The NEW Nikon D7000 - Good news / Bad news

[keithsnell]

Chris,

By the way, I really like your "first pic" above.   Nice light, beautiful skin tones and color rendition and nice and sharp.

Keith

By the way, I think you'll find the "sweet spot" for the 50mm is between f2 and f4.

[Chris]

For Nikon's Flash System: http://nikonclspracticalguide.blogspot.com/

Thanks. I'll check that out.

I'm sure you've read Keith's "Understanding and Controlling Exposure" in this site. Find out where's Zones V and VII in your D7000's light-meter using spotmeter when shooting in 14-bit NEF. The fun is when you're the artist and not the camera.

I have read it but am reading it all over again.   I may have to read it several more times.

Nikon's Focus System is very fulfilling - you'll be very unhappy if you don't master it.

So far I have figured how to set a single focus point and move it around. Much better than the full auto I think. I like it better for now at least.

In photography, there is no reason to "disconnect" capture, postprocessing and ouput (print or web).

So far I have found that editing the nef files is much easier than jpgs. Editing won't be such a big deal anymore. That's one thing I've been looking forward to.

By the way, did you see my Fixed and out of whack pictures in the gallery?
Fixed: http://spiritofphotography.com/coppermine/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=0&pos=0
Out of whack: http://spiritofphotography.com/coppermine/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=0&pos=1
I could have never done that with a jpg but it was so easy with the nef.

[Chris]

Chris,

By the way, I really like your "first pic" above.   Nice light, beautiful skin tones and color rendition and nice and sharp.

Keith

By the way, I think you'll find the "sweet spot" for the 50mm is between f2 and f4.

Thanks Keith.

[Chris]

Keith, you said in the comment on the out of whack picture, " Do you have the RGB histogram option turned on? "
I figured out how to turn it on in playback. Should I be able to turn it on in the viewfinder? I haven't found any info on that yet. I know I can turn on the histogram in the viewfinder of my canon but it is an electronic viewfinder just like the lcd on the back of the camera, only smaller.

[keithsnell]

Keith, you said in the comment on the out of whack picture, " Do you have the RGB histogram option turned on? "
I figured out how to turn it on in playback. Should I be able to turn it on in the viewfinder? I haven't found any info on that yet. I know I can turn on the histogram in the viewfinder of my canon but it is an electronic viewfinder just like the lcd on the back of the camera, only smaller.

Hi Chris,

No, the RGB histogram will only display in playback.  There's no provision for turning it on in the viewfinder.

We could have a long discussion about how to best use the RGB histogram, so just start asking questions when you're ready.

Keith

[girod]

Chris,

Yup, I saw both ("Out of whack" and "Fixed") and until now I'm still trying to figure out how the D7000's matrix metering system, in Aperture priority mode with no exposure compensation, failed to automatically exposed the scene in averaged middle gray luminance (with a default priority to save bright highlights) at whatever WB preset.

Do you have an idea Keith how the D7000 handled this exposure?

[girod]

Hello Keith,

In the camera's RGB histogram which is JPEG-based, a multiplier is applied to R and B - so if the R and/or B channel(s) in highlights are/is clipped but the Green is not, the R and/or B are not clipped in the actual NEF file. Hence the use of UniWB, so as not to actually underexpose the R and/or B channel(s).

How or what else can you best use the RGB histogram?

[keithsnell]

Chris,

Yup, I saw both ("Out of whack" and "Fixed") and until now I'm still trying to figure out how the D7000's matrix metering system, in Aperture priority mode with no exposure compensation, failed to automatically exposed the scene in averaged middle gray luminance (with a default priority to save bright highlights) at whatever WB preset.

Do you have an idea Keith how the D7000 handled this exposure?

Hi Jaime,

We get some hints if we download the image and look at the histogram in Photoshop.  If we look at the individual color channels we can see that although the red channel is severely clipped, the green channel is not, and the blue channel is actually "underexposed."  The "luminosity" histogram (the combination of all three color channels, at the ratios which they determine brightness) is not clipped either.  As a matter of fact, the luminosity histogram looks just about "perfect."  The fact that the luminosity histogram is not clipped is one of the primary indications of why the metering system didn't lower the exposure, since the purpose of the meter is to expose the image at the correct "brightness."  

So the "clipping" in the "out of whack" image is all in the red channel, which explains 1) how Chris was able to recover it in the raw file and 2) why the corrected version is less red.  

It's also worth noting that the D7000 has a new auto white balance setting.  Under auto white balance you can select "normal" or you can select "keep warmer colors."  From the rendition of the "Out of Whack" image, I wonder if the "keep warmer colors" option was selected for auto white balance, which would result in more amplification to the red channel and accentuate the clipping?  The image was obviously taken under very warm light, and this warm light resulted in the red channel clipping way before the other channels (in the rendered version).  (You correctly stated that the white balance multipliers applied when rendering the image are usually what results in the red or blue channel clipping.)

I'll try to answer your question about how to best use the RGB histogram in a follow-on post.

Keith

[girod]

Thanks Keith. Now I get it. I should have downloaded the file and look at the histogram too - that's another important use of the histogram: analysis then learning from the image captured.

[Chris]

Here's link to the NEF if you care to look at it. It's 40MB though.
http://www.christopherfranklin.info/temp/DSC_0067.zip

I had to rename the file so that it could be downloaded. It has an extention of .zip but it is not a zip file. Simply change the file extention to .nef and it should work fine.

[Chris]

I took a look at white balance setting. It's on normal not keep warm colors. I'm sure this is a setting I have not changed.

[keithsnell]

I took a look at white balance setting. It's on normal not keep warm colors. I'm sure this is a setting I have not changed.

Good to know.  Thanks.

Keith

[Chris]

Ok, this is different. After posting the nef I went to look at it again in capture. When I opened it I saw the fixed version and thought "Oh no! I have saved over the original!". I then noticed a box labeled Version and found that I could switch back to the original. Is that why the file size is 40MB instead of 20something like the others? How many versions can you save in a single nef? That's awesome but will take some getting used to.

[keithsnell]

Ok, this is different. After posting the nef I went to look at it again in capture. When I opened it I saw the fixed version and thought "Oh no! I have saved over the original!". I then noticed a box labeled Version and found that I could switch back to the original. Is that why the file size is 40MB instead of 20something like the others? How many versions can you save in a single nef? That's awesome but will take some getting used to.

Yup, that's one of the cool things about nefs and Capture.  I've never run up against any limit on the number of "versions" I could save in a single nef.  (I'm sure there is one, I've just never hit it.)

I noticed the file size too, and thought "that's huge!"  I'm not sure why 40MB instead of the 20 that I would normally expect.  The additional "versions" shouldn't add that much overhead.  I'll have to do some experimenting.

Keith

[keithsnell]

Here's link to the NEF if you care to look at it. It's 40MB though.
http://www.christopherfranklin.info/temp/DSC_0067.zip

I had to rename the file so that it could be downloaded. It has an extention of .zip but it is not a zip file. Simply change the file extention to .nef and it should work fine.

Thanks Chris,  

It's nice to have the raw file to play with.  A couple of observations on the white balance.  I compared the "recorded" white balance to daylight white balance, and the "recorded" value is equal the lower end of the range on daylight > sunlight (at 4132 Kelvin).  Then I selected the "calculate automatically" option, and the software calculated that a "neutral" white balance was 3000 K.  

From past experience, I know that the auto WB option will "bottom out" (or top out) at whatever the lowest (or highest) number is on the range for what it determines the actual lighting conditions are.  So, for example, if it determines that the lighting was "flash" the lowest it will ever set the WB at is 4255K, because that's lower limit of the "flash" WB settings.  

So, even though the "actual" WB temperature of the scene was closer to 3000K, the auto WB only corrected it to 4132K, because that was the lower end of the "daylight, sunlight" range.  That's why the image still appeared "warm" and wasn't corrected all the way to neutral.  Make sense?  

Keith

By the way, there's a real danger of getting "warmer" and "cooler" mixed up when we're talking about white balance.  The lower Kelvin numbers (like 3000K) are actually "warmer" than the higher numbers like 6000K, which is considered a "cool" WB.  The software makes this more confusing by labeling the lower end of the correction slider "cooler."  That's because if you slide the carrot in that direction, you are setting a "warmer" WB temperature, which the software will then used to calculate the required correction to make the image correspondingly "cooler.'  Pretty confusing I know.  

One way to think about it is like this.  A "typical" incandescent bulb is a "warm" light source with a color temperature of about 3000K.  If you set that WB setting in the camera, the software will attempt to compensate for the warmer light source by "cooling off" the rendering by a corresponding amount in order to make the whites neutral (instead of with a yellow or "warm" color cast).  Make any more sense?