Let me just say as a long-time raw adherent--and this is very difficult for me to admit to-- the L-fine in-cam jpegs from the Z9 are downright impressively good. Obviously I've gone into the menu and refined my jpeg settings to my own style preferences, but dang, these come out so close to my "carefully processed" raws for latitude, detail and color I am actually blown away...
gear-nut wrote:
Let me just say as a long-time raw adherent--and this is very difficult for me to admit to-- the L-fine in-cam jpegs from the Z9 are downright impressively good. Obviously I've gone into the menu and refined my jpeg settings to my own style preferences, but dang, these come out so close to my "carefully processed" raws for latitude, detail and color I am actually blown away...
Okay, I've said it in public.
Out of curiosity, what jpegs settings did you refine?
RoamingScott wrote:
Yes they are. That’s one of Nikon’s strong suits with their last few generations of sensors and processors.
I won't argue, but I never seemed to get them this nice out of my Z7ii even with the same settings. But then again, there is something to the Z9 sensor color rendering that grabs me more than anything else ever has...
Enjoy being pilloried! I made a feature suggestion over at Adobe’s LR forum regarding Nikon Picture Styles, and the “real photographers use RAW” crowd quickly circled the wagons.
Nikon makes some great JPEGs. I use them for pre-capture, mostly. There are three downsides to JPEG for most of my shooting:
1) I have to be more careful about nailing white balance. This is most painful when shooting macro flash, where I sometimes drag the shutter
2) I like to shoot in B&W or in different crop ratios in camera, to aid with visualization. In JPEG, those settings are permanent. (I shoot B&W in RAW as a result.)
3) Adobe’s new noise reduction algorithm only works on RAW photos.
If we didn’t have lossy RAW, I’d shoot JPEG more often. Lossy RAW on the Z9 is almost as small as JPEG.
@Jack Flesher - Appreciate you sharing the Picture Control settings for JPEG files above! For Mid-range sharpening I see you put '+.' Does that mean '0' or was it meant to be '+' some value (1, 2, etc.)?
