upgrade from D40 to D7000 / 7100 plus lens advise

vaibhav_aroraD40

Hi Everyone

I got the camera last week of December and then took it for a two week break to the south of India start of this year. Just got back. I think the autofocus as well as responsiveness of the camera is incredible. I ended up clicking ~3000 shots in this break (some of them have come out good). It's much higher than what I average.

I have a couple of questions on points that are bothering me much -

a) The colors from D7000 are nowhere near as good as the D40. I've changed the setting to vivid mode, used (mostly) cloudy white balance, but the richer colors of D40 are missing. Is there something else I can do to the settings? I can see the D7K is noticeably brighter but that's not the same thing.

b) The nikkor 18-140 VR lens has barrel distortion at the wide end. Since i visited lots of historical buildings, I photographed them and it's quite visible in many cases. I tried correcting in-camera via the menu but the camera returns 'cannot apply for this photograph' message consistently. Is it because there's no firmware update available for the 18-140? Or is there something I can do to correct it? My other option would be to install lightroom I suppose?

thanks in advance,
Vaibhav

PB_PM

Unless Nikon releases a firmware update the barrel distortion correction in camera will not work with the lens as you suppose.

Msmoto

Shoot RAW 14 bit, lossless compressed, process in Lightroom 5. Use the LR 5 controls to eliminate distortion. And, if you are looking at the rear monitor, this is not a way to evaluate the color. The histogram will help with exposure, but IMO color can only be evaluated in the post processing end.

dissent

As Msmoto says, yeah, correct the distortion on your images in post. I use LR because it edits and organizes my photo catalog. For post editing corrections I have also heard good things about just using the software that is available from Nikon, like the ViewNX2 that came with your camera.

vaibhav_aroraD40

Thanks. Any pointers about what to do with the colors?

Shoot RAW 14 bit, lossless compressed, process in Lightroom 5. Use the LR 5 controls to eliminate distortion. And, if you are looking at the rear monitor, this is not a way to evaluate the color. The histogram will help with exposure, but IMO color can only be evaluated in the post processing end.

Thank you. I tried using LR5 this morning to eliminate distortion but didn't see the lens profile along with other remaining profiles. (on adobe site it says the profile is supported though).

I'm not looking at the rear monitor for comparing color - viewed on the rear monitor, the colors are very nice indeed! I'm looking at my computer screen - for both D40 shots as well as D7000. There I find the D40 colors better (richer).

I guess I'm still thinking whether it was worth making the switch. Part of the reason for move from the two lens combination (18-55 / 55-200) to 18-140 was to eliminate lens change as far as possible. Also I zoom very little. Most of my photos are walkabout. I looked at the exif data of the recent trip photos where I used the D7000 + 18-140 combination only. Of the approximately 3400 shots, 2300 were captured at 18 mm stop.

Thanks to dissent and pb_pm as well. I'll try viewNX2 as well (haven't yet installed it).

Msmoto

I think you can manually control some distortion in LR 5. Also, the file from the D7000 should have more color information within it, so the final result will be better. It may require some presets in LR 5 to make it all happen, however.

Oh, also, I was in Europe in 1970 with my Nikon F's, 24mm and 85mm lenses….270 images on Kodachrome with the 24, about five with the 85mm…LOL

dissent

You can create your own lens correction presets; see links here -
https://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/tag/lens-correction-profiles

However, it also seems that the number of built-in lens correction presets that you see in LR depends on whether or not you're working with a RAW or JPEG image -
Note: in Camera Raw and Lightroom, the lens profile popup will only display the profiles appropriate for the file type. So if you’re looking a raw file, you get to see raw-based lens profiles. If you’re looking at a jpeg, you get to see non-raw-based lens profiles. As you can see, we have many more raw-based lens profiles available than non-raw-based lens profiles. This is due to the fact that lens correction quality for non-raw files (JPEGs, TIFFs, etc.) can be very problematic (this is because it depends on where the JPEG/TIFF came from, and how it was previously processed). For example, a JPEG that comes straight out of the camera is very different from a JPEG that somebody created from a raw file in ACR. If you try to apply the same non-raw-based lens profile to these two cases, you can get quite-different results (even though they’re both JPEGs from the same camera and lens). Thank you for that in-depth information Eric! (also taken from the above linked article.)

vaibhav_aroraD40

Thank you. One more question - this one on the ergonomics. I've noticed that the grip is quite uncomfortable
- (tried taking a few photos again yesterday just to be sure it wasnt the trip fatigue). My little finger sort of hangs with not much to hold. Is adding a battery grip (the MB-D11) the only option? Besides the expenditure It would add weight too which is a negative I think. I can only shoot handheld due to the places that I shoot in (mostly archaeological ruins in India - tripod is not permitted).

spraynpray

The grip is a marmite accessory - you either love it or hate it. I used to like it on my D90, but I found it to be less firmly attached on my D7000 (even after I returned it to the Repair Centre and they improved it) so it was less useful as it made a mockery of buying a good tripod. The other, and final straw is that it takes up too much room in my bags so making extraction of body + grip +17-55 from my bags more of a fumble than I like plus it cuts down the number of bodies I can carry and my bags are heavy enough now without buying an even bigger one.

I don't have one for my D7100 for the above reasons in spite of my little finger slipping under the body. Funny, but since taking the grip off, the little finger thing doesn't bother me...

BTW, LR5 can automatically correct distortions with one tick of a box and so you can forget it as a problem except you should allow for the lost pixels when you compose your picture.