Some new ones uploaded today from Alfie’s picture control collection.
UPDATE: 28TH APRIL 2010
I have made a few new picture controls today:
- HighContrastColour01
- HighContrastColour01
- DarkSepia
- HighContrastMono
Download these new ones here. Check the instructions and also the comments further down this page for advice on installation. And, enjoy! I’ve been getting into the whole idea lately of using these settings just like I used to use specific kinds of film for the way they rendered colour or mono. It’s a great idea just to decide to go out and shoot on one Picture Control and for me feels just like loading a specific film into the camera and shooting with it. You start looking for things and scenes that will work well in that mode. Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Most digital cameras have ways of altering the colour, shooting in black and white and even in sepia and other tones. These can be handy ways of getting great results in-camera when either you don’t want to do lots of post-processing onthe images or even when you shoot in RAW, to get some great effects.
The ones I use the most tend to be the black and white ones, for when I want higher contrast images or want to simulate the effects of using coloured filters like I used to in the film days. But Nikon’s DX Mode controls are also superb with DX Mode 1 giving great skin tones, so there are links to them here too.
As for how you install them, all instructions are provided below – courtesy of a link to the Nikon Global Imaging website.
For those of you using Nikon’s ViewNX software, there is a great area of that program called ‘Picture Control Utility’, which allows you to save, edit and install Picture Controls to your camera. Go up to the ‘File’ item on the menu, then pull down to ‘Open Picture Control Utility’
It also allows you to edit the picture controls on the controls on the computer and then install those new, modified ones to a memory-card and then into your camera.
My Picture Controls
Below you’ll find a link to a ZIP file, which contains eight custome picture controls that I have made for use in my D700. They should work fine in any Nikon camera that accepts Picture Controls.
They are a range of colour and black and white controls, handily named according to the subject-matter or effect: e.g. THINGS1, PEOPLE1, WILD [crazy vivid colours, not wildlife], MONOCHROME2 etc etc.
Here’s a shot I took on our mystery tour walk last Monday, in Okurayama, with four of my picture controls applied as well as Nikon’s ‘Standard’ control.
Download Alfie’s Picture Controls then unzip the folder on your computer. You will have a folder called NIKON.
Copy the “NIKON” folder directly to the top (root) level of the removable disk. The camera will not recognize the optional Picture Controls if the “NIKON” folder is inside another folder. Once the copying has finished and whilst you still have the memory card in the card-reader of your computer, open the “NIKON” folder and check that “.NOP” files are all copied.
Follow this link to the rest of Nikon’s own instructions for the install to your camera, from Point ’4′ in the list.
Have fun and if you can, send in some shots you’ve taken using them.
For the rest of the Nikon Picture Controls, use the links below:
- Download the ‘Portrait’ picture control
- Download the ‘Landscape’ picture control
- Download the ‘D2X’ picture controls
| Copy the “NIKON” folder directly to the top (root) level of the removable disk. The camera will not recognize the optional Picture Controls if the “NIKON” folder is inside another folder. | |
| Once the copying has finished, open the “NIKON” folder and check that “.NOP” files are all copied. |
March 26th, 2010 at 11:17 pm
thats a nifty little thing right there!!! the 5d mkII doesn’t have something like this, does it??!!!
March 26th, 2010 at 11:18 pm
It has picture controls Jono.. but not sure you can download them, edit them, tweak them and put them back into the camera.
March 27th, 2010 at 5:00 am
Canon has a picture style editor downloadable for free from Canon.com website which allows you to apply different styles(color,hue,sharpening,contrast,etc..) to your RAW files.
I have 5DmkII and if you use EOS utility you can set your C1,C2,C3 mode with your own picture style profiles.
On the website you can also download some styles already edited by Canon like Nostalgia effect,Autumn foliage effect,Twilight effect and some more..
Hope this can be useful for Canon users
cheers guys
March 27th, 2010 at 7:46 am
I knew you could set them on the camera and edit them. Wasnt aware of the other items you mentioned. Cheers Gabriele.
March 31st, 2010 at 9:40 am
yeah – even the std in camera ones allow you to set the degree of contrast etc. i personally don’t see the point of stuff like this. think it’s gimmicky.
March 31st, 2010 at 9:47 am
White Balance tweaking, contrast tweaking, colour tweaking, coloured filters; gimmicky? Possibly. But all of this stuff is just mirroring what you did on film with other techniques; different kinds of film for indoors and outdoors; filters to change contrast, warm-up or cool-down colour; increase the agitation in the developer to increase contrast on b+w films; shoot Fuji cos its good for greens and blues, Kodak cos it was good for reds, Agfa cos it was good for blue etc etc. I don’t see the difference.
March 31st, 2010 at 1:14 pm
that can all be done in post if you shhot raw – they should spend their research budegt on improving things that make the process of taking a pic easier – eg AF, viewfinder crop options etc. arguably the best full frame (m9) has hardly any of these gimmicks!
April 1st, 2010 at 10:43 am
True… and when they go out and shoot 1000 shots of their best friend’s wedding weekend and hen party, then have to process them all?? That’s when you might want to cut down on the amount of post-pro and get it right on the day.
I cant write all of the stuff I want to write about photography all at once, Charlie. Lots of advice I give people on lessons which I am slowly getting down on ‘paper’, which includes choices of AF, viewfinder etc etc.
But, about this point of picture controls: you often talk a lot about getting it right ‘in the camera’, cos that – after all- is what you have to do with film. Modifying and setting up these picture controls is actually a way for digital shooters to do MORE work in their camera, instead of doing it all in post. Or maybe they dont have enough memory cards on them to shoot their whole holiday on RAW but want a way of mixing it up in the camera to get some different results.
I have been on jobs where setting the right picture control on location has saved me hours in post-pro. Different strokes for different folks mate.
April 5th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
Nikon vs Canon. I will take Nikon any day of the week. They rule in the Digital SLR market hands down.
April 8th, 2010 at 3:46 am
Alfie, These don’t seem to work. When I download your zip file it contains 8 .NCP files each 4KB in size. The Nikon ones are .NOP files and are 32KB in size. Is the zip file correct?
April 8th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Hmm.. sorry about that. Will take a look and sort them out when I am next back at the home PC.
April 10th, 2010 at 6:08 am
James. Fella commenting on this photo in my Flickr stream seemed to have got on fine… maybe a D3 issue?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alfiegoodrich/4503692423/
April 10th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
For the D3s, I was able to import them into my camera only after putting all the files into a subdirectory called \NIKON\CUSTOMPC\ on the card (as suggested on the Flickr thread you mentioned).
April 11th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Perhaps to further clarify, .NOP files (like the picture conntrols from Nikon) need to be put in a \NIKON\ directory. .NCP files, like those from Alfie’s camera, need to be put in a \NIKON\CUSTOMPC\ directory. At least this is the logic that worked for me.
April 13th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Thanks Justin.
April 16th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
Alfie, I never used these when I used to shoot JPG because I didn’t feel like committing to a particular look in camera. I’d rather use actions later in photoshop to process each image individually to taste. Of course it would take some time, but then again I am not a pro, so it really didn’t matter to me…
Now that I have been shooting RAW I haven’t even considered those mode because I was under the assumption that they wouldn’t affect the RAW file. Can you explain this part to me as if I was 5 years old? How do camera settings can affect a RAW image?
April 17th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Sure, I understand. But, this part of your comment “I never used these when I used to shoot JPG because I didn’t feel like committing to a particular look in camera.” is a lit misnomer, as JPEG is a compressed file format, with no roll-back. So, whether you leave the camera on ‘standard’ picture control or use something else, you are by nature of the format committing to a look of some kind in the camera, whether it be the ‘normal’ one or something more exotic.
Why do this in RAW? The picture controls I made, I loaded back into Nikon’s software so that I can use them on other RAW files that may not have been shot with them in the first place. That’s kinda useful. But the main usefulness is to save time with workflow when I have lots of pics to edit for a client or for myself. Like I am writing this while batch converting to JPEG a bunch of images to make a new gallery on this site, for an article about being out in the rain yesterday. I got the shots using the in-camera picture setings I liked (just like choosing to load my film with Fuji RD50 rather than Agfachrome, for the look that Fuji gives the greens, for instance) so that all I need to do is to ‘process’ them in the simplest possible way; i.e. convert file format and resize for web.
Think of me shooting with in-camera picture controls or not as like the difference between shooting chrome or neg.
April 17th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
I know, it does sound absurd, doesn’t it? I guess the problem there was that when I used JPG only I realized the limitations I had in photoshop making dramatic changes in color balance and curves. Keep in mind that I hadn’t really discovered the advantages of RAW, in other words I wasn’t enlightened yet.
Then I found RAW and realized that I had SO MUCH control in the post processing phase. I guess this brought me to ignore completely what was happening in the camera settings (except aperture / exposure / DOF, of course) I don’t even care about white balance that much since I am color blind and I prefer to tweak it in photoshop or ACR using the numeric tools that are provided there.
But this article of yours was eye-opening. You brought back the feel of choosing a film BEFORE going out and shooting… I will have to experiment on this one, my friend!
thanks for sharing!
April 17th, 2010 at 8:27 pm
Windows file…
doesn’t work here… sad thing…
thanks anyway…
April 30th, 2010 at 5:20 am
hola alfie, sabes porque lightroom no reconoce estos controles?
April 30th, 2010 at 5:20 am
hi alfie, you know why Lightroom does not recognize these controls?
April 30th, 2010 at 8:12 am
They are not for Lightroom, Roberto. They go in the Nikon camera and are used for even more control through Nikon’s View NX with Picture Control Utility. These are all about the camera not external software though. If you load them into your camera and shoot as JPEG, the look of any of the controls will be permanent. If you shoot RAW then in View NX or Capture NX you can switch between any of the controls. Using them is, for me, all about getting results in the camera and not in any external application.
June 10th, 2010 at 5:08 am
Hello Alfie,
First of all, I recently discovered your site and I’m hooked. Congratulations!
I just LOVE Tokyo, by the way (been there twice)
As to the topic of this post, I couldn’t agree more with you when you said “Think of me shooting with in-camera picture controls or not as like the difference between shooting chrome or neg.”
That’s exactly the way I see it too; and, coming from shooting slides almost exclusively back in the ’90s, that’s why I stick to JPEGs. I just like to think before shooting, and get it right in camera. To me, working with/around the constraints of a particular ‘picture control’ (or actually ‘film simulation mode’, as Fuji calls them on my S5) is a bonus creativity-wise – just like it was when I had to choose whether to shoot Velvia, or Kodachrome 25, or Kodachrome 200.
Cheers,
Marco.
June 15th, 2010 at 5:41 am
Hi, Alfie, it seems that my D-90 can’t read the files. I’m following Nikon’s instructions based on a D3. They refer to .NOP files, but your files are .NCP. When I try to import in NOikon picture control it says “no custom picture control files found”. Any idea? Gisle
June 15th, 2010 at 6:10 am
I found out! Have to use subfolder Nikon/Picturecontrols.
June 26th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Hi, Alfie, I just created a set using your picture controls! You will find them here http://www.flickr.com/photos/gisle78/
June 27th, 2010 at 9:53 am
Thanks Gisle. Had a quick look; some interesting shots you have there.
July 5th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
Do you know if i can put these setting on my D60 (I don’t think so, I didn’t find it on manual). Thanks for your theaching and for the beautiful shots of Tokyo, I love it (I staied there two years ago).
Mauro
July 5th, 2010 at 9:20 pm
I think you can. Best Google it and make sure.
July 6th, 2010 at 12:32 am
I read the manual with more accurancy and I find it….thanks. Tonight I’ll set my camera. Just an info, I used to convert the Raw file with Camera Raw and then I used the camera calibration (an example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mippol/4748708240/in/photostream/); so, now with your setting this step is not necessary, right?
Thanks again.
July 15th, 2010 at 5:04 pm
My mistake…..It’s impossible to import a new setting on D60. With this camera yuo can ONLY change some setting but not import any else. I have to change it….maybe a D300 or a new D400 (when it will be available).
July 15th, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Shame. However, re: upgrading….I’d hang on and get a full-frame camera. To be honest there is no point upgrading to another DX chip camera unless you have a cupboard-full of DX lenses. The benefits of FX are huge. Used D700s are now very reasonable and you can find almost new examples in the shops here in Tokyo.
July 16th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
Thanks Alfie. I will think about D700.
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:53 am
It works on my D90. Thanks a bunch ^___^
August 9th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
Hello Alfie
I like the Things 3 Controlls. any suggetions suitable for Portrait,Landsap and other general photography in these controlls?
Anoop
August 9th, 2010 at 11:38 pm
You’ll probably just have to experiment yourself, Anoop. They are all named sort of conveniently; ‘People1′, ‘people2′ and Things etc. Some of the ‘things’ and ‘high contrast colour’ are also good for people but use the WB in Auto, hold the WB button down and turn the front dial (D300 and D700) to set b5 or b6. Dialling-in blue helps counter the nasty yellow tone you will otherwise get for skin.
Nikon’s own D2X modes 1 and 2 are also very good for people.
Thanks mate.
August 11th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Hello Alfie
I had tried to extract Your Picture controls and i didnt extracted to individual files and i haved copied it my CF card but i couldnt find it on my camera when i tried to Load them. my question is normally the Nikon picture controls are somewhere 31KB but yours are just 1 KB can you help me?
Thanks
Anoop
anoop@lsc-kw.com
August 12th, 2010 at 9:25 am
Anoop… check the comments at the bottom of this article, as there are a few pointers there from people who have done the operation.
August 31st, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Alfie,
Thanks for sharing these – ever since loading your monochrome picture control into the D700, i don’t really use any of the color profiles anymore. It helps to “think” in the finished medium, instead of making it on the computer later on.
Also enjoying the 50/1.2 very much. Shooting manual focus, manual exposure, “normal” lens, SOOC – not the original reason why I bought a D700 but it’s really challenging and highly satisfying.
Cheers,
Edmund