Nikon D300 RAW 200 ISO – Adobe Camera Raw 4.3 + Adj.
Sky shot, to test low ISO noise and Active D-lighting (set to normall).
Converted in Adobe Camera Raw 4.3, and saved in PS CS3 at as high a level of JPEG as possible to fit under Flickr’s 10mb file limit (quality 12 or 11 setting).
This version from ACR has had manual adjustments in the “recover” and “fill light” dialogs to try and emulate the unclipped shadows and highlights of Active D-Lighting metadata that ACR doesn’t support (at this time).
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The story:
About two weeks ago I got the chance to hold and shoot on my own card with a pre-production Nikon D3 and D300. The D300 is the focus of this set of test shots, as I am on the list to get one of the first production models ( yes, retiring the long serving D70).
The camera couldn’t leave the sight of the Nikon people, so these were taken within 5 feet of the front door of the camera shop in Portland and I only had a couple minutes to shoot something. The camera was set to record medium jpeg + RAW and the reason I have not posted these was the lack of compatible RAW converters and that the jpegs had compression artifacts just from the file format, not because of anything to do with the quality of the camera. Adobe has just released version 4.3 of it’s PhotoShop Adobe Camera Raw plugin now supporting the D3 and D300, and Nikon View NX has been updated to support it as well, so now I can compare RAW output from two converters.
I mainly wanted to test the new Active D-Lighting feature that corrects the dynamic range at the time of shooting (as opposed to post processing). I also shot a couple higher ISO shots for those into that. It’s rare I would shoot that high, but they’re good enough that I will probably shoot by setting my shutter and f-stop manually and putting it on auto-iso, something I would never trust my D70 to do.
All these shots were taken with the new 24-70mm 2.8 lens.
My opinion is that it is a fantastic and capable camera, one I will be hard pressed to find it’s limitations anytime soon. I honestly believe that it is capable of equaling or besting the image quality of any current or previous Nikon DSLR. That’s right, look at the most interesting D2X shots on Flickr. Given the same quality of lenses and photographic talent the D300 should be capable of anything that nice.
Nikon D300 RAW 200 ISO – Adobe Camera Raw 4.3 + Adj.
Sky shot, to test low ISO noise and Active D-lighting (set to normall).
Converted in Adobe Camera Raw 4.3, and saved in PS CS3 at as high a level of JPEG as possible to fit under Flickr’s 10mb file limit (quality 12 or 11 setting).
This version from ACR has had manual adjustments in the “recover” and “fill light” dialogs to try and emulate the unclipped shadows and highlights of Active D-Lighting metadata that ACR doesn’t support (at this time).
--
The story:
About two weeks ago I got the chance to hold and shoot on my own card with a pre-production Nikon D3 and D300. The D300 is the focus of this set of test shots, as I am on the list to get one of the first production models ( yes, retiring the long serving D70).
The camera couldn’t leave the sight of the Nikon people, so these were taken within 5 feet of the front door of the camera shop in Portland and I only had a couple minutes to shoot something. The camera was set to record medium jpeg + RAW and the reason I have not posted these was the lack of compatible RAW converters and that the jpegs had compression artifacts just from the file format, not because of anything to do with the quality of the camera. Adobe has just released version 4.3 of it’s PhotoShop Adobe Camera Raw plugin now supporting the D3 and D300, and Nikon View NX has been updated to support it as well, so now I can compare RAW output from two converters.
I mainly wanted to test the new Active D-Lighting feature that corrects the dynamic range at the time of shooting (as opposed to post processing). I also shot a couple higher ISO shots for those into that. It’s rare I would shoot that high, but they’re good enough that I will probably shoot by setting my shutter and f-stop manually and putting it on auto-iso, something I would never trust my D70 to do.
All these shots were taken with the new 24-70mm 2.8 lens.
My opinion is that it is a fantastic and capable camera, one I will be hard pressed to find it’s limitations anytime soon. I honestly believe that it is capable of equaling or besting the image quality of any current or previous Nikon DSLR. That’s right, look at the most interesting D2X shots on Flickr. Given the same quality of lenses and photographic talent the D300 should be capable of anything that nice.