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Nikon D300 in-camera sharpening with RAW?

From what I gather, in-camera sharpening settings are supposed to be ignored when shooting raw.

Here's an oddity I noticed from my D300:



This is a screenshot of the .NEF file, before any processing (any raw processor shows the same). There is some fringing (which can be removed in NX2, using chromatic aberration correction), but there's also a halo as if some sharpening has occurred. The CA correction will remove the fringe, but not the halo.

Does this imply that there is some pre-raw processing going on? Or is there another explanation I'm missing?

Has anyone else noticed anything similar, and found a way to correct for it without having to do it by hand?
 
Update:

Turns out this is not limited to the D300. After spending an evening researching this anomaly (and looking at many test images from various camera manufacturers) it appears it is a problem with CFA sensor algorithms. I found lots of images showing the same artifacts wherever a CFA type sensor was used.
Interestingly (but I suppose not too surprisingly) foveon-sensored cameras do not have this problem on the whole. I did find a similar effect in some foveon images, but the problem was much more subtle than the CFA images.

I also read that Raw Therapee allows for a choice of demosaicing algorithms; I may have to give that a try to see if it can reduce the problem in my recent images.

...and just in case I get accused of pixel peeping :rolleyes:, I discovered this issue because of some processing I'd applied to my images: attempts to create a bit of contrast 'bite' highlighted the halo beyond what would normally be unnoticeable!
 
It seems I jumped the gun a little. My digging last night was on my laptop, using the browser to view the samples. Now I'm on my desktop with a RAW reader the CFA problem isn't nearly as obvious.

What I don't understand is why only the foveon images didn't display artifacts on my browser? Curious.

None of this helps with my particular problem, though. :confused:
 
After trying out a few other camera and lens combinations it turns out it's my 70-300 that's at fault.

There are a couple of comments about this on other forums (but not many). It appears the CA produced by this lens is not easily correctable after the fact. Considering it's an FX lens, I wonder if the problem is more prevalent on DX cameras for some reason? You would have thought the opposite.

I've replaced it with an old 80-200 which in my non-scientific tests does not seem to be quite as sharp, but the CA produced is easier to correct!
 
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