Std Neutral Vivid for Portraits?

lifeinfocus

I have an assignment to take photos of many girl scouts and one parent. It will be in a very nice setting indoors. I have often used "Vivid" picture control in taking photos of people. But for this type of portrait I would like the collective opinion on use of various Picture Control settings for a Nikon camera.

Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Saturation and Sharpening. Which to use - standard, neutral or vivid and to what degree for saturation and sharpening?

What is the recommended setting for a portrait type photo?

I will be using LR for post processing.

Thank you,
Phil

Icebear

lifeinfocus wrote: »

I have an assignment to take photos of many girl scouts and one parent. It will be in a very nice setting indoors. I have often used "Vivid" picture control in taking photos of people. But for this type of portrait I would like the collective opinion on use of various Picture Control settings for a Nikon camera.

Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Saturation and Sharpening. Which to use - standard, neutral or vivid and to what degree for saturation and sharpening?

What is the recommended setting for a portrait type photo?

I will be using LR for post processing.

Thank you,
Phil

Why are you shooting anything but raw?

MomaZunk

I shoot nikon as well, and use the camera vivid setting as my starting point for everything (kids stuff and sports)
I recommend shooting in raw and using a preset that is applied at import to mimic the camera settings.
My preset on import includes these settings:
Under tone curve: Strong contrast
Under Lens correction: enable profile corrections
Under Camera Calibration: Process = 2010 Profile: Camera Vivid
Detail: is default ( I usually add a little more later, but it is more image and end use specific)

This preset gets me pretty close to the camera vivid in the camera

If you are shooting in raw, the nikon settings only affect your jpeg preview that you see on the back of the camera. I do make the following adjustments to get the jpeg preview to look as close to the LR raw conversion later as follows:

I warm up the auto white balance just a bit (+A2) as I believe the nikon auto white balance feels a little blue to me. (The WB does affect the WB starting point for the raw image in LR)
Camera vivd
Standard sharpening

I believe the biggest challenge with portraits is the white balance with potentially mixed lighting. I recommend using a gray disc in a starting shot for each lighting change, and then either setting a custom white balance in camera, or using the eye dropper in LR during post processing. If you do not use the custom WB in camera, then you will want to put your white balance on a particular setting like daylight or incandescent so the white balance is not moving around, and post processing will be easier.

If you are not comfortable with raw yet, then shoot raw + jpeg, and then if you want to change the images later, you can use the raw to modify or experiment.

White balance adjustments can be made on jpegs, but the temp and tint ranges are more exact with the raw image file.

I hope this helps.

lifeinfocus

Icebear wrote: »

Why are you shooting anything but raw?

Good point. Just came back from very long trip and I suppose not thinking well.

Thanks much.

lifeinfocus

MomaZunk, thanks so much for taking the time to go through all your processes in such detail. I will try all of them iin advance.

Take care,
Phil

Icebear

lifeinfocus wrote: »

Good point. Just came back from very long trip and I suppose not thinking well.

Thanks much.

Lightroom has really changed the game.

arodney

If you shoot raw (and I would suggest you do) the picture styles have no effect on that data. Only ISO and exposure settings affect raw. So you could in theory have the camera white balance set wildly off, it wouldn’t matter a lick.

spinero

The answer to your question, is do not shoot vivid for people. You won't be happy in the long run with skin tones. Shoot raw or jpeg, as is your preference, but vivid really saturates the skin tones and adds a lot of contrast in an unpleasant way.

zoomer

Definitely Neutral for people's faces. In a controlled setting like that shooting Jpeg would work just fine if that is what you wanted to do.
Vivid is the last setting I would use for portraits.
If you shoot Raw once you get into Lightroom go to the bottom right in the develop menu and those Mode choices can be made in Lightroom for Raw's.
I usually use a setting of 7 for saturation, sharpening 90 2 20 90.

lifeinfocus

zoomer wrote: »

Definitely Neutral for people's faces. In a controlled setting like that shooting Jpeg would work just fine if that is what you wanted to do.
Vivid is the last setting I would use for portraits.
If you shoot Raw once you get into Lightroom go to the bottom right in the develop menu and those Mode choices can be made in Lightroom for Raw's.
I usually use a setting of 7 for saturation, sharpening 90 2 20 90.

Thank you. I ended up shooting just raw, should have done both.