Nikon announced a new image processing product today, Nikon NX. Free to download, and seems to do all of what one would want to produce nice images. Being a Nikon person, I just had to download it and see “wassup…”
One of my foundational concepts for raw processing is the ability to see the image in “ggbutcher-neutral”, that is, demosaiced RGB with camera white balance and a basic matrix colorspace conversion. No tone shenanigans. Nikon has long touted a Neutral picture control, so I decided to see what, if any differences there were between it and my notion of neutral. 'Ere y’go:
Foreground top-left is Nikon NX, background bottom-right is rawproc. I circled both the NX Neutral picture control selection, and the tone curve it took to roughly duplicate NX Neutral from ggbutcher-neutral.
In a car, auto or manual transmission, there’s a well defined thing called Neutral. Not so in raw processing software…
I can imagine Nikon’s marketing department thinking, “if we show people what their cameras are actually producing, they’ll complain, and switch to <brand>”.
Exactly. Thing is, there is a certain amount of processing required to get to a viewable image, the question becomes, where should be the starting point for discretionary editing? Scene-linear may seem like a good place to start, but even that is fraught with ambiguity if you consider the color transform. I actually don’t do it until the end, but I look at it through the display transform all the way through the pipeline (rawproc allows one to select any tool for display, whether it makes sense or not). And, as I’ve demonstrated in the SSF threads, one has pretty wide discretion in how that transform is done with camera profiles.
I’m not kvetching for a common definition of “neutral”, I’m really just illustrating what we each might consider in that for our own uses…
Or the maximum brigthness of your screen. And the viewing conditions. Editing an image with “the perfect pipeline” will turn out different when you edit in the dark at night with a low screen-brightness or at daytime with a higher screen brightness. Color-coordinates can be spot on calibrated, but the editing-results will differ. Most likely not only in picture brightness and contrast but potentially also in the color edits one makes.
To be frank, Nikon does not say the Neutral ‘picture control’ has no enhancements:
Delivers images that are closest to the original scene. To reproduce the subject’s unique colors and gradations with maximum authenticity, avoid extreme enhancements. Compared to Standard, Neutral gives a more soothing overall impression. With Neutral, you can adjust sharpening, contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue (coloration) individually.
The one that’s ‘even more neutral’ is called Flat:
Flat provides minimal dramatization while preserving the material characteristics. Compared with Neutral, the finish shows less contrast and does not look as lively as it is. Flat is most often used when shooting video. When you add adjustment to the video after shooting, overblown highlights, blocked up shadows, or excessive color saturations rarely occur, thus enabling rich tonality of both brightness and color tones. With the wealth of information from highlight to shadow areas, this mode is recommended when you are shooting a scene with post-shoot adjusting in mind.
The Flat Picture Control was added with the Nikon D810 DSLR and can be found in cameras introduced after the D810. To adjust the Flat Picture Control on images, use Picture Control Utility 2 which can be found in Nikon Capture NX-D or Nikon ViewNX2 software programs (as of June 26, 2014) or Nikon ViewNX-i software (as of March 2015).
Hmmm, didn’t see Flat in my Z 6 until I scrolled past the first page (first page!) of Picture Controls… I’ll have to do the same comparison when I get upstairs to my Windows computer.
In doing this, I’m starting to think that finding the tone curve that matches a Picture Control would be helpful in having the camera process embedded JPEGs similarly to my batch proofs. If one looks at the screenshot I posted above, one will note that the filmic A, B, C, and D parameters are visible; what I would do is put them in the batch processing toolchain. I still have the capability to regard the “ggbutcher-neutral” state by selecting for display the last tool in the rawproc chain before tone curve(s). But, doing this would make my thumbnails look like the proofs…
Canon has neutral and faithful “picture styles”. The latter is the nicer neutral, while the former is boring but still not “neutral enough”. A perceptive and nerdy user could make it “more neutral”. To me, neutral is defined by a person or manufacturer. There is no such thing as a neutraler image. Three other considerations need to be made when considering the concept of neutral. Picture style (or control, etc.)
1 Doesn’t factor in other camera settings, physical or in terms of processing. 2 Although non-linear, compensates for odd properties of the true camera neutral output. 3 Conforms to the manufacture standard and branding. (E.g., Nikon uses Sony sensors and other components that aren’t manufactured by them. Nikon wouldn’t want to produce Sony-like photos.)
I didn’t put in any exposure modification; it’s all in the depicted curve. The shadows are in a curved toe, which is not visible when the full curve is displayed.
is called Flat: