Using Nikon Creative Picture Controls

Are you missing a little drama in your life? Sometime when you’re bored, here’s something you can do for entertainment. Creative Picture Controls are available for the Nikon Z cameras, even shooting in raw format.

This feature can only be understood with examples. Nikon presently offers 20 options here; some are extremely subtle and some are absolutely wild. I personally prefer the wilder options, since other photo editors can easily emulate the more subtle ones.

Before you try this stuff with whatever photo editor you like, a word of caution. The versions that I am using for Lightroom and Capture One don’t support these controls. Zoner Photo Studio does support them, but not when selecting the ‘Raw’ editing tab (use ‘Editor’ tab). Nikon’s free NX Studio does support this, so you can experiment without having to incur any cost.

The Binary picture control

To access these options, you start by going into the PHOTO SHOOTING MENU | Set Picture Control | scroll down to Creative Picture Control.

These are the options (numbered 1 through 20):

1 Dream, 2 Morning, 3 Pop, 4 Sunday, 5 Somber, 6 Dramatic, 7 Silence, 8 Bleached, 9 Melancholic, 10 Pure, 11 Denim, 12 Toy, 13 Sepia, 14 Blue, 15 Red, 16 Pink, 17 Charcoal, 18 Graphite, 19 Binary, and 20 Carbon.

The 19 Binary control, for instance, looks exactly like Kodak Kodalith film. I think they stopped selling Kodalith somewhere during Aristotle’s time.

The 13 Sepia closely resembles old black-and-white photos that were stained using the sepia toner, but with a little twist of added color. I actually used to do this when I had a darkroom.

19 Binary picture control: like old Kodak Kodalith film

13 Sepia. Sort of like old sepia-toned black-and-white

17 Charcoal, more conventional black-and-white

6 Dramatic

5 Somber

20 Carbon

8 Bleached

These controls can really make some blah scenes look pretty cool. They’re kind of like eating licorice instead of your vegetables; once in a while you should try skipping the proper adult thing to do.

If you’re worried about potentially ruining a shot by choosing one of these speciality color schemes, not to worry. In NX Studio, for instance, all you have to do is change the “Picture Control” value from the “Recorded Value”, which is something like “([CV16]PINK) into something more suitable like “[NL]Neutral” or “[SD]Standard”. That’s the beauty of shooting in raw format.

If you’re still uncomfortable about shooting with these unusual picture control color schemes, then you can always do the job totally inside the editor, instead. In NX Studio, you can take your raw photo that was shot in maybe ‘Neutral’, and just select Picture Control | Creative Picture Control | [08] Bleached to perform the picture drama after the fact.

What about other Nikon cameras (non-Z mount)? Using NX Studio, you can go to the Picture Control and select Latest Picture Control and then scroll down to Creative Picture Control and finally select from the same set of 20 picture controls!

3 Pop