Nikon D5100 Experience Manual page 26

Nikon D5100 Experience
loss of image quality in the adjusted image. JPEG files are also compressed which makes them
smaller in size but as a result some image information and a little bit of image quality is lost.
Now JPEG is not a terrible thing. I am using extreme examples in order to better explain how it
works. If you carefully select a Picture Control, and if the Auto White Balance does its job or
you select the White Balance yourself to match the lighting conditions, and your exposure was
correct, then the JPEG will look great. The problem is that you will have less leeway later if you
adjust the image in Photoshop, especially if your settings or exposure were off. The JPEG files
are so much smaller in size than RAW files because there is less information in them and they
are compressed. But if you are not going to be processing your images in Photoshop, then you
will need to save your images as JPEG files. Choose your image settings like White Balance
carefully and select and adjust a Picture Control to create the look you want – the contrast, color,
sharpness, etc. You should experiment with the different settings and find what gives you the
image appearance that you desire. See the Picture Control section for more information.
Figure 15 – Image Quality Menu
NEF (RAW)
NEF (RAW) is a format that captures the raw data that hits the camera sensor, without
processing the image in the camera (well, it does a little bit of processing). It saves a large file
with nearly all the original information and uses lossless compression that reduces the file size
but does not affect the image quality. Even if you have your camera set to Fluorescent White
Balance, it does not lock that into the file. It will "apply" those settings to the image you see on
your rear LCD Monitor, but all the original information is still there in the RAW image file, and
you can change it to Cloudy White Balance later without any loss of image information or
quality. RAW is such a powerful file format because it contains so much information that you
can even dramatically adjust the exposure of the image later. If you underexposed the shot by
minus 2 EV, you can fix that in post processing with little or no loss of image quality. You will
need a program like Adobe Camera Raw, Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, or Capture NX 2 to
view and process RAW files, or you can use the ViewNX 2 program that comes with the camera.
ViewNX 2 is good for demonstrating and starting to see what you can do with a RAW file, but it
is much less sophisticated than the other programs.
25