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Set Picture Control
Nikon’s Picture Control styles allow you to choose your own sharpness, contrast, color
saturation, and hue settings and apply them to your images as they are taken. If you
have used an older Nikon camera with the Optimize Image option, you’ll recall that it
offered five fixed settings to choose from (Normal, Softer, Vivid, More Vivid, Portrait),
plus Black-and-White, and a single Custom entry that allowed you to specify sharpen-
ing, tone compensation (contrast), color mode, saturation, and hue. Yes, that’s right—
you got one Custom Settings slot, and although you could create your own custom
settings on your computer and upload them to the camera, the five predefined settings
and single set of custom parameters was quite a limitation.
Happily, the Nikon D7000 sweeps those limitations aside with the Picture Control
styles. There are only six predefined styles offered, which Nikon calls Original Picture
Controls: Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Monochrome, Portrait, and Landscape. However,
you can edit the settings of any of those styles so they better suit your taste. But that’s
only the beginning; the D7000 also offers nine (count ‘em) user-definable Picture
Control styles, which you can edit to your heart’s content, assign descriptive names, and
deploy at the press of a few buttons. Even better, you can copy these styles to a memory
card, edit them on your computer, and reload them into your camera at any time. So,
effectively, you can have a lot more than nine custom Picture Control styles available:
the nine in your camera, as well as a virtually unlimited library of user-defined styles
that you have stored on memory cards.
Moreover, Nikon insists that these styles have been standardized to the extent that if
you re-use a style created for one camera (say, your D7000) and load it into a different
compatible camera (such as a Nikon D3s), you’ll get substantially the same rendition.
In a way, Picture Control styles are a bit like using a particular film. Do you want the
look of Kodak Ektachrome or Fujifilm Velvia? Load the appropriate style created by
you—or anyone else.
Using and managing Picture Control styles is accomplished using two different menu
entries, Set Picture Control, which allows you to choose an existing style and to edit the
predefined styles that Nikon provides, and Manage Picture Control, discussed in the
next section, which gives you the capability of creating and editing user-defined styles.
David Busch’s Nikon D7000 Guide to Digital SLR Photography250
A WHITE BALANCE LIBRARY
Consider dedicating a low-capacity memory card to stow a selection of images taken
under a variety of lighting conditions. If you want to “recycle” one of the color tempera-
tures you’ve stored, insert the card and load one of those images into your choice of preset
slots d-1 to d-4, as described above.