More D70 stuff

Gotta love Google. I put up my D70 Gallery all of 5 days ago, and already a Google search for "D70 photos" has my site on the first page of results. Ahead of a lot of other, better web galleries.

At any rate, I've gotten some questions about what settings I've been using, so here they are. I have been shooting in RAW mode, so these settings can be altered after the fact, with the best results coming if the exposure is correct.

auto white balance -1 (helps with color cast)

sRGB / mode I color space

in-camera sharpening none (sharpening done in Nikon Capture)

provia custom curve (from Fotogenetic's web site)

For minimal post-processing, tinkering with the in-camera settings (sharpening, saturation, and custom curves) will yield good results in most situations. I like shooting in RAW, because it gives me the flexibility to muck around with things like white balance after the fact. Certain lighting conditions don't lend themselves well to auto white balance, like the shot shown here.

This shot was taken around sunset, the light had a very warm feel to it. The auto white balance setting pretty much obliterated the warmth, resulting in an image that was flat and boring. Changing the white balance to "cloudy -2" in Nikon Capture yielded a more accurate image.

I use Nikon Capture to batch process multiple images at a time, applying the same settings to all images in a folder, for example, and saving the output as tiffs in a new directory. The "auto-contrast" operation adjusts the histogram of each image, setting black and white points. This is helpful if the image is slightly under or over-exposed. I can quickly review the resulting files using an image viewer like iView Multimedia to verfiy that I'm happy with the output, and sort the images according to vertical or horizontal orientation.

Once I sort the images by orientation, I then run my ImageMagick scripts (I'll add a link to those soon) to create jpegs for posting to my photo gallery. The whole process from beginning to end (posting the resized images on my site) can take less than an hour for several dozen images, even if I have to go back and edit a few by hand in Nikon Capture.

Which gives me more time to practice and learn to take better pictures.