I've been experimenting with the Picture Control settings on the D90 & thought I'd share some of my results. I've created over thirty custom settings, mostly full color, although I also played with a few Cyanotype & Sepia options as well.
In all of the settings, I kept both the Sharpening and Brightness set to Zero, which for Sharpening means no sharpening, and for Brightness means neutral.
I prefer to capture the maximum amount of image information in camera, and save color adjustment and sharpening for post-processing. I found that altering the Contrast setting above the minimum quickly & irrevocably sent a large amount of data into the extreme right & left of the histogram. I shot JPEG's of the same Kodak Color Control patches & compared them in Adobe Lightroom on a calibrated monitor, which confirmed that my favorite Custom Setting was ColorC1S1H4.
In Picture Control, the Contrast, Saturation and Hue and (in toned Black & White) Tonality settings have 7 steps between minimum and maximum. I focused my experimenting upon Contrast, Saturation & Hue settings for color. Picture Control also offers "Filter" settings in Black & White mode: Off, Yellow, Orange, Red & Green.
In order to make it simple to manage custom settings, I abbreviated the names in the following manner
Color_ModeContrast#Saturation#Hue#
or
B&W_ModeContrast#FilterColorTonality#
For example:
ColorC1S4H7 (Color, Contrast=1, Saturation=4, Hue=7)
and
SepiaC1FyT4 (Sepia-toned Black & White, Contrast=1, Filter=Yellow, Tonality=4)
Using this nomenclature, it's much easier to select a setting without having to wonder which is more saturated: "Portrait" or "Vivid."
I dug up one of my ancient, 32MB SD cards (good for nothing else in the gigabyte era) and loaded all of my settings onto it. Unfortunately the D90 will only support 9 Custom Settings at a time, but it does allow you to transfer settings from an SD Card to the camera, and vice versa. The proper folder location is:
SD Card:\NIKON\CUSTOMPC
Have fun with the attached Zip file of Custom Settings!
In all of the settings, I kept both the Sharpening and Brightness set to Zero, which for Sharpening means no sharpening, and for Brightness means neutral.
I prefer to capture the maximum amount of image information in camera, and save color adjustment and sharpening for post-processing. I found that altering the Contrast setting above the minimum quickly & irrevocably sent a large amount of data into the extreme right & left of the histogram. I shot JPEG's of the same Kodak Color Control patches & compared them in Adobe Lightroom on a calibrated monitor, which confirmed that my favorite Custom Setting was ColorC1S1H4.
In Picture Control, the Contrast, Saturation and Hue and (in toned Black & White) Tonality settings have 7 steps between minimum and maximum. I focused my experimenting upon Contrast, Saturation & Hue settings for color. Picture Control also offers "Filter" settings in Black & White mode: Off, Yellow, Orange, Red & Green.
In order to make it simple to manage custom settings, I abbreviated the names in the following manner
Color_ModeContrast#Saturation#Hue#
or
B&W_ModeContrast#FilterColorTonality#
For example:
ColorC1S4H7 (Color, Contrast=1, Saturation=4, Hue=7)
and
SepiaC1FyT4 (Sepia-toned Black & White, Contrast=1, Filter=Yellow, Tonality=4)
Using this nomenclature, it's much easier to select a setting without having to wonder which is more saturated: "Portrait" or "Vivid."
I dug up one of my ancient, 32MB SD cards (good for nothing else in the gigabyte era) and loaded all of my settings onto it. Unfortunately the D90 will only support 9 Custom Settings at a time, but it does allow you to transfer settings from an SD Card to the camera, and vice versa. The proper folder location is:
SD Card:\NIKON\CUSTOMPC
Have fun with the attached Zip file of Custom Settings!