Nikon D7000 manual 235

Chapter 8 ■ Setup: Playback and Shooting Menus 235

until the quality/image size settings (respectively) that you want are shown in the top- side monochrome status LCD. You can also use this menu option to make the quality settings using the bigger, brighter three-inch color LCD. You might want to do that when the D7000 is mounted on a tripod and the top-panel LCD is above eyelevel, or you simply might prefer the color LCD’s display, which can be easier to read. You have two choices to make:

■JPEG compression. To reduce the size of your image files and allow more photos to be stored on a given memory card, the D7000 uses JPEG compression to squeeze the images down to a smaller size. This compacting reduces the image quality a lit- tle, so you’re offered your choice of Fine (a 1:4 reduction), Normal (1:8 reduction), and Basic (1:16) compression. You can see an exaggerated version of the effects of JPEG compression in Figure 8.11. There is a further tweak you can make, specify- ing whether JPEG compression should be optimized for the smallest possible image size at a given compression level, or whether you’d prefer to sacrifice some com- pression for optimal quality. You won’t find those options in this menu entry; instead, use the JPEG Compression menu item, described later in this section.

■JPEG, RAW, or both. You can elect to store only JPEG versions of the images you shoot, or you can save your photos as RAW files, which consume more than twice as much space on your memory card. Or, you can store both at once as you shoot. Many photographers elect to save both JPEG and a RAW, so they’ll have a JPEG version that might be usable as-is, as well as the original “digital negative” RAW file in case they want to do some processing of the image later. You’ll end up with two different versions of the same file: one with a JPG extension, and one with the NEF extension that signifies a Nikon RAW file.

Figure 8.11

At low levels of JPEG compres- sion the image looks sharp even when you enlarge it enough to see the actual pix- els (top); when using extreme JPEG compres- sion (bottom) an image obvi- ously loses quality.