Nikon D600 For Dummies

Choosing the Right Quality Settings

Almost every review of the D600 contains glowing reports about the camera's top-notch picture quality. As you've no doubt discovered, those claims are true: This baby can create large, beautiful images.

What you may not have discovered is that Nikon's default Image Quality setting isn't the highest that the D600 offers. Why, you ask, would Nikon do such a thing? Why not set up the camera to produce the best images right out of the box? The answer is that using the top setting has some downsides. Nikon's default choice represents a compromise between avoiding those disadvantages while still producing images that will please most photographers.

Whether that compromise is right for you, however, depends on your photographic needs. To help you decide, the rest of this chapter explains the Image Quality setting, along with the Image Size setting, which is also critical to the quality of images that you print. Just in case you're having quality problems related to other issues, though, the next section provides a handy quality-defect diagnosis guide.

Diagnosing quality problems

When I say picture quality, I'm not talking about the composition, exposure, or other traditional characteristics of a photograph. Instead, I'm referring to how finely the image is rendered in the digital sense. Figure 2-14 illustrates the concept: The first example is a high-quality image, with clear details and smooth color transitions. The other examples show five common ...