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Nikon D810 - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2016

Bracketing
Of all the functions which camera makers add to devoted buttons on a camera body, Nikon's implementation of bracketing is perhaps one of the most useful. One push of the 'Bkt' button followed by a couple of notches on the command dials and you are ready to roll. While this might seem a trivial advantage over other marques, sometimes fleeting light in the landscape is just that - with insufficient time to be rolling through menus on the back of a camera trying to remember which part of the menu that is required and squinting in difficult sunlight. The shot here is an example, the light burst through for just a couple of seconds, enough time to set up and blast a 5-frame sequence on high speed continuous mode for manual stitching in Photoshop. There are many ways of skinning this particular cat and we discuss this further in this issue.

Sharpening
Thousands (possibly millions!) of words have been written on the subject of sharpening digital images. Such is the divergence of views that we got fed up with all the arm waving and made a Photoshop action to create an A2 sheet with 12 snippets of a 16x20-inch print at 12 different sharpening conditions. Over the intervening five years these have been put before almost 1,000 photographers who were asked to choose their preference. What this has taught us is that while no two people always agree between adjacent settings, in the main people home into particular areas of preference. Thus with High Pass Sharpening methods (as devised by Pixel Genius) the variation of preferences in opacity of the High Pass layer lies between 20% and 70%, so there is little logic in fretting over a choice between say 30% and 35% - the variations need to be greater than this. We have also found that the preferences are swayed by both subject matter and the shooting ISO of the image. Thus for the same sharpening suite of values we have found a 6400 ISO image wrecked by the higher levels of sharpening but a D800 image left most people unable to even see a difference across the same value set. For some time this fooled us into thinking that the D800 required different sharpening tactics but we have slowly moved our position on this and the values for the D800 (and so by definition the D810) are actually the same for the D700 and D800/810 for the same type of subject.

To give you an idea of the strength of variation, the Pixel Genius group recommend pre-sharpening in Camera Raw followed by Photoshop sharpening specific to output. Tony Kuyper rejects this work flow totally and proposes zero sharpening of the Raw processing followed by sharpening in Photoshop. One thing all agree on is that sharpening is resolution dependent and so anything you do for a print image will need to be reined back for a web image. All this serves to do is confuse the newcomer but we can distil a few things that are definite requirements while accepting that other methods are successfully used by others.

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Contact Mike McNamee

1st Published 01/02/2016
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:25

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