Most of the time when shooting I am utilize three modes. Manual, Aperture Priority and Shutter priority. While reading a blog post from a rather prominent photographer, he was singing the praises of a creative preset on the Nikon Z series cameras, #17 Charcoal.
Needless to say I was intrigued by the photographs that he was posting showing the subtle, yet natural looking results he was getting by simply using this creative preset readily available in camera. Curious about the results I would get, I decided to test it for myself. A recent day trip we took to historic Frankenmuth Michigan was the perfect opportunity.
An old weathered barn was the perfect subject for my experiment with Charcoal #17. The picture above is taken in standard and produced a very nice image.
The preset appearance really depends on the settings you input as like most things in the camera, it can be tweaked. Here are the settings that I began with.
- #17 Charcoal
- Effective Level 50
- Quick Sharp 0
- Sharpening +5
- Mid Range Sharpening +2
- Clarity +3
- Contrast 0
- Filter Effects ORNG
- Toning set to NONE
Those settings produced what you see above which I kinda like. The wood tones are bit richer, more true to what I was seeing and not the washed out gray like the standard setting. This is not something that you would use on every photo but on things like old wood it does produce a really cool look. It is simply just creative fun.
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