Kaj E wrote:
If you shoot RAW the best advice is to turn D-Lighitng off forever and set your camera to neutral and Adobe RGB in order to get a in camera histogram that most closely resembles the RAW exposure.
To get an even better idea of where your dynamic range will clip, temporarily switch your camera over to JPEG and set the contrast level to as low as it will go. Save the setting and then switch the camera back to NEF mode.
The camera uses the JPEG processing settings to determine both the look of the preview and to calculate the Histogram.
Active D-Lighting processing is done on the CMOS itself before the signal goes to the EXPEED for packaging into Nikon's NEF "raw" package, so while Capture NX2 can virtually undo the effect, the Active D-Lighting is part and parcel of the origianl raw fdata. So if you choose notto use Capture NX2, but use Adobe Camera Raw In either Photoshop or Lightroom, Bibble, Capture One or another raw processor , the Active D-Lighting setting you choose on the camera is always respected, even if you convert Nikon's proprietary NEF raw to DNG as a part of your raw processing and archiving workflow.
I tend to leave it to normal unless it is a low contrast scene ( dynamic range of 4 stops or less) in which case I turn it off.
T. Hogan's suggestion of turning Active D-Lighting off for High ISo values theorectically makes sense. I'll try that when I review the D3s.
What I suggest you do is experiment and discover which Active D-Lighting setting works best in different kinds of lighting conditions and Different ISO settings for you. That is part of learning your camera.
williamkazak wrote:
Why would you not be setting to sRGB when all labs and inkjets are printing sRGB?
The inkjet printer I use is a Canon iPF imagePROGRAF 6100 and with high quality gloss and semi-gloss papers the gamut pretty much matches Adobe RGB(1998) and in some parts of the spectrum actually is slightly larger than Adobe RGB(1998).
