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Certain lenses can produce a type of distortion that causes straight lines to appear curved in the photos you take with your Nikon D3100, D5100, or D7000. Wide-angle lenses, for example, often create barrel distortion, in which objects at the center of a picture appear to be magnified and pushed forward, as if you wrapped the photo around the outside of a barrel. The effect is perhaps easiest to spot in a rectangular subject like this oil painting. Notice that in the original image, on the left, the edges of the painting appear to bow slightly outward. Pincushiondistortion affects the photo in the opposite way, making center objects appear smaller and farther away.
You can minimize the chances of distortion with your Nikon DSLR by researching your lens purchases carefully. Photography magazines and online photography sites regularly measure and report distortion performance in their lens reviews.
If you notice a small amount of distortion, try enabling the Auto Distortion Control option on the Shooting menu. This feature attempts to correct distortion as you take the picture. Or you may prefer to wait until after reviewing your photos and then use the Distortion Control on the Retouch menu to try to fix things.
The extent of the in-camera adjustment you can apply is fairly minimal. It’s also a little difficult to gauge results on the monitor of your D3100, D5100, or D7000, because you can’t display any sort of alignment grid over the image to help you find the right degree of correction.
All that said, the first step in applying either filter is to display your photo in single-image playback mode and then press OK to display the Retouch menu. Highlight the filter you want to use (Distortion Control or Fisheye) and press OK again. From that point, the process depends on which of the two filters you’re using:
Sharpening setting Neutral vs Standard picture controls? Does a given sharpening setting in the Neutral picture control produce the same level of sharpening as the same setting in the Standard picture control? Sharpening setting Neutral vs Standard picture controls? Yes; I am currently shooting in jpeg. D7000 - Set picture control.
- Distortion Control: Select Distortion Control and then press OK. An Auto option is available for some lenses, as long as you didn’t apply the Auto Distortion Control feature when taking the picture. As its name implies, the Auto option attempts to automatically apply the right degree of correction. If the Auto option is dimmed or you prefer to do the correction on your own, choose Manual. The little scale under the image represents the degree and direction of shift that you’re applying. Press the Multi Selector right to reduce barrel distortion; press left to reduce pincushioning. Press OK when you’re ready to make your corrected copy of the photo.
- Fisheye: After you highlight the filter name and press OK, you see the word Fisheye at the top of the screen, and the scale at the bottom of the image indicates the strength of the distortion effect. Press the Multi Selector right or left to adjust the amount. Then press OK to create the fisheye copy.
A feature that Nikon calls Picture Controls offers one more way to tweak image sharpening, color, and contrast when you shoot in the P, S, A, and M exposure modes with your Nikon D3100, D5100, or D7000 and choose one of the JPEG options for the Image Quality setting.
When you shoot in the advanced exposure modes you can choose from the following Picture Controls. In the other exposure modes, your Nikon DSLR selects the Picture Control setting for you.
![Picture control nikon d7000 kevin wang youtube Picture control nikon d7000 kevin wang youtube](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125859976/918808683.jpeg)
- Standard (SD): The default setting, this option captures the image normally.
- Neutral (NL): At this setting, the camera doesn’t enhance color, contrast, and sharpening as much as in the other modes. The setting is designed for people who want to precisely manipulate these picture characteristics in a photo editor.
- Vivid (VI): In this mode, the camera amps up color saturation, contrast, and sharpening.
- Monochrome (MC): This setting produces black-and-white photos. Only in the digital world, they’re called grayscale images because a true black-and-white image contains only black and white, with no shades of gray.
- Portrait (PT): This mode tweaks colors and sharpening in a way that is designed to produce nice skin texture and pleasing skin tones. (If you shoot in the Portrait or Night Portrait Scene modes, the camera selects this Picture Control for you.)
- Landscape (LS): This mode emphasizes blues and greens. As you might expect, it’s the mode used by the Landscape Scene mode.
![D7000 D7000](/uploads/1/2/5/8/125859976/240001561.jpg)
The extent to which Picture Controls affect your image depends on the subject as well as the exposure settings you choose and the lighting conditions.
The following steps provide a quick overview of the process so that if you encounter the menu screens that contain the related options, you’ll have some idea what you’re seeing. So here are the basics:
- Set the Mode dial to P, S, A, or M.These are the only modes that let you select or modify a Picture Control.
- Display the Shooting menu, choose Set Picture Control, and press OK.
- Highlight the Picture Control you want to modify.
- Press the Multi Selector right.Which options you can adjust depend on your selected Picture Control.
- Highlight a picture characteristic and then press the Multi Selector right or left to adjust the setting.
- Press OK to save your changes and exit the adjustment screen.As when you fine-tune a White Balance setting, an asterisk appears next to the edited Picture Style in the menu and Shooting Information screen to remind you that you have adjusted it.
Complete details on each of the Picture Control adjustment options for the D3100, D5100, and D7000 are found in the electronic version of the camera manual, stored on one of the two CDs that shipped with your camera. (The other CD contains the Nikon software.) You can read the manual in Adobe Acrobat or any other program that can open PDF files. The paper manual contains only basic operating instructions, and the Picture Control editing functions didn’t make the cut.