Mihai's Web Pages
Nikon D40 is a tiny little great SLR camera. Due to its small size and low weight, it replaced my D70 for day to day shooting especially when hiking or cycling. I was dreaming for a low weight camera that can produce quality images in any type of light conditions and none of the compact point and shot on the market came close to what I wanted. The D40 is the closest a DSLR can get to my dream camera. A range-finder camera would also be nice as a compact high quality photographic tool, but the Leica M8 or the Epson RD1 are prohibitively expensive.
With the D80 model, Nikon introduced some in-camera retouching functionality similar to some features that can be found in the Nikon Coolpix series of compact cameras. Same features are now introduced in the new D40 model. Although far from being a "pocket Photoshop", there are occasions when these can be useful. Applying them is quite quick either - just a few buttons away from the main menu. A new image is always created. The original image are not touched
Here are some tricks I found out while playing with my new D40
This one is quite cool actually! High Dynamic Range (HDR) in camera!. This is possible using the "Image Overlay" feature from the Retouch Menu.
When I heard of the image overlay feature I was thinking that it must be the most useless feature. Actually, it is quite nice. It only works with RAW images but the nice thing is that it also produces a RAW file. When producing HDR images from multiple exposures it makes sense anyway to shot RAW. Of course, the camera should be mounted on tripod and a remote should be used
So, here is a small example of how to combine two images to increase the dynamic range. It might also work with more images if the procedure is applied in more stages, but I did not try it.
Just one more note. All images on this page are straight from the camera - only resized with a touch of sharpening on PC
The image above is taken from my apartment window. Nothing exciting. As you can see the dynamic range is a bit too high. There are areas in the sky where the highlights are completely blown out. If I would expose for the highlights in the sky, the rest of the image would be quite dark.
So, I placed the camera on a tripod and took two images. One under-exposed by 1.3EV and another one over-exposed by 1.3EV. Do not ask me why I have chosen these values. I guess that one should experiment to find the best values. As you can see below, the under-exposed image has a nice if not too dark sky while the other one has the sky completely blown out but more details in the rest of the image.
One can take the two images and combine them in Photoshop or other tools to create an HDR image. I am sure that a skilled person would get better results than what I get here using the in-camera image overlay function However, on a PC it would take much longer.
So go to: Menu Button -> RETOUCH MENU -> Image Overlay. Then select the two RAW images: the under and over exposed images. The order is not important. Once both images are selected, the trick is to adjust the gain for each image, as shown in the screenshot below:
Select a low gain around 0.2 for the overexposed image. This will lighten the dark part of the image without blowing the overexposed areas. For the under-exposed image select a slightly higher gain than 1.0 - 1.1 or 1.2 should do. These are starting values. I have only tried this procedure once. I am sure that each set of images would work with different values. When you like the result, press OK button to save the composite image as a new file.
Here are two HDR images created in camera with this procedure. Each image was created with slightly different gain parameters:
You can see that the sky retains much more detail, while the dark portion of the image is not too dark and has a good level of details.
The nice ting about this procedure is that is fast, can be done on site and it does not alter the original files.
I normally do not shot RAW. Processing RAW files on a PC is too time consuming. The Specialized DSP (Digital Signal Processor) chip built in the cameras are much faster. They can process a few RAW images per second! This is what is actually happening when shooting JPEG.
It is known that RAW capture allows more flexibility in post processing without ruining the image. With the D40 it is possible to do some limited RAW conversion/editing tricks using the features found in the Retouch menu.
The D40 has some nice goodies in the Retouch menu. An interesting one is the color balance tool:
Menu Button -> RETOUCH MENU -> Filter Effects -> Color Balance.
I will not explain here all the details; they can be found in the camera manual. What is interesting is that it can process both RAW and JPEG images. The result is saved in a new JPEG file. If we process a RAW image, we will get an Large Fine JPEG! We can adjust the color balance and it looks like the D40 screen is calibrated so we can trust the colors we see on it. If we do not adjust the colors the RAW file is simply converted to a JPEG image.
Another very nice feature of the color balance tool is that it provides us with an RGB histogram.
Well, but what if the image is slightly over or under exposed? Can we correct this in camera? The D-lighting feature can bring some more luminosity in the dark areas, but that is all it can do. There is another option!
The image overlay feature comes again to rescue us! This feature can be used to adjust the exposure of RAW images! How? Simple! Select the same file for both images. Then play with the gain values for both or just one of the images! Values over 1.0 to increase the exposure, under 1.0 to decrease it. Of course this will only work well if the original RAW is only slightly under or over exposed and only a small amount of correction is needed. The nice thing about this trick is that the resulted image is also in RAW format so we can for instance apply another in-camera filter to it without quality loss.
