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D300 User's Guide: August 2008 Top of D300 Users Guide D300 Review More Nikon Reviews
NEW: Nikon D300 User's Guide for iPhone and iPod. 12 December 2009
Want free live phone support? In the USA, call (800) NIKON-UX, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. How to Get Here Select the Retouch Menu by pressing MENU, moving to the left and then up or down to select the brush icon second from the bottom. You'll then see RETOUCH MENU on the top of the color LCD. You also can hit OK while an image is playing. What it Sets This is a silly menu that lets you twiddle with images you've already shot. The originals are unaltered. The D300 creates new versions of the images and saves them. Concatenation: The D300 is sneaky enough to know if a file was created with these trick modes, and often won't let you apply the same filter twice. You can concatenate different filters. If your original image is an NEF or TIFF, it will be saved as a FINE LARGE JPG. Otherwise, it's saved the same way as the original image. Firmware Defect: The new images are saved with a file number one more than the most recent image. The EXIF create time is unaltered, so you'll have to sort images by create time if you can. This defect means that the file numbers of the newly created versions are scrambled from the originals. If you're playing with the most recent image the file numbers are close, but if you're playing with an earlier file, its file number will be unrelated to the original. The correct way to have done this would be to retain the same file name and append -edit, -edit1, -edit2, etc. For instance, if you make a new version of DCS_0123.jpg, the new file might be called DSC_5837.jpg. Good luck sorting them out! If done correctly, the new version would be named DSC_0123-edit.jpg. The D300 is improved from earlier cameras. At least the files all begin the same way as the original file, regardless of how you set it. Pity the D40 owners who use these Retouch gimmicks, because the D40 changes the file prefixes as well! Here's what each does. D-Lighting top This lightens dark shadows. It doesn't touch highlights. You have three levels of lightening: Low, Normal, and High. If you set ADR to NORM for shooting as I do, you shouldn't need this. Remember: shadows are supposed to be dark. Red-Eye Correction top This attempts to rectify flash-induced red eyes. This filter is sneaky enough to know if you used flash or not to make the image, and won't let you use this filter if you didn't use flash. I've never had a problem with red-eye with my D300, so all the better. When I was able to cause red-eye, this filter only corrected half of the eyes! Trim top This creates cropped versions of images. No pixels are moved or changed in size. Trim removes unwanted pixels from the sides of an image and saves a smaller image. Monochrome top This creates black-and-white images. It has three modes: Black-and-White Sepia (Brown-and-white) Cyanotype (Blue-and-White) Have fun! Filter Effects top This creates images with warmer colors. You've got your choice of: Skylight Very slightly pinker. Warm Filter Slightly warmer (more orange). The Warm filter usually improves casual images. You can forget the skylight filter. Color Balance top This one's slick. It calls up a better control panel than Photoshop's color balance tool, which dates from the 1980s. Nikon's tool reminds me of what we have on million-dollar Hollywood telecine color correction machines used to color correct motion pictures. The Nikon D300 shows three histograms (reminiscent of Tektronix' WFM700 waveform monitors) and the D300's Up/Down/Left/Right key becomes the color correction track ball. Click it left and right to alter blue-red, and up down for magenta - green. If you have something neutral, watch the waveforms, oops, histograms, until they are about equal. Left - right on the Up/Down/Left/Right key slides the red and blue in opposite directions, and green - magenta slides the red and blue equally left or right. The green stays put. This allows you to correct in any color, and if you want to warm an image (that I do most often in Photoshop), allows more flexibility than the fixed Warm filter above. Side-by-side comparison top This lets you compare an original image with versions that have been messed with above. My D300 User's Guide continues below. I support my growing family through this website. This guide is free to read online, but copyrighted and formally registered. If you haven't helped yet and would like to save or make a printed copy of this article for your camera bag, please send me $5.00 for each complete or partial copy that you print or save, for personal use only. Others charge $29.99 for crappier information, and with your honesty I can continue to offer these guides online for less. If you bought your D300 by clicking through my links, then you've saved money and also helped me write this guide. Thank you and please enjoy it. It's great people like you, and those who help me otherwise, who allow me to keep adding to this site for everyone's benefit. The biggest help is to use these links to Adorama, Amazon, B&H, Ritz and J&R when you get your goodies. It saves you money and is a huge help to me. These places have the best prices and service, which is why I've used them since before this website existed. I recommend them all personally. Thanks for reading!
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