Settings for D3 to use with UniWB


Click on the thumbnails for Steps 1 through 3 to see the screen captures of the menues at 100% in a separate window.

Step 1 Connect the camera and open Nikon Camera Control Pro 2 application. Navigate to "Image Processing" tab. Press "Edit" button.

Step 2 Uncheck Auto. Set Sharpening, Saturation, and Hue sliders to "0". Check "Use Custom Curve". Press "Edit" button.

Step 3 Make sure the curve is linear, that is the vertical and horizontal ranges are set to 0..255, gamma slider is set to 1. Do a "Save" if you wish (it will save this simple linear curve to the disk) and press "OK" button to return to the menu shown as Step 2.

Step 4 (optional) Press "Save as a new Custom Picture Control" button.

Step 5 Press "OK" button to exit menu of the Step 2. You will be taken back to the main screen of the Camera Control Pro 2.


That's it, you should be done by now.

Forums: 

UniWB with D3

How useful is UniWB with the D3? Considering that the D3 is supposed to have exceptional noise handling, do you use UniWB in conjunction with a colored filter (over flash or over lens)? Or do you just use UniWB for histogram evaluation only?

regards / roy

How useful is UniWB with the D3?

Very useful. Exceptional noise handling does not mean the exposure can be wrong and the result will be the same as with the correct exposure. I also prefer to know when one channel is truly blown out. I rarely use D3 at base ISO (most of the exceptions are wide angle shots); but when I do I use a gel to balance the sensitivity of the channels if shooting conditions permit. It never hurts to get the per channel exposure correct at the time of shooting instead of postprocessing for correct colour and exposure ;)

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Iliah Borg

thanks for your reply. I

thanks for your reply. I have more general questions, if I may pick your brain for more info...

Is there much image degradation if I were to use a gel (rather than glass filter) over my lens? I happened to settled upon a Roscoe Pink (4830) for my D80. After evaluating a sample set of Roscoe swatches alongside UniWB. I found that the Pink resulted in the least amount of Red and Blue WB adjustment for the D80 with flash as the light source. I never really use the filter, but I was so intrigued by all the posts that I read on dpreview that I had to try it out for myself as an academic exercise.

At the moment, I'm using NX 2.1 for raw conversion; I finally decided to give it a shot after using NX 1.3 for a while. The workflow of NX 2 still isn't very good, but I like the auto color aberration capability, and I just noticed that the WB problem (aka FixNEF) is now resolved.

As a side note, I don't have a Mac... otherwise I would use RPP. I was able to load OSX on my PC, but I had a weird issue with OSX changing my system clock such that it was 12 hours off. Anyway, RPP seemed very nice (evaluated 3 months ago), but I was getting some weird demosaicing artifacts (zig zags, if I recall, with AHD). I noticed that there is new multiprocessor capability with the latest version of RPP, so I may have to give it a shot again.

regards / roy

> Is there much image

> Is there much image degradation if I were to use a gel (rather than glass filter) over my lens? I happened to settled upon a Roscoe Pink (4830) for my D80. After evaluating a sample set of Roscoe swatches alongside UniWB. I found that the Pink resulted in the least amount of Red and Blue WB adjustment for the D80 with flash as the light source.

When using flash as the only light source I always place the filter in front of the flash, not in front of the lens. This way no image degradation occurs.

If I need to use colour gel filters outdoors then I prefer Lee filters. When used with a deep compendium they cause image degradation on par with a regular protection filter.

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Iliah Borg

How to process UniWB images in NX2 ?

Hi, Having set my D3 up with UniWB. How do I then correctly process in NX2 the images capatured with UniWB so I get an image with visually appropriate White balance? Txs Mike

The options are: use Auto

The options are: use Auto White balance in NX (White Balance: Set Colour Temperature: New WB: Calculate automatically) as a first step and adjust from there; use click/drag grey white balancing method (White Balance: Set Grey Point); select the type of light in the scene and adjust colour temperature (for example - White Balance: Set Colour Temperature: New WB: Daylight: Cloudy); take a separate shot with custom white balance and copy in NX white balance from it to the shots taken with UniWB.

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Iliah Borg