Nikon Picture Control System (PCS) Part 1

Today, heard some of my colleagues discussing about picture of cxxxx look more interesting and attractive compared to Nikon.

I am totally disagree and in this blog, I would like to explain the basic tuning of the powerful SPC from all Nikon dSLR.

Nikon PCS has total of 6 type of picture controls:- Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Potrair, Landscape and Monochrome. In each PC, you can tune up to 5 parameters:- Sharpnening, Contrast, Brightness, Saturation and Hue.

You know best of what kind of feel of picture to be given to viewer, it affects the viewer's emotion as well.

 Look at the grid below to understand what is the default setting for each picture control on the contrast and saturation. You may create up to 9 customize picture control at your own preference.

For example, I took this photo with STANDARD

By choosing VIVID and tune the contrast and saturation by +3, the same picture give total different feel. Seems attractive huh??

Let's look at another example, I took this with STANDARD.

STANDARD

If I chose VIVID and tune the contrast and saturation by +3, here how it looks,

VIVID, Contract & Saturation +3

Looks more lively?? But in fact, it losses lot of details!!

STANDARD

 

VIVID

The dark area totally blown out! No detail!

Believe it or not? The size for STANDARD is 1.22MB while the VIVID is 1.35MB!! Increases by 10% more!! Which means you actually need more space to get NO/LESSER detail... sigh!