Lens choice for D7500 video practice on a tripod

I'm a stills shooter but I'm going to have time on an upcoming trip to actually devote solely to learning 4k video on my D7500.

I'm going to be shooting on a tripod, no panning, no handheld, I just want to get a bunch of clips to work on when I get back.

All my shooting is going to outside, in the forest, on a lake shore, low light to bright daylight.

My choice of lenses are:

1) 18-140, a lens I use for walkaround stills

2) 18-55 AF-P

3) 10-20 AF-P

4) Sigma 17-50

The main reason I'm asking you fine folks here is there's bound to be considerations that I'm not aware of in making my choice, seeing that the usage is shooting video and not stills. Thanks.

Is this the equivalent question as someone going on the FX forum and asking "what camera should I buy?"?

I was going to ask if me practicing with my D850 and Tamron 17-35 would be a better setup than using my D7500 but maybe that's my next question.

tl;dr version:

1) You MIGHT need a focal length wider than the focal length for shooting stills because I think the D7500 MIGHT have a significant crop when shooting 4K.

2) If you plan to use autofocus, you will need to figure out which lens has best / most reliable autofocus with your D7500 in VIDEO mode. (A lens can have great AF in stills, but horrible AF in video).

3) You MIGHT want to get a Neutral Density filter (or two, or more), and depending on what size filters you get, you will want to use a lens that the filters will fit on.

4) You might want to try shooting handheld, and in that case, a lens with good stabilization will be helpful.

Ok, now the long rambling part of my post...

Firstly, glad to hear you are taking the plunge in trying out video.

Crop Factor:

If I remember correctly, doesn't the D7500 have a pretty significant crop factor when shooting 4K video??? (Double check this please.)

If so, then you will be wanting to use a focal length wider than you normally would.

Aside from the (possible) crop factor, lens considerations are mostly the same as shooting stills. Meaning, just use the appropriate focal length for the subject and make sure that you are using a fast enough lens.

Auto Focus:

I have no idea how well the AF in video / Live View mode works on the D7500. It was atrocious on my D7000 and my D750. Hopefully your D7500 has a lot better AF than my D7000 and D750.

If you plan on using AF when shooting video, then you will want to find out which of your lenses have the best AF WHEN SHOOTING VIDEO. A lens can have great AF when shooting stills, but lousy AF when shooting video.

Too Much Light:

One issue that videographers experience more frequently than still photographers is the problem of having TOO MUCH LIGHT. In particular, on bright days when you want to shoot at a fast aperture / shallow depth of field.

This is because - traditionally - videographers use a shutter speed that is (approximately) twice the frame rate. For example, if you shoot at 1/24th of a second FRAME RATE (which traditional film is shot at), then you would normally use a 1/50th of a second shutter speed to keep any motion in the video looking "normal."

Traditionally, movies have a little bit of motion blur and a lot of people want to maintain that traditional motion blur. And the best way to maintain that motion blur is by keeping the shutter speed at twice the frame rate.

To do this, videographers use Neutral Density (ND) filters to allow LESS light in on bright days.

So you might look at your lenses and see which ones have a common filter size, and whether it makes sense to get an ND filter for that (common) filter size.

The other option is to buy an ND filter that fits the lens with the largest filter size, then use step-up rings to fit the ND filter on to the lenses with smaller filter size.

Having said all this, I personally don't think it is a crime against humanity if you use a shutter speed that is significantly faster than 1/2 the frame rate. A lot of people won't even realize it if you are shooting 24fps and you use a shutter speed of 1/100th or 1/200th of a second.

Lens Stabilization???

If I understand correctly, the D7500 has three-axis in-body stabilization when shooting in 1080p resolution, but not in 4K.

Now, I know you mentioned shooting on a tripod, but in case you plan to shoot handheld (and you will often find yourself shooting handheld even if you DON'T plan to), then a lens with good stabilization goes a long way. I don't know how the stabilization is on your lenses.

1) The D7500 has a 1.5 x crop in 4K which in tight spaces might require the 10-20

2) The D7500 is my go-to walkaround road trip camera and it's stills AF is great. Don't know about the AF in Live View, guess I'll find out! I never use Live view for stills/ I'm hoping when the center AF box turns green that actually means AF has been acquired but I won't know that till I get back. I never manually focus and so far my stills come out sharp no matter what lens I'm shooting with on AF

3) I remember being taken aback at how a neutral density filter is almost a must outdoor (I've never owned one). I did try some video last summer with another camera and wound up shooting at f/22, which I never do. And, as you said, a higher shutter than you'd want.

The 4k on the D7500 is at 30 fps so I have the shutter set to 1/60. My first experiments are going be in a forest, maybe the light won't be so bright

4) The D7500 doesn't have in-body stabilization in 4k (grayed out, I didn't notice it) but does in 1080 and my lenses have VR

5) All of my previous experimentation has been handheld and the whole stabilization-in-post, no matter how steady I thought my handholding was, also threw me. I've been watching Y'Tub vids and one channel I watch does pretty much nothing but one scene, on a tripod, no camera movement, then cut to the next scene, like stills only you can see the flowers moving with the wind. I thought I'd try that

6) I'm going to shoot in Standard. I tried Flat last year but color grading is just another area of videography I'll get to eventually after I actually get the shooting workflow down

toomanycanons said:

1) The D7500 has a 1.5 x crop in 4K which in tight spaces might require the 10-20

2) The D7500 is my go-to walkaround road trip camera and it's stills AF is great. Don't know about the AF in Live View, guess I'll find out! I never use Live view for stills/ I'm hoping when the center AF box turns green that actually means AF has been acquired but I won't know that till I get back. I never manually focus and so far my stills come out sharp no matter what lens I'm shooting with on AF

3) I remember being taken aback at how a neutral density filter is almost a must outdoor (I've never owned one). I did try some video last summer with another camera and wound up shooting at f/22, which I never do. And, as you said, a higher shutter than you'd want.

The 4k on the D7500 is at 30 fps so I have the shutter set to 1/60. My first experiments are going be in a forest, maybe the light won't be so bright

4) The D7500 doesn't have in-body stabilization in 4k (grayed out, I didn't notice it) but does in 1080 and my lenses have VR

5) All of my previous experimentation has been handheld and the whole stabilization-in-post, no matter how steady I thought my handholding was, also threw me. I've been watching Y'Tub vids and one channel I watch does pretty much nothing but one scene, on a tripod, no camera movement, then cut to the next scene, like stills only you can see the flowers moving with the wind. I thought I'd try that

6) I'm going to shoot in Standard. I tried Flat last year but color grading is just another area of videography I'll get to eventually after I actually get the shooting workflow down

Click to expand...

Good to see that you have already done some research and done some experimentation.

In a forest, I don't think you will really need an ND filter. In the open, you almost certainly will. Lots of people use variable ND filters, but they can be expensive and the cheaper ones can impact image quality.

An alternative is to buy one filter at about three stops and a second filter at about two stops. Then you can stack both filters if you need a lot of ND. One potential drawback though is that the filter frames can cause vignetting when stacking filters. So you would need slim filters.

If I recall correctly, the D7500 has NO on-sensor phase detect AF, so it will be contrast-based only when shooting video. That will be usable for large inert objects Like rocks or trees or the ground). It might hunt a bit and in dark situations, you might have to switch to manual focus.

Generally, Nikon's standard profile is quite good. The main issues are 1) overly sharp, and 2) overly contrasty / lower dynamic range. You can reduce the in-camera sharpness easily, but for contrast, the best option would be the flat picture profile. If you are going to shoot video, you probably have to do SOME grading, or live with the contrast.

One other thought is that you might want to bring along extension tubes or a macro lens of some kind, as it sounds like you might have a few opportunities to shoot macro (either stills or video). In a lot of situations though people find that manual focus is best for shooting macro.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for all the tips. Like I said, I'm primarily a stills shooter and have that down. As far as video...well...

Today I went out and plunged into video, D7500-style. What a trip

It's said and rightly so, you just gotta get out there and practice. You'll only learn what works and what doesn't by shooting/videoing, checking out your mistakes and your successes

I won't go into what I found out today but it's all good. Now I know (at this point at least) what to avoid, what to work on, what works...

Stills shooting and videos are two completely different animals. I'm excited and frustrated at the same time but I'm done with wishing I knew how to shoot vids as confidently as I do stills

I did a bunch of research into ND filters last year but never followed up because I don't need an ND filter for what I do for work/money but after today, again, I realized there's no avoiding having some ND filters in my stable

One hurdle I'm having to jump over is that, with stills, I have a plan and a purpose and I just go for it. With videos it's all practice at this point and I find myself video'ing boring stuff just for the workflow practice. Things should pick up once I come up with a plan/direction/story to tell

toomanycanons said:

Thanks for all the tips. Like I said, I'm primarily a stills shooter and have that down. As far as video...well...

Today I went out and plunged into video, D7500-style. What a trip

It's said and rightly so, you just gotta get out there and practice. You'll only learn what works and what doesn't by shooting/videoing, checking out your mistakes and your successes

I won't go into what I found out today but it's all good. Now I know (at this point at least) what to avoid, what to work on, what works...

Stills shooting and videos are two completely different animals. I'm excited and frustrated at the same time but I'm done with wishing I knew how to shoot vids as confidently as I do stills

I did a bunch of research into ND filters last year but never followed up because I don't need an ND filter for what I do for work/money but after today, again, I realized there's no avoiding having some ND filters in my stable

One hurdle I'm having to jump over is that, with stills, I have a plan and a purpose and I just go for it. With videos it's all practice at this point and I find myself video'ing boring stuff just for the workflow practice. Things should pick up once I come up with a plan/direction/story to tell

Click to expand...

One of the main differences between video and stills is that in video, you definitely want motion in the shot. So you either shoot something that is moving (like flowers in a field blown by the breeze, as you mentioned), or you want the camera moving (think of a drone video shot flying toward a large mountain as an extreme example) or both subject motion and camera motion.

So when you are ready in the future, you might think of getting a gimbal (or a video tripod with a good pan and tilt head). But that is a discussion for another day.

Another obvious difference is the tendency to have a change in perspective in the same scene in video. By this, I mean that in video we often (but not always) have a wide shot (an establishing shot), then a medium shot, then closeups.

You might not always want to do a Wide -> Medium -> Close up for every scene, which is fine, and it might be good to break it up by doing the reverse order, i.e., Close up -> Medium -> Wide. Of course, with any halfway decent video editor, you can change the sequence of your shots in post production.

I don't know if you will be having music in your videos but if you have an account with youtube you can get access to the Youtube Audio Library which allows you to use royalty free music in your videos. But even if you DON'T want to have a music track in your videos, some people find it helpful to EDIT to music. What this means is that you find a nice music track and you put that in your timeline and you time your edits to fall on the beats of the music (typically for music videos they would fall on beat one of every measure or beat one of every other measure, but mix it up). Then you can always mute that audio track (or delete it) before you render / export your video. That tends to give a nice "flow" to the edits in your video.

Hope this helps.

For lenses I'd bring the 18-140 and the 10-20, assuming the 10-20 will go to a low F stop. If not, you might look into getting a wide prime for low light.

As others have mentioned, video is all about motion. If you're on a tripod shooting scenery, consider a very slow pan, or a "reveal" shot where you put the camera down low and focus on the flowers directly in front of you, and then move focus to the background. You'd be using manual focus for scenery shots.

Another way to make a static shot interesting is to shoot 4k but edit in a 1080p timeline. This gives you the ability to do slow, creeping zooms, sometimes called the Ken Burns effect. A 4k image contains the equivalent of four 1080p images, which gives you a lot of leeway to add zooms or crop and reframe during editing.

You could also try some handheld, using the neck strap technique - push the camera forward with both hands till the neck strap is tight behind your neck. Now you have 3 points of contact holding your camera steady. All you have to do is hold it level as you move. The "reveal" shot can benefit from this technique - you're behind a tree, or the corner of a building. You move to the side to reveal what's on the other side. Shooting handheld with a wide lens gives you the least amount of camera shake. Then you could follow that shot with a telephoto (with tripod) of a point of interest in the shot you just revealed.

Interesting video can be ruined by bad light. Look for scenes you can shoot near sunset or after sunrise. Midday light is not very flattering, unless you're in a shaded forest. The exception would be if you can use the contrast between light and shade as a compositional element - a technique you should be familiar with as a stills shooter.

The constant aperture of the 17-50mm is nice, but is has a very short focus throw, which makes it difficult to manually pull focus when you're recording video.

Since you can't use the optical viewfinder when recording video, you may find an LCD Viewfinder or 1,000cd/m² field monitor useful.

I didn't know how well a newbie-styled thread like this would go over here.

As it is, I've been on a road trip up in the mountains and I've taken a ton of 4k vids with my D7500. Just getting the muscle memory down of setting up the camera, going into Live View (which I never do in my stills photography), counting down the seconds of the clip etc took a few hours.

I'll be looking at the footage when I get back home and I'll let you all know if I got any keepers.

I'm also going to download DaVinci Resolve 17 and start from scratch learning it. There are many programs to choose from, gotta start somewhere right?

toomanycanons said:

I didn't know how well a newbie-styled thread like this would go over here.

As it is, I've been on a road trip up in the mountains and I've taken a ton of 4k vids with my D7500. Just getting the muscle memory down of setting up the camera, going into Live View (which I never do in my stills photography), counting down the seconds of the clip etc took a few hours.

I'll be looking at the footage when I get back home and I'll let you all know if I got any keepers.

I'm also going to download DaVinci Resolve 17 and start from scratch learning it. There are many programs to choose from, gotta start somewhere right?

Click to expand...

I might be too late here, but another thing to try experimenting with is time-lapse photography / video.

I find it easier to just record a video at the standard frame rate (I think you said you are going to shoot at 30fps), and then just speed it up in post. You can right click on the clip in Resolve and either go to clip attributes (on the media page) or click on change clip speed (on the edit page) and change it to a faster fps.

All 4K. If I set the exposure correctly they look great. I'm tying to figure out some kind of story line then dive into learning DaVinci Resolve 17 and put something together. I plan to spend all winter learning this stuff, wish me luck!

toomanycanons said:

All 4K. If I set the exposure correctly they look great. I'm tying to figure out some kind of story line then dive into learning DaVinci Resolve 17 and put something together. I plan to spend all winter learning this stuff, wish me luck!

Click to expand...

Good luck.

It can be difficult to develop a "storyline" for nature / landscape shots. The only think I can advise is watch as many videos of the types of videos you want to create and learn from them.

Hope this helps.

All of the ones shot yesterday were with a Flat color profile, the others on Standard.

I can see the theory behind shooting in Flat which leads me to this series of questions:

1) Do all of you assume you will need to do a ton of color grading when you shoot your videos and therefore shoot in a color profile that needs a ton of color grading just for the leeway that provides and

2) Is the color profile you shoot in dependent on how much time you have between the shoot and delivering to your client meaning

3) Would you just go ahead and shoot in Standard (or some other profile that has some sort of in-house color grading already) and just concern yourself with the basic editing but

4) Are you using some LUT to achieve the level of color grading you typically deem necessary?

I watched this video by Casey Faris () giving us a rundown on a quick DaVinci Resolve 17 color grading workflow.

Coming from a stills background where I "color grade" my stills in Lightroom or Photoshop, I can see the similarities in thought process between tweaking my stills and working with video color...at this point tweaking a video's color seems to be a much longer and involved process but I guess I'll learn.

I know my "when my tweaked image is good enough" parameters. The same can be said of video: sooner or later you learn when your video is "good enough" for your clients.

So: color profile that always needs a bunch of color grading/a handy LUT that does the work for you/in-camera color profile that does the job in-camera. Which of these?

toomanycanons said:

All of the ones shot yesterday were with a Flat color profile, the others on Standard.

I can see the theory behind shooting in Flat which leads me to this series of questions:

Click to expand...

WARNING: Ask four videographers the same question, get six opinions.

toomanycanons said:

1) Do all of you assume you will need to do a ton of color grading when you shoot your videos and therefore shoot in a color profile that needs a ton of color grading just for the leeway that provides and

Click to expand...

Not always. Sometimes you just want a quick turnaround time. Sometimes you really prefer the colors (and contrast) that a particular profile gives (for example, a lot of people love the built in Fuji color profiles or Canon's standard color profiles).

I find Nikon's natural color to be beautiful, to be honest (thinking of my old D750). Although I did prefer to shoot in flat profile and then boost saturation and contrast in post.

toomanycanons said:

2) Is the color profile you shoot in dependent on how much time you have between the shoot and delivering to your client meaning

Click to expand...

Yes, that plays a role in deciding whether to shoot in a standard / natural profile, or whether I shooting in a flat / log profile.

But for me, the main factor is how "difficult" the lighting situation is.

By difficult, I mean are there lots of "conflicting" color casts in the lighting. For example, you have to shoot in a room that has (blueish) sunlight, mixed with (orangeish) tungsten lights, and also has (greenish) fluorescent lights. You can really only white balance for one of those types of lights. Using a flat (or LOG, or RAW) profile gives you more leeway in post to emphasize certain pleasing colors and de-emphasize the conflicting other colors.

The other "difficult" lighting situation is extreme contrast, where you are trying to get as much dynamic range as possible. In which case, I would use a flat (or LOG, or RAW) profile instead of a standard one.

Now, there are times when the sky is ugly and you don't really care if it looks blown out. Meaning, if it isn't attractive, you don't necessarily have to show it.

toomanycanons said:

3) Would you just go ahead and shoot in Standard (or some other profile that has some sort of in-house color grading already) and just concern yourself with the basic editing but

Click to expand...

Same answer as above. Depends on time and the challenge of the lighting.

toomanycanons said:

4) Are you using some LUT to achieve the level of color grading you typically deem necessary?

Click to expand...

If I shoot in LOG I am (basically) using a LUT all the time.

I think for Nikon's flat profile, there are some LUTs out there that you can use as well. I know some people created custom picture profiles (which you would import in to your camera) and then use the corresponding LUT.

Generally, when you want to apply a LUT, it is almost always best to do your luminance / brightness adjustments FIRST before applying the LUT. Sometimes when you apply a LUT, then your highlights will clip. If they clip and you try to do luminance / brightness adjustments AFTER the LUT, then you won't be able to recover those clipped highlights. But if you apply the luminance / brightness adjustments BEFORE you apply the LUT, you will have a better chance to bring the highlights back "in range," meaning not clipped.

toomanycanons said:

I watched this video by Casey Faris (

) giving us a rundown on a quick DaVinci Resolve 17 color grading workflow.

Coming from a stills background where I "color grade" my stills in Lightroom or Photoshop, I can see the similarities in thought process between tweaking my stills and working with video color...at this point tweaking a video's color seems to be a much longer and involved process but I guess I'll learn.

I know my "when my tweaked image is good enough" parameters. The same can be said of video: sooner or later you learn when your video is "good enough" for your clients.

So: color profile that always needs a bunch of color grading/a handy LUT that does the work for you/in-camera color profile that does the job in-camera. Which of these?

Click to expand...

Video color grading might seem difficult for you right now because it is set up to (potentially) work with different cameras (and their different color profiles) on the same timeline.

For example, someone who needs to color grade a documentary and their might be footage from Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, RED, and DJI and an iPhone all in the same video. And they need a method to work with the footage from all these cameras. So color grading (especially in Resolve) tends to be a bit more complex than you would see in Lightroom because it needs that flexibility.

If you are just using one camera, such as your Nikon D7500, you could just shoot in flat and then in Resolve, create a node with a simple S curve in the levels tab, probably add a little bit of color balance (I think it is abbreviated as CB), add a bit of Saturation, add a bit of midtone details (MD) add a bit of sharpening, and you are done.

With resolve, in the color panel, you then right click a frame in the shot you just graded, click save still (maybe it is capture still???) and it will create a "preset" for you. Then on the next ungraded clip, you will right click on the Still you created, and then apply it to the ungraded clip. That will apply the preset to that ungraded clip.

> > > > > > Bottom Line < < < < < <

I assume right now you have some free time to practice, right? And you mentioned you have an interest in nature and landscapes, right?

If so, go out and shoot some scenes where you use both the standard profile and where you also shoot in flat, and you will see what you can and can't achieve by shooting in a flat profile and then grading in post.

And again, most likely you will only want to shoot in flat / LOG profiles when either the dynamic range exceeds that of the picture profile AND you want to retain highlights as much as possible, or you have a lot of mixed color casts that you have to deal with.

Otherwise, just go with what you know.

--
What Middle School Is Really Like:

Nikon's Standard profile should be pretty close to Rec.709, so if I'm indoors, and can control the lighting, I'll stick with Standard.

For high contrast scenes, like a sunny day, I might use Neutral or a Flat profile to try to get as much dynamic range as I can.

Which profile you choose is a matter of balancing compromises; Standard has limited dynamic range, and Flat raises the noise floor and can introduce banding artifacts, however, those issues can be alleviated with ETTR (exposing to the right) and dithering e.g. film grain.

I use a circular polarizer and 1.2 graduated ND filter to help retain highlight information, but those filter can't be used in all high contrast scenarios.

Flat profiles can be tricky to grade manually, so it's best to use a corresponding corrective LUT. Nikon released a corrective 3D-LUT for N-Log, but I'm not sure if they ever released a corrective LUT for their Flat profile.

Once you've applied a corrective LUT, the video should only need minor tweaking, e.g. highlight recovery, selective contrast and saturation boost, sharpening, and maybe noise reduction. As Off The Mark mentioned, be sure to make your tweaks to the node that precedes your LUT.

Just two thoughts.

1) On the Resolve colour page just try the auto mode. It's the A on the far left under Primaires.

In daylight you might find it good enough most of the time.

2) Just like stills you have basically two extremes. Hyperrealism where you try to recreate the real world. Colour checker etc. The other extreme throws out the real world and is grading for an artistic vision.

Depending on your goals either can be correct. But if you aren't in either extreme camp good enough isn't that hard. Most viewers won't be able to tell you ended up a shade off here or a fraction off there. Assuming you had a well exposed file to start with.

I just took my D7500 out on a sunny day and shot on all the Camera Profiles available to me. Flat sucked, I mean it was horrible. I haven't checked out all the videos I took a few days ago up at a pristine alpine lake but I have my fingers crossed...

Flat looked so bad it was like something was wrong with my camera. No contrast (expected), washed out colors (expected) very very unsharp, like I'd taken my camera off AF and just winged the focus and missed badly. That bad. Of course, I didn't know that at the time so I press on.

To summarize what I found out: Flat is unusable at least for stills. Neutral is much better, a touch of color, way more sharpness and better focused (for want of a better description).

Standard looks like what I would color grade a clip up to. Not too contrasty or vivid.

Auto was the most vivid of all and unusable, really.

Portrait was one step up from Neutral in contrast and color, but not nearly as much as Standard.

Vivid...forget vivid but it wasn't as vivid as Auto.

Landscape...forget Landscape, it was even more vivid than Vivid.

So I guess it's Neutral or Portrait. The theory being they will capture more information than Standard...I guess. I'm going to shoot some vids on all three to compare and see how my color grading skills have progressed, at least with videos.

What happened to Flat? Does it perform differently when shooting videos :-O

toomanycanons said:

I just took my D7500 out on a sunny day and shot on all the Camera Profiles available to me. Flat sucked, I mean it was horrible. I haven't checked out all the videos I took a few days ago up at a pristine alpine lake but I have my fingers crossed...

Flat looked so bad it was like something was wrong with my camera. No contrast (expected), washed out colors (expected) very very unsharp, like I'd taken my camera off AF and just winged the focus and missed badly. That bad. Of course, I didn't know that at the time so I press on.

Click to expand...

toomanycanons said:

To summarize what I found out: Flat is unusable at least for stills. Neutral is much better, a touch of color, way more sharpness and better focused (for want of a better description).

Click to expand...

Did you grade the footage you shot in flat?

You will need to add saturation, color balance (CB) midtone details (MD) sharpness, and contrast. The method for adding contrast is really up to you. Some people like to use an S curve in the curves panel. Some people like to use the numeric Contrast value in the correction wheels palette. Some people like to use Lift and Gain color wheels.

Off The Mark said:

toomanycanons said:

I just took my D7500 out on a sunny day and shot on all the Camera Profiles available to me. Flat sucked, I mean it was horrible. I haven't checked out all the videos I took a few days ago up at a pristine alpine lake but I have my fingers crossed...

Flat looked so bad it was like something was wrong with my camera. No contrast (expected), washed out colors (expected) very very unsharp, like I'd taken my camera off AF and just winged the focus and missed badly. That bad. Of course, I didn't know that at the time so I press on.

To summarize what I found out: Flat is unusable at least for stills. Neutral is much better, a touch of color, way more sharpness and better focused (for want of a better description).

Click to expand...

Did you grade the footage you shot in flat?

You will need to add saturation, color balance (CB) midtone details (MD) sharpness, and contrast. The method for adding contrast is really up to you. Some people like to use an S curve in the curves panel. Some people like to use the numeric Contrast value in the correction wheels palette. Some people like to use Lift and Gain color wheels.

Click to expand...

I will, but that's the next step in my learning how to use DR17. As it is, being a stills guy, I just tried again shooting stills in Flat then Neutral then Standard. I hoped this set would not be as alarming as the last set of stills I took in Flat. And...

I took both the jpegs and raws into Lightroom (where I live most of the time) and I have to say the Flat images just weren't recoverable. No matter what I did to either the jpegs or raws, I could not bring up the sharpness to match even Neutral. Like I said previously, it's like the camera purposely mis-focuses on Flat. Closeup of a flower revealed a mis-focused center, better on Neutral, looks great on Standard. Bumping up the Clarity and Sharpness and Contrast etc on the Flat images did basically nothing.

So I just looked at one of the vids I took in Flat (not in DR17) and a guy can't tell anything, really. Who knows if the video will sharpen up in the Color page. If it does, for some reason, shooting in Flat in a video, the camera just processes things totally differently.

I've never shot stills in Flat and it's a shock, really, giving results I would have never imagined. Learn something new everyday, right? Now into Resolve 17 and see what I can come up with. Stay tuned.