I've recently discovered something pretty neat. I may be well behind the curve compared to most of you Nikon mono shooters, but here goes.
Since first getting the D800, I've always set up a second main shooting menu for Monochrome capture; A for color, B for mono and of course named them appropriately. In the mono, I've generally just left the factory mono settings at their defaults and it did a credible job, but to get what I wanted I needed to work the raw a bit in C1 to get where I wanted, even when using my saved custom C1 presets.
With the acquisition of the D810, I started playing around with the in-cam settings a bit and have hit on what I think is a pretty awesome combo -- a combo I've transferred to the D800E and Df, and it appears to work equally well with them. It helps render the mono with a fairly broad and smooth tonal gradation and then light color-tone to taste, so I thought I'd share them for your comment.
I select mono, then dial back sharpening to 3 and zero out contrast, clarity and brightness. I turn on sepia and dial it back to 1.0 (D810 you can sub-set toning in 0.25 increments, but 1.0 is the minimum in all these cams and my preference.) I am currently experimenting with using the Y filtration, and it seems to give a really nice overall balance to the relative hue rendering.
Obviously, these settings only apply to the in-cam jpeg, but do then render for the rear LCD review, so we see our capture in our as-set toned mono. However, there's a nifty part -- Capture NX-D does apply those settings to the raw file on import, and it does so extremely well, rendering the nef with the same look as the in-cam jpeg -- and frankly I find it so good the file doesn't need much tweaking beyond that. At the least, it's a lot less work than was required in C1 to get a really nice B&W.
I'd encourage you to experiment a bit and post your thoughts after playing around with it. Really does open an entirely new dimension to these cameras for me.
Since first getting the D800, I've always set up a second main shooting menu for Monochrome capture; A for color, B for mono and of course named them appropriately. In the mono, I've generally just left the factory mono settings at their defaults and it did a credible job, but to get what I wanted I needed to work the raw a bit in C1 to get where I wanted, even when using my saved custom C1 presets.
With the acquisition of the D810, I started playing around with the in-cam settings a bit and have hit on what I think is a pretty awesome combo -- a combo I've transferred to the D800E and Df, and it appears to work equally well with them. It helps render the mono with a fairly broad and smooth tonal gradation and then light color-tone to taste, so I thought I'd share them for your comment.
I select mono, then dial back sharpening to 3 and zero out contrast, clarity and brightness. I turn on sepia and dial it back to 1.0 (D810 you can sub-set toning in 0.25 increments, but 1.0 is the minimum in all these cams and my preference.) I am currently experimenting with using the Y filtration, and it seems to give a really nice overall balance to the relative hue rendering.
Obviously, these settings only apply to the in-cam jpeg, but do then render for the rear LCD review, so we see our capture in our as-set toned mono. However, there's a nifty part -- Capture NX-D does apply those settings to the raw file on import, and it does so extremely well, rendering the nef with the same look as the in-cam jpeg -- and frankly I find it so good the file doesn't need much tweaking beyond that. At the least, it's a lot less work than was required in C1 to get a really nice B&W.
I'd encourage you to experiment a bit and post your thoughts after playing around with it. Really does open an entirely new dimension to these cameras for me.
