Home  Donate  New  Search  Gallery  Reviews  How-To  Books  Links  Workshops  About  Contact

Nikon D7000 Guide:
Retouch Menu
(brush and canvas icon)
© 2011 KenRockwell.com. All rights reserved.
Please help KenRockwell..com

Nikon D7000

Nikon D7000 and 35mm f/1.8 DX. enlarge. The biggest source of support for this free website is when you use these links, especially these directly to the D7000 at Adorama (either body-only or with 18-105mm lens), the D7000 at Amazon (body-only or with 18-105mm lens), or Ritz (body-only or with 18-105mm lens) when you get yours. Thank you! Ken.

 

July 2011      Top of Nikon D7000 User's Guide     Nikon D7000 Review

More Nikon Reviews    Nikon Lens Reviews

 

Help me help you         top

I support my growing family through this free website, as crazy as it might seem.

The biggest help is when you use any of these links to Adorama, Amazon, eBay, B&H, Ritz, Calumet, J&R and ScanCafe when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live. It costs you nothing, and is this site's, and thus my family's, biggest source of support. These places have the best prices and service, which is why I've used them since before this website existed. I recommend them all personally.

If you find this page as helpful as a book you might have had to buy or a workshop you may have had to take, feel free to help me continue helping everyone.

If you've gotten your gear through one of my links or helped otherwise, you're family. It's great people like you who allow me to keep adding to this site full-time. Thanks!

If you haven't helped yet, please do, and consider helping me with a gift of $5.00.

As this page is copyrighted and formally registered, it is unlawful to make copies, especially in the form of printouts for personal use. If you wish to make a printout for personal use, you are granted one-time permission only if you PayPal me $5.00 per printout or part thereof. Thank you!

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Mr. & Mrs. Ken Rockwell, Ryan and Katie.

 

Ritz Camera

I use Adorama, Amazon, eBay, Ritz, Calumet, J&R and ScanCafe. I can't vouch for ads below.

Free Live Help (USA only)       top

Want free live phone support?

In the USA, call (800) NIKON-UX, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

 

How to get to the RETOUCH Menu

Select the Retouch Menu by pressing MENU, moving to the left and then up or down to select the icon showing a brush and a canvas. You'll see RETOUCH MENU on the top of the LCD.

Trick: Press the OK button when an image is displayed to get to most of the retouch menu.

 

What it does

This lets you manipulate images in-camera. The originals are unaltered. The D7000 creates new versions of the images and saves them.

I never use these tricks.

 

Firmware Defect

The new images are saved with a file number one more than the most recent image, and are prefaced with CSC, not DSC. The EXIF create time is unaltered, so you'll have to sort images by create time if you can.

This double-defect means that the file numbers of the newly created versions are often completely unrelated to the originals from which they are created. If you're playing with the most recent image the file numbers are close, but if you're playing with an earlier file, its file number will be unrelated to the original.

By prefacing the files with CSC instead of DSC, the modified files will sort differently than the originals.

The correct way to have done this would be to retain the same file name and append -edit, -edit1, -edit2, etc. For instance, if you make a new version of DCS_0123.jpg, the new file might be called CSC_5837.jpg. Good luck sorting them out! If done correctly, the new version would be named DSC_0123-edit.jpg.

 

D-Lighting        top

This creates new versions of images with lightened shadows similar to Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight Adjustment tool.

You have three levels of lightening: Low, Normal, and High.

Presuming you remembered to set ADR to AUTO, you probably won't need this.

 

Red-Eye Correction

This creates new versions of images attempting to rectify flash-induced red eyes. This filter is sneaky enough to know if you used flash or not to make the image, and won't let you use this filter if you didn't use flash.

I've never had a problem with red-eye with my D7000, so all the better. When I was able to cause red-eye, this filter only corrected half of the eyes!

 

Trim        top

This creates new cropped versions of images.

Trim removes unwanted pixels from the sides of an image and saves a smaller image.

No pixels are moved or changed in size.

 

Monochrome        top

This creates new black-and-white versions of images.

It has three modes:

Black-and-White,

Sepia (Brown-and-white) and

Cyanotype (Blue-and-White).

 

Filter Effects        top

This creates new versions of images with different color effects. Try them yourself if you're interested, there are seven different filters.

There is no Ken Rockwell filter, but we're working on it.

 

Color Balance       top

This one's slick. It calls up a better control panel than Photoshop's color balance tool, which dates from the 1980s.

Nikon's tool reminds me of what we have on million-dollar color correction machines used in Hollywood telecine to color correct motion pictures.

The Nikon D7000 shows three histograms (reminiscent of Tektronix' WFM700 waveform monitors) and the D7000's Up/Down/Left/Right key becomes the color correction track ball. Click it left and right to alter blue-red, and up down for magenta - green.

If you have something neutral, watch the waveforms, oops, histograms, until they are about equal. Left - right on the Up/Down/Left/Right key slides the red and blue in opposite directions, and green - magenta slides the red and blue equally left or right. The green stays put.

 

Image Overlay        top

This creates a new image by adding two others together in the z-axis (intensity).

I think this is silly, but one reader has made good use of this for adding the Moon to some of her landscape images, all in-camera. I'm still impressed.

It only works with raw files.

Another reader wrote me about a genius plan to use this for in-camera mutilation of large dynamic range scenes by combining two very different exposures. I don't see it working. I'm missing the genius part.

You can't get to this with the OK key on playback. You have to use the menu button.

 

NEF (RAW) Processing       top

This lets you make a JPG from an NEF raw file.

This can be useful if you forgot to set the D7000 to record NEF files.

 

Resize       top

This lets you make a smaller pixel-size image from a larger one.

 

Quick Retouch        top

This is a quick auto-everything magic picture fixer.

 

Straighten       top

This lets you save a new, slightly rotated, version.

 

Distortion Control        top

This lets you save a new version with linear distortion (barrel or pincushion bending of straight lines) corrected.

AUTO attempts to read EXIF data, identify the lens, and correct based on an in-camera database. It works with newer lenses. A firmware defect lets you move a slider belie the image, but it is ignored.

MANUAL lets you adjust this to taste with a slider at the bottom of the screen.

 

Fisheye       top

Fisheye is a Distortion (out of) Control: it lets you gravely distort the image similar to a fisheye lens.

 

Color Outline        top

This is a filter which attempts to turn the image into a line drawing for kids to color.

The result is gray-and-white.

 

Color Sketch        top

This is similar to the gray-and-white image of Color Outline, except with a soft, flat pastel version of the original image underlaid.

 

Perspective control       top

This allows one to "square up" an image in case the D7000 wasn't pointed directly at the subject.

Since we sometimes can concatenate these effects, we can take a snap, straighten, square-up, trim, resize, color-correct and have it all ready for broadcast straight from the D7000.

 

Miniature Effect       top

This blurs the image away from one zone of well-defined sharpness.

It plays on a weird psychological effect wherein we perceive something to be a small model if large parts of it are out of focus, which is usually what happens when photographing models.

 

Edit Movie        top

This lets us trim the ends of a clip, or save-out one still frame.

 

back to top of page     back to top of Nikon D7000 User's Guide

 

KNOBS, BUTTONS and CONTROLS

MENUS

     PLAYBACK MENU  

     SHOOTING MENU

     CUSTOM SETTING MENU

     SETUP MENU

     RETOUCH MENU

     RECENT ITEMS MENU < LAST

 

Home  Donate  New  Search  Gallery  Reviews  How-To  Books  Links  Workshops  About  Contact