Nikon Capture to Lightroom

[Tim Ayers]

I've been a very long time user of Nikon Capture (latterly with my D800) and now I'm moving to Lightroom. I believe my "Landscape" (Vivid) Nikon Camera preset will not be read, therefore which settings would you recommend to give my photographs a similar look (contrasty and colourful), obviously as a serious photographer I believe this is realistic and pleasing to the eye.

Thanks for your time 

[Guest]

https://photographylife.com/how-to-get-accurate-nikon-colors-in-lightroom(scroll down to 3/4)

[MDM]

I don't know how a Nikon preset will translate into Lightroom. There is no Landscape Vivid profile - it's either Landscape or Vivid. However, I would recommend that, as a serious photographer, you get yourself an X-Rite Color Checker Passport or Color Checker Clasic and produce your own camera profiles. This is very simple to do in the supplied X-Rite software but even better with Adobe's DNG profile editor for more control. I did this a while back and wished I'd been doing it for years.

[Colin Houck Photography]

My two-cents: Shoot RAW (Nikon NEF), and in ACR you can get the effect you're looking for by using the "clarity" slider. Also, Google's NIK has some decent contrast plugins in their CEP4 set.

[MDM]

Clarity is also a sharpener and can cause some unwanted effects if not used in moderation - over used together with sharpening in LR/ACR is probably far more likely to cause a QC failure than a teeny bit of CA.

[spacecadet]

Your images don't look particularly "vivid" to my eye. You might just experiment with a clarity and vibrance import preset. Vibrance is a bit gentler that saturation in LR, a bit less shouty.

I don't find a bit of clarity to be a problem with default sharpening- even at 100 to get through the Dubai haze.

[MDM]

Your images don't look particularly "vivid" to my eye. You might just experiment with a clarity and vibrance import preset. Vibrance is a bit gentler that saturation in LR, a bit less shouty.

I don't find a bit of clarity to be a problem with default sharpening- even at 100 to get through the Dubai haze.

 

Clarity, however it is dressed up, is a sharpener and can definitely affect image quality if used excessively - 100% is way over the top.

[spacecadet]

You're right in general of course but it worked for me on those few hot days with a lot of airborne dust. I even called the preset dubaicreek. But that was in the jpeg days and I haven't used it since. I wouldn't dream of it now- 20 or 30 at most.

[MDM]

Thanks. I'm not being pedantic. It is perhaps not generally realised that Clarity is a sharpener and can seriously degrade an image if overdosed.

 

In relation to the original question, I think it is far better to play with the colours only and leave the pixel relationships alone (e.g. clarity) to avoid sharpening artifacts. There are various ways of getting a particular colour look in Lightroom - camera profiles are one way, another is to create import presets with the colour controls, yet another is to set development defaults and all three can be used together.

[Colin Houck Photography]

Clarity is also a sharpener and can cause some unwanted effects if not used in moderation - over used together with sharpening in LR/ACR is probably far more likely to cause a QC failure than a teeny bit of CA.

Moderation is key, no doubt. There has never been an instance where I've moved the clarity slider past 25%, and even that is on the very rare occasion - usually below 10%.

[Tim Ayers]

Thanks I've learnt a lot about the best way to handle processing in LR, I'll try and build an fairly mild import preset that I can 'develop'.

How do you deal with image sharpening, I believe export sharpening is set separately and should be zero and how do you handle noise reduction in LR.

[Allan Bell]

Use the luminance noise and colour noise sliders. Carefully.

 

Allan

[spacecadet]

Some RAW sharpening and colour NR is  necessary and there's an import default of 25 in LR on each. I add a bit of luminance NR as standard but it's only really needed at higher ISO.

[MDM]

It depends on the camera-lens and the ISO. In the past sharpening was supposedly a no-no although most people seem to apply some sharpening and word has it that Alamy doesn't mind LR default capture sharpning as spacecadet says. For D800 series cameras, default colour noise reduction (again as spacecadet says) and no luminance NR is necessary at low ISO. I start to add some luminance NR at ISO 400 and a bit more at 800 but this does affect sharpness so balance is required. Images with lots of bland areas (e.g. skies) tend to show up noise the worst, particularly if underexposed.

[spacecadet]

My RAWs don't look very sharp  without the default sharpening in LR. If by 'capture sharpening' you mean done by the camera, I don't have that option so I wouldn't know about it.

[MDM]

Capture sharpening is a phrase coined I think by Bruce Fraser (revered raw image guru no longer on the planet unfortunately) that means some basic sharpening in the raw converter (LR, ACR etc). It's a very loose term in its current meaning but default sharpening in LR is light to moderate capture sharpening. Raw images don't retain any in-camera sharpening.

[Tim Ayers]

Capture sampling to my mind would be in-camera sharpening which is set to zero. But, and I'm not sure about this, I believed that somewhere LR gives the option for export sharpening which also should be set to zero. I will be exporting to 16 bit tiff in photoshop and I sometimes apply a very small amount of smart sharpen (100%, 0.2 and Lens blur) to the full sized final image.

[MDM]

Capture sharpening is a misleading term but, in the sense that it is generally used and in which I meant it, it refers to initial sharpening in LR or ACR so that the image appears sharp on screen. Output sharpening, in contrast, is intended for the printing stage. It's got nothing to do with any sharpening or not in the camera as the camera sharpening settings are not relevant to raw images.

 

See books by Jeff Schewe and/or Martin Evening for a detailed explanation - Martin Evening's book is especially useful for an experienced photographer new to LR and would probably persuade you to do your basic sharpening in LR rather than Photoshop because the new sharpening algorithms used in LR/ACR are apparently superior. Moreover and most importantly. you can balance the sharpening with the noise reduction on the raw file - far better than running NR on the converted image.