Hi Tom, I read your comments and can only think I could have written the same thing. I also have a D500 and I have paired it with 3 lenses. Rokinon 14 mm, Nikon 16-80 and Tamron 100-400. I am headed to Norway to photograph the Northern Lights. I also don’t know how to post process. I shoot in Raw and JPEG. There are some really good suggestions here from some experienced photographers. I don’t even know what some of their abbreviations mean! I just know taking photographs makes me happy. I am continuing to practice low light photography and how to change my settings quickly in low light. The camera itself is a complicated piece of equipment. I keep reminding myself to just breathe. Practice until it feels like muscle memory. Don’t sweat learning PP now, concentrate on what you are doing! Which is some lovely work. You will have lots of time when you return.

Hi friends. I enjoy my daily dose of Ugly Hedgehog, and value the expertise, opinions, and humor I find here. I have a dilemma, and would appreciate your thoughts. Bottom line...am I too old (age 70) to learn, use, and benefit from Lightroom? Put another way, should I shoot RAW + JPEG or just JPEG on my upcoming (mid-August 2023) trip to Brazil to shoot wildlife? A little background-- following a less than stellar photography performance on a trip to Costa Rica this past February, I vowed to improve my skills, and equipment, in an attempt to better deal with low-light (and other light challenges) photography in the wild. To this end, I acquired a Nikon D500 and a 500mm prime lens (the cheap one!) and have been practicing every day to shoot in manual mode, especially in low light. I feel that I am making progress, so I started looking ahead to my trip to Brazil, and the nuts and bolts of shooting and processing the photos I anticipate taking. As I sit here this morning, I am overwhelmed at the prospect of learning Lightroom (or some other PP program) prior to my trip, and am starting to question whether I should even try. After several hours of research (including in the post-processing forum) my mind is boggled. Heck, I am not even sure if I should try to use the Classic version or the cloud version. Right now my gut feeling is that JPEG images are more than sufficient for my needs (I have a website/blog that I created and maintain for my grandchildren and other friends who are interested in archaeology and birds), and I should devote my time to just taking the best JPEG images that I can at point of capture. I feel that I still have most of my wits about me, but I find myself doubting that I have sufficient gray matter to shoot and process RAW. What do you think this old man should do? (PS- attached is a "practice" photo I took a few days ago at a local park on a cloudy day)

Hi friends. I enjoy my daily dose of Ugly Hedgehog, and value the expertise, opinions, and humor I find here. I have a dilemma, and would appreciate your thoughts. Bottom line...am I too old (age 70) to learn, use, and benefit from Lightroom? Put another way, should I shoot RAW + JPEG or just JPEG on my upcoming (mid-August 2023) trip to Brazil to shoot wildlife? A little background-- following a less than stellar photography performance on a trip to Costa Rica this past February, I vowed to improve my skills, and equipment, in an attempt to better deal with low-light (and other light challenges) photography in the wild. To this end, I acquired a Nikon D500 and a 500mm prime lens (the cheap one!) and have been practicing every day to shoot in manual mode, especially in low light. I feel that I am making progress, so I started looking ahead to my trip to Brazil, and the nuts and bolts of shooting and processing the photos I anticipate taking. As I sit here this morning, I am overwhelmed at the prospect of learning Lightroom (or some other PP program) prior to my trip, and am starting to question whether I should even try. After several hours of research (including in the post-processing forum) my mind is boggled. Heck, I am not even sure if I should try to use the Classic version or the cloud version. Right now my gut feeling is that JPEG images are more than sufficient for my needs (I have a website/blog that I created and maintain for my grandchildren and other friends who are interested in archaeology and birds), and I should devote my time to just taking the best JPEG images that I can at point of capture. I feel that I still have most of my wits about me, but I find myself doubting that I have sufficient gray matter to shoot and process RAW. What do you think this old man should do? (PS- attached is a "practice" photo I took a few days ago at a local park on a cloudy day)

At this point, skip the software and keep working on your shooting skills, especially your camera set-up. The colors and pose of this image are wonderful. Alas, the soft focus can be traced to your set-up.

Change from AF-S to AF-C and practice tracking subjects with the shutter half-pressed, to continuously engage the AF. Better yet, configure back-button focus (BBF) and use your thumb to hold focus and your index finger to release the shutter, with your thumb actively pressing / holding the assigned BBF.

Next: learn, practice and achieve the finger dexterity to move / position a selected AF point onto the subject's eye, when possible, or at least the face. This image has a centered AF point on the body, not the eye. If 1 AF point to too hard to track the eye of a moving subject, use any of the 'zone' options, such as a 9-AF box or the slightly larger 12-AF box. Get that box over the subject eyes, the camera will do the rest. That 'dexterity' means changing the AF location with the camera held to your eye in a shooting position.

If you're going to be a JPEG shooter, not a post-processor, change from Adobe RGB to sRGB. Otherwise, you have to process every image before sharing, if for nothing more than correcting the colorspace to the online standard.

As a JPEG shooter, customize your Standard picture control. Bump the sharpening to +4.0 or +5.0. Add some saturation, say +0.5 or +1.0. You have clarity at +1.0, consider Contrast at +0.5 to +1.0. Test how these changes impact your images and fine-tune further, if desired.

This result shows you're in the neighborhood of success. Up your game with these setting updates and technique adjustments. Let the camera make you successful and you're justified in skipping the post processing downstream work.

When you become one with your camera, the magic begins.