and making prints, you’ll want a more advanced system (up to $500) like the various
Spyder products from Datacolor (www.datacolor.com), or Colormunki from X-Rite
(www.colormunki.com).
Active D-Lighting
Active D-Lighting is a feature that improves the rendition of detail in highlights and
shadows when you’re photographing high contrast scenes. It’s been available as an inter-
nal retouching option in Nikon’s lower-end cameras (by that I mean the CoolPix point-
and-shoot line) for some time, and has gradually worked its way up through the
company’s dSLR products, eventually reaching the more advanced cameras, including
the D7000. You’ll find the “non-active” D-Lighting feature in the Retouch menu, which
I’ll describe in Chapter 10.
A new wrinkle, however, is the Active D-Lighting capability introduced with Nikon’s
new higher-end models, which, unlike the Retouch menu post-processing feature,
applies its tonal improvements while you are actually taking the photo.That’s good news
and bad news. It means that, if you’re taking photos in a contrasty environment, Active
D-Lighting can automatically improve the apparent dynamic range of your image as
you shoot, without additional effort on your part. However, you’ll need to disable the
feature once you leave the high contrast lighting behind, and the process does take some
Chapter 8 ■Setup: Playback and Shooting Menus 261
Figure 8.28
Pantone’s Huey
monitor color
correction sys-
tem is an inex-
pensive device
for calibrating
your display.