Nikon NX Studio for Infrared Photography

Is Nikon NX Studio good for editing infrared images? Let’s look at how to white balance, swap colors, and add contrast to your infrared images. We’ll also look at some of the challenges in using NX Studio.

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Transcript for Nikon NX Studio for Infrared Photography. Duration: 17:27.

• 0:00 Can Nikon NX Studio be used to edit infrared images? Can you set a good white balance? Can you swap colors? What are the pros and cons of using NX Studio to edit your Nikon RAW infrared images? Let's find out. Since I don't have any Nikon cameras, several people have contributed Nikon RAW images for this video. All of the images in
• 0:24 this video have been edited using only NX Studio. Let's start by setting a white balance. If we look at the right-hand side of the screen, we have the Adjustments tab and under this we have Basic Edit Palettes. If I open that up, I have a number of options available. We'll look at white balance, one of the raw options
• 0:43 available. Within white balance, you can see I can set a color temperature from 2500 Kelvin to 10,000 Kelvin, perfectly suitable for visible light photography, but that's not going to work for infrared. I also have a drop down with a number of presets available for preset white balance settings, but unfortunately none
• 1:03 of these are suitable for infrared. I've tested all of them. What we do have though is a gray point sample tool, which will allow us to sample a neutral element in the image to set a white balance. So if I click on the clouds, then I get a good white balance. I could also pick other subjects like a headstone here that gives me a
• 1:22 white balance or I could select the ground. Any one of these could be used to set a good white balance, any neutral subject in your image. I can also adjust this using the fine adjustment. Before I do that, let me increase the exposure of this image slightly. So we'll go into exposure compensation and I will increase this by one
• 1:41 stop so we can get a little bit better view of it. Now if I go back to white balance, I can do under fine adjustment, I can adjust this to be a little bit cooler if I wanted to, or I can adjust this to be a little bit warmer. So NX Studio does a good job of allowing you to set a white balance on a neutral subject in an infrared
• 1:58 image. Let's talk about a couple cases where setting a white balance can be challenging. What I've noticed is that when an image is overexposed, NX Studio has, it could be NX Studio, it could be a Nikon sensor, but there's some struggle to set a good white balance. So if I try to set a gray point and pick the clouds, for
• 2:18 example, I don't get a very good white balance here. And if I click the side of this monument, now I get a better white balance. You can see that this is mostly gray, the grass is light blue, the sky is yellow, but I have these unusual green tones in the sky and that's not going to work very well. These can be hard to recover.
• 2:38 Here's another image that's overexposed. We can take a look at this. We'll do a gray point sample tool and click the clouds. You can see that's a bit of a challenge there. I could click the ground, maybe a little bit better. Here's one thing you can do that'll help some images. If I go down to adjust brightness and
• 2:54 color, let me scroll down here and I can adjust the highlight protection. If I turn that on, that'll get me a little bit better control of the highlights so those aren't so overexposed. But again, it could still be challenging to set a white balance in an image where the highlights are blown out. So be very careful about
• 3:14 the exposure settings with your Nikon cameras. It's preferable to underexpose an image, avoid overexposing your images. Alright, let's talk about swapping colors. So let's swap the colors for this image. First thing we'll do of course is to set a white balance. So in the white balance settings, I'll select the gray point sample
• 3:33 tool and I could pick clouds in this image or I could pick one of these rocks. I've got a variety of subjects here to pick from that all work pretty well. Neutral elements for setting a white balance. Now this image is underexposed which is fine. I can come down to exposure compensation. I could either use the drop down to set to
• 3:53 increase it by about 1 EV or I could use the slider for a variable amount. Let's stick with 1 EV for now. One stop. Now how to swap colors. We're going to do that in the lightness, chroma and hue adjustment panel. So we'll open this up and go into LCH, the LCH panel and this is where I can swap my colors using a hue
• 4:17 adjustment. In this panel, select the chroma drop down and we've got some options here. I want to select hue because I'm adjusting the hue of this image and I can slide up and down in this image to adjust the color. This immediate view only allows me to do 60 degrees of adjustment but if I change this to 180, now I can adjust
• 4:40 the hues by a full 180 degrees. So if I take this end bar and I slide it all the way down to the bottom, you can see that I've completely swapped my colors 180 degrees. I could also slide this up and down slightly to tweak the sky color to get to a color that I like. So this is getting me a little bit more blue in the sky and
• 5:03 a little more of a nicer color here in the foliage. So there we go. I've swapped colors in the LCH panel with a hue adjustment of 180 degrees. Actually probably maybe around 150 minus 150 degrees got me a good color swap with this image. NX Studio does not have a channel mixer, an invert option or the ability to use LUTs but you
• 5:28 can do a color swap with a hue adjustment. Let's look at some of the ways you can modify your image using picture control. In this particular image, I've white balanced on the clouds and I've done an exposure compensation. In this case, three and two-thirds stops which is a lot. Even though the image was under exposed, the
• 5:46 clouds, the highlights were protected. So let's look at picture control. There are two options in picture control. These are latest picture control and camera compatible. We'll start with camera compatible. Camera compatible are the profiles that you would see in your camera. So if I open up this second drop down, you can see
• 6:05 that I have standard, neutral, vivid monochrome, portrait and landscape. So these are probably options were available for this Nikon camera right in your camera. And in this case, the recorded value was monochrome. And so that's the value that this was captured with but because it's a RAW file, we could switch to any
• 6:24 of these others such as landscape. So these are the settings that are available for camera compatible. Underneath in advanced settings, you have some additional controls. We have a quick adjustment that would allow me to adjust contrast. And you can see that that makes adjustments down here to contrast and to
• 6:42 saturation. Or I could set that back. I could individually adjust sharpening or I could come down to contrast and make specific adjustments to contrast. Maybe notch that back a bit. We could adjust brightness so that some limited controls here. We could control saturation for this image. We could even control the hue.
• 7:05 So clicking this would make an adjustment to the hue. So in this case, you can see the trees are a little bit more blue. And if I go into the negative side, they're a little bit more teal. So a slight adjustment to hue. So these are the advanced adjustments that I can make under the camera compatible picture controls. Now let's look
• 7:23 at these settings that are available under latest picture controls. So these are controls that are available in NX Studio but may not have been available in your camera. This changes the drop down underneath and now there's a number of other options available from auto standard neutral vivid monochrome.
• 7:40 Now a flat monochrome. So if we go monochrome and then we see flat monochrome, we can see what that looks like. And then we can look at deep tone monochrome. So a variety of monochrome options are now available. We've got some portrait options, landscape, flat, a sort of low saturation look, and then
• 8:00 flexible color. We'll come back to that in a second and then creative picture control. And there's a number of options here that you can use for your images. So for example, you could look at bleached to see what that does to your image, or you could look at pop to see what that does. So some choices there under creative
• 8:20 picture control that will allow you to quickly get a look for your image. But let's take some time and look at flexible color. I think this one is pretty interesting. In addition to the advanced settings that we receive, so there's even more advanced settings than we had under camera compatible. So we've got sharpening, we've
• 8:37 got clarity, we can increase clarity, contrast, highlights, shadows, white level, black level. So lots of control over the image if you're using these flexible settings as opposed to one of the camera compatible profiles. In addition to the advanced settings, you now get access to a color blender and color grading.
• 8:59 More options here when you're using flexible color. So for the color blender, I could pick a specific color that I wanted to make an adjustment to. Let's say I wanted to adjust the trees slightly. I could have that control over the hue, a little more control than I did with the camera compatible profiles in terms of the color
• 9:17 range that's available. And I can do the same for the sky and then color grading. So I could apply a color grade to a specific image. So lots of interesting controls here in picture control to either use those that are compatible with your camera or under latest picture control to select from a variety of styles that either give
• 9:36 you presets to work with or a lot of control over your image. Let's take a look at some ways to adjust the saturation in your images. So for this particular image in the basic edit palettes, you can see that I've set a white balance on the clouds. I have done an exposure compensation of two stops and then underneath the
• 9:56 lightness, chroma and hue adjustment, I have done a hue adjustment to swap my colors. So I've got my color swapped to adjust the saturation. I can come down to this second drop down and select chroma. And from here, I've got a few options to increase the saturation of the entire image or decrease. I could grab this
• 10:18 handle on the side and I could increase up, which will increase the saturation of the entire image. So foliage, sky, etc. And then I could also decrease the saturation as well. If I wanted to increase the saturation of only part of the image, like say in this case, the foliage, I could come over here and pick a spot in say the
• 10:40 orange yellows here and drag that up. This kind of creates sort of a tone curve of chroma, a tone curve of saturation, if you will, where I can increase the saturation of the foliage, but not so much the blues in the sky. So I could do those independently. So you've got some controls here. You could add in a number of points to
• 11:00 refine the saturation of your image. Another option is in the color booster, which is available below. So if I open up the color booster, you can see that I've got a slider here from 0 to 100 and I will pick people and nature. I'm going to pick nature and then we will take the slider and we will slide this up. And what's
• 11:22 interesting about the color booster is it tries to selectively impact the color. So you can see, unlike the saturation, which was very uniform, this is making adjustments to parts of the image. So it may work better on some images than other. You can see it's tending to increase the saturation more to the center of the image
• 11:42 and less to the outsides of the image. Actually, if I switch this to people, what's interesting is that if I then increase, you'll notice that the saturation increases are happening on the trees in the middle, but again, not uniform. So color booster is something that you could play with to see if this helps to improve the
• 12:01 saturation of your image. All right, let's look at a neat trick for making your images pop. So we'll start by setting a white balance on this image. I'll use the Greypoint sample tool, sample the clouds. We'll go pretty quickly through this. I'm going to do some exposure compensation. Let's go about two stops. That'll get my
• 12:20 exposure pretty good. Okay, now I want to swap colors. So let's go down to Lightness, Chroma and Hue adjustment. We'll go into the LCH and I will set this to Hue 180 and then let's make an adjustment here. Try to find colors that are interesting. I'm not going to do a full 180 degrees. I like the purples here. Purple teal look is
• 12:46 kind of cool. Okay, so let's go with a look like this. Okay, so we've got our image, but we want it to pop a little bit more. We've got this really cool graffiti here and we need a little bit more contrast to the image. So let's go under Levels and Curves and what we're going to do here is you can of course do all the adjustments
• 13:05 you would do in other programs for setting tone curve. You've got the full control for RGB. You could go into individual channels and you could set individual channels and adjust the curves for those, but there's a really cool tool here, this Auto contrast, which is this half colored circle. And if you click on Auto contrast, what
• 13:27 the program does is it will create an automatic leveling for each of the individual colors and you can see that it's changed the slope for each color individually and in doing so it's of course kept our white balance, kept our colors the same, but it's created a lot of interesting contrast in the image. So this Auto contrast
• 13:51 is a really nice tool for adding a lot of pop and contrast to your images without a lot of work. NX Studio doesn't have masking or local adjustments, but it does have a control point system that'll allow me to make some changes locally within an image and I can get to that through this icon, the color control point tool or which
• 14:11 will open up this tool within the touch-up area. So the color control point tool allows me to select this option or again up here to select or select here and then from here I can put a control point in my image. So let's say I wanted some more contrast out of this barn, so I can come into this control point and this first
• 14:34 adjustment that I can do is to adjust the size so I can get this positioned right where I'd like to see more contrast. I've got tools for brightness, contrast, so I could increase the contrast in this part of the image. I've got saturation and I can also expand this down for red, green, blue and warmth adjustments. So if I
• 14:56 wanted this to be warmer I could make that adjustment as well. So that gets me everything within this circle and then I can simply create additional control points to cover the parts of the image that I want. So not quite as convenient as maybe masking but definitely super easy to use. So I can add some contrast here and
• 15:17 then I can go create another control point and again the control point is going to be this dotted outline, not my yellow circle here and I can use this circle on the left to drag this around to get it where I like it and then increase the contrast and then if I wanted to say increase the warmth I could do that as well. So you can use
• 15:37 these control points to make minor adjustments to your image. You know again not the full control of masking or local adjustments, you can do dodging and burning basically. So I can make adjustments to the brightness and saturation and a little bit of contrast. So a little bit of control over the local elements in your image. Let's
• 15:57 summarize some of the pros and cons of Nikon NX Studio for infrared photography. Well it's free so that's great. You can set a white balance without the need for any custom profiles, that's very nice. You can swap colors using a hue adjustment and all of the basic adjustments that you would expect for a RAW editor are available.
• 16:18 Now let's talk about some of the negatives. So this is of course limited to Nikon files so it'll only be useful for images shot with your Nikon camera. The RAW editor or maybe even the sensors are sensitive to overexposed images. So be careful when you're shooting not to overexpose your RAW images. The histogram may not be giving
• 16:40 you the full truth because the histogram is calibrated for visible light. So keep that in mind when you're shooting to avoid overexposing your infrared images. There's no color swap with the channel mixer, inverter, or LUT but we do have the hue method. There's no masking and these local adjustments with the color control
• 16:58 points are pretty limited. The program can be slow to load images and I've had at least one crash when using NX Studio on the Mac and one crash when using NX Studio on Windows. So just something to be aware of there. Do you use Nikon NX Studio for editing your infrared images? What do you like or dislike about it? Let us know
• 17:19 in the comments. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography journey, like, subscribe or comment. Hope you enjoyed, thanks.