gdotts

Sold ALL my Canon gear (35 years sideline football photographer) for Nikon gear. Drawn to the beautiful more colorful sharpened Nikon pictures my friends seem to have.
Canon allways seems so soft and lifeless I liked Nikon's picture control, especially VIVID but VIVID seem a little to unreal. I know I can adjust in camera picture control (D800) but what do you suggest?? Shooting Blue Angel's soon.

autofocus Loc: North Central Connecticut

for me personally, I prefer the more neutral settings and if I want to further saturate a color, or colors I will do that in post processing

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

I withheld an editorial on your past post. Sadly, you're misunderstanding digital photography, and especially RAW processing.

Sharpening is a post processing technique that applies to any / all cameras. Nothing unique to Nikon.

Saturation, Contrast, and White Balance adjustments are post processing techniques that apply to any / all cameras. Nothing unique to Nikon.

VIVID is a Nikon-unique picture control. You said you plan to shoot in RAW. Although you can set the camera to VIVID, in RAW this sitting can be removed / modified, as well as you can use Standard and modify the RAW to any level of saturation desired. All things you could have done with your Canon equipment, or Sony, or Olympus, or Fuji, or any camera that captures in RAW.

For a while, I used Canon's Landscape to 'up' the saturation of blues and greens and sharpening. Then, I learned where / how to better manage these settings in my digital editor. Now, I have very discrete sharpening, using masks, and I don't have over-saturated and unrealistic blues and greens. Where desired in your digital editor, you can saturate individual colors and / or the luminance (brightness) of individual colors, things far more effective and precise than a global picture control.

You didn't respond in your prior thread to the software you'll use for RAW processing. This is the key question, along with your workflow and level of digital editing experience, things that matter far more important than the high-end equipment model and brand you plan to shoot in RAW.

Alas, prior to jumping ship, you could have presented some example images and asked how to modify your EOS settings to achieve similar results to those you were admiring. The answer might have been in the JPEG camera settings. Or, it could have been to shoot in RAW and edit. We can't go back in time now and confirm.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Now that I've given my pent-up editorial, try some ideas against Standard creating your own custom-control:

1, Increase the saturation setting by +1 or +2. Set-up some test subjects and capture the same image with each adjustment that you evaluate later on your large computer monitor against the JPEG result so you see the from-the-camera impact.

2, Increate the sharpening setting by +1 or +2 (even +3 over the default if you really want to).

3, Increase the contrast setting just slightly. I don't have this camera so I'm unsure if the scale of adjustments is whole numbers or finer.

The section on Image Enhancement starting on page 163 of the D800 user manual explains where / how to make these setting changes.

And finally, if shooting in RAW, the adjustments above could be immaterial depending on the software you use to edit your RAW images. Certainly, in any RAW editor, you have much more discrete editing options and scale of adjustments as compared to the tools in the camera.

gdotts

Ya...I jumped horses in the middle of the stream, but since the 70's figured I can swim. My RAW software: Lightroom, Photoshop, Paintshop pro 2019, Topaz Adjust AI, Topaz DeNoise.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

If you haven't already reviewed these posts, consider now. You can use the UHH "bookmark" feature to remember them later, including a personal comment on why you created each bookmark and / or which page of a longer thread to access.

Basics of noise processing

Basics of Lightroom Sharpening

Recommended resizing parameters for digital images

You'll probably want to remember to use <Quote Reply> to give your replies context.

R.G. Loc: Scotland

If you're shooting raw, the only time the Picture Control settings matter is when you're using Nikon's software (NX Studio, View NX etc) to convert the raw files. Other raw converters won't apply the profile adjustments, and with the Nikon software you have the opportunity to switch off those adjustments. The chances are your friends' "beautiful" pictures are that way because they know how to do their own post processing.

gdotts

Oh yes also have Nikon's software (NX Studio, View NX). All of my post processing had been on jpeg. With my thousands PLUS of shots a weekend just couldn't handle RAW sizes. I got football blind for a while. I quit football at 70 just could not handle the Texas heat 120 on the field. Now looking to hobby shoot with RAW as my main file...with Nikon.

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

The Nikon software is fine for free software. It doesn't hold a candle to any of your paid-for titles.

jcboy3

Shoot RAW, sort it out later.

gdotts

How about saving raw files in DNG??

Luckily, DNG (short for Digital Negative), a format developed by Adobe, preserves all the raw, unprocessed pixel information that is recorded by the camera.Jul 29, 2013

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

DNG is a waste of time. The Adobe products support your camera NEF files directly. There's ZERO reason to convert them to Adobe's format they tried to push onto the industry, a failure of effort by Adobe.

RAW data is read-only. Always has, always will. Claiming to preserve all the raw, unprocessed pixel information is just a word-play as the read-only data cannot be edited (changed) by Adobe in the NEF. Not even the Nikon software can / will modify the read-only RAW data. All the DNG or Nikon software does is write 'wrapper data' around the read-only RAW payload.

Use your Lightroom to manage the edits against the RAW. LR is a database used to maintain a pointer to the image files and a history of the step-by-steps of every edit against each file in the database. The LR software dynamically applies these edit instructions and displays the results within the LR editor. Or, when you export the image, those instructions are used to create a new target output image file. The original image files are never changed / never at a risk of being changed in a LR environment, and RAW files cannot be changed by the technical implementation of these read-only files.

gdotts

OK Thanks!

gdotts

Question...
D800 manual says FX has 3 settings so you don't have to be stuck with the one large size.

large7360 x 4912.
You also can use ....
mediun 5520 x 3680
small 3680 x 2436
Will these be quality to work with due to their smaller size, or will some things be worse the smaller the size gets?

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

You bought a 36MP camera, because you felt it was better than any camera you used to own.

You could have bought a 20MP camera like the D500 with resolution around 5520x3680.

A 9MP camera could only be bought used, more than a decade old, and could have cost less than $200.

There's a link above about how and why to resize your digital images during the final export processing from Lightroom. That is the only time ever to lower the pixel resolution of an image file.