RETOUCH MENU (brush icon)

How to Get Here

Select the Retouch Menu by pressing MENU, moving to the left and then up or down to select the brush icon at the bottom. You'll then see RETOUCH MENU on the top of the color LCD.

Trick: Press the OK button when an image is displayed to get to most of the retouch menu.

What it Sets

This lets you manipulate images in-camera. The originals are unaltered. The D40 creates new versions of the images and saves them.

Concatenation: The D40 is sneaky enough to know if a file was created with these trick modes, and often won't let you apply the same filter twice. You can concatenate different filters.

Firmware Defect: the new images are saved with a file number one more than the most recent image, and are prefaced with CSC, not DSC. The EXIF create time is unaltered, so you'll have to sort images by create time if you can.

This double-defect means that the file numbers of the newly created versions are scrambled from the originals. If you're playing with the most recent image the file numbers are close, but if you're playing with an earlier file, it's file number will be unrelated to the original.

By prefacing the file with CSC instead of DSC the modified files will sort differently than the originals.

The correct way to have done this would be to retain the same file name and append -edit, -edit1, -edit2, etc. For instance, if you make a new version of DCS_0123.jpg, the new file might be called CSC_5837.jpg. Good luck sorting them out! If done correctly, the new version would be named DSC_0123-edit.jpg.

D-Lighting

This creates new versions of images with lightened shadows similar to Photoshop's Shadow/Highlight Adjustment tool.

You have three levels of lightening: Low, Normal, and High. (this is the same, with much clearer labeling, than the D80's Moderate (less), Normal and Enhanced (more) options).

You'll never need this with the D40, because the D40's meter firmware is defective, just like the D80's meter, and usually overexposes, especially images with dark sections.

This trick D-Lighting would have been clever on one of the cameras with a good meter, like the D200, D70 and D50, but not the D80 or D40 which expose for the shadows with a vengeance.

© 2007 KenRockwell.com

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converted by Sándor Nagy