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Don’t use Active D-Lighting in Nikon’s D90 as default setting
3 comments Published 2009-01-04 in Photography, NikonWell, at least not the high Active D-Lighting settings.
I set the Active D-Lighting in my D90 to “Extra High” some day and I did not change it since then. I am shooting RAW and JPG in the highest resolution for now so I can compare the JPG produced by the camera software and the RAW directly.
The first photo is a crop of the in-camera JPG. As you can see, the Active D-Lighting is creating a halo in the sky around the very bright area. The Nikon software is trying to produce a kind of pseudo HDR tonemapped image here. I played with the curves in Gimp a little bit (not much) enhancing the contrast.
The second photo is the RAW processed with ufraw. Don’t care about the sharpness, colours, exposure as I used different settings. But it is obvious that in the RAW file is not affected by the Active D-Lighting halo effect.
Don’t care about the noise here neither… I forgot to set down ISO to 200 and shot whole day with 800… shit. Although, the huge amount of the photos is usable (which would not have been the case with my previous D70s).
As conclusion: There are cases where Active D-Lighting is great, if you don’t want to process RAWs and you are taking pictures of scenes with high contrast. But care that you don’t leave it as your default setting!
Did you happen to try it with other than “Extra-high” Active D-Lightning settings?
Of course I did. Normally I use “Auto”, which works quite fine. And if the Nikon Software pushes it too much or too less, I fall back to the RAW to adjust the exposure.
I like the Active D-Lighting feature, very much. But there are situations where it should be used with caution.
Thank you for the information