I want to pass on my current tips for getting good photos with the D7.

1. Shoot with Normal sharpening.

Some sample images (not Phil's) showed excessive sharpening artefacts on the Normal setting. This led many (including me) to set the camera to soft. And I didn't evaluate it.

Well, it's now my conclusion that Normal doesn't show artefacts and further it results in *less noisy* images if you then take the images into Photoshop and sharpen them (i.e. you'd have to sharpen more for a Soft image). Normal sharpening also seems to ameliorate the "grain" of high ISO images - the grain is a little more "clumpy" in Soft than in Normal.

2. Use DIVU for accurate colour and set the camera to normal colour (0).

I've seen the samples produced by Profile Prism and these images don't look right to me. I spot what I consider colour errors in localised parts of the images that stick out quite badly. The overall balance of these images is good, but the colour is off (e.g. a green object will turn blue where sunlight highlights it). I use a calibrated monitor, for what that's worth, and view in Photoshop 6.

DIVU is well known for altering the contrast of images (I describe the effect as "muddy"). And it *can* blow highlights (I find it only does this in "dark" scenes - outdoor pictures including those in strong sunshine don't seem to be affected).

My solution is a curve. I have uploaded the curve for you to download:

www.cupidity.force9.co.uk/Photos/DIVUCorrection.icj - (unfortunately that link is case-sensitive, so type carefully!)

You should find the "DiMAGE Image Viewer Utility" folder on your workstation. Inside that there is a Prefs folder and inside that a folder called ImageCorrectJob - create that folder if it isn't there already. Download the file to this folder.

To apply the curve you should first open the image as normal in DIVU. Then click on the Color Correction tab (or double-click the thumbnail). Then click the Select a Color Correction Job button in the lowest set of buttons, third from right. Select the job called DIVUCorrection and save your image.

You can try to make the equivalent of this curve in Photoshop, but beware that the "curviness" of curves in DIVU and Photoshop is quite different. This means that the control points can't simply be copied into Photoshop to make a curve there. I should really make a Photoshop curve...

3. Shoot with low contrast.

I use contrast -3. It means I can choose, later, how much of the shadows I want, and to a lesser extent, how much of the highlights I want.

After applying step 2 above I can then tweak the image to choose where I want the right amount of contrast, using what starts out as a relatively "washed out" image, because of the -3 contrast setting. It doesn't require much adjustment (in Photoshop, say) but you should learn how to make S-shaped curves work in Photoshop before you take pix with this setting.

Once you understand this, you can get surprisingly wide dynamic range out of scenes - though negative film is still streets ahead.

Hope you have fun.

Jawed
(I'm sure there was something else I was going to suggest, but I can't remember...)