using it to develop your RAW image then most of the tags are ignored. Aperture is tracking the WB setting that is embedded into the RAW file and ISO data to adjust its auto noise reduction. I don't think it uses any of the saturation or contrast settings. Again it is worth noting this just give you a starting poing for you settings you can override everything in either Adobe Camera RAW, Phase One Capture, Nikon Capture, or Aperture.

Hope that clarifies my earlier post a bit.