Nikon D3400 Picture Controls and Effects – How to Use Them on the Nikon D3400 DSLR Camera

The Nikon D3400 PICTURE CONTROLS are similar in many ways to the kind of effect you could have if you put a filter on the front of your lens. Filters change the exposure of your image, sometimes quite subtly, and you can manipulate the picture controls when in semi-auto modes, which are M, A, S, and P. You can’t control them when in auto modes, although they still apply. For example, if you look in PORTRAIT MODE, you will see that the picture control is for portrait and if you are in LANDSCAPE MODE, you will see that the picture control is landscape. They’re grayed out so you can’t change them, but they’re there, so it’s fair to say the picture controls apply across the entire mode dial, so it’s worth knowing what they do. Here’s a quick rundown of what Picture Controls do and what kind of effects they will have on your still images and your videos as well.

So the first picture control on the D3400 is STANDARD PICTURE CONTROL and this setting applies some sharpness and a little boost to contrast and saturation. Basically this is the daily setting for image control. It is the one used in the automatic adjustments and it is probably the one you will use most frequently in M, A, S and P.

The next of the D3400 picture controls is NEUTRAL. The neutral setting applies only a small amount of sharpness with no other modifications and this can be very useful if you intend to work on the image later in your editing software, because it means that it looks most natural and you can apply whatever you want. you want to do with the image more easily. The VIVID Picture Control really increases contrast and saturation and also increases sharpness. Now this is useful if you want to print directly from the camera or from your memory card without having to do any post-production work on it, but it’s often a bit too saturated and the color tones seem a bit unnatural. It’s really not good for portraits because it doesn’t do skin tones very well.

Next on the D3400 picture controls is the MONOCHROME option. However, the Nikon D3400 will change the image to a monochrome image, which is not just black and white. You can also convert it to a sepia image or a cyanotype image. I would recommend that if you are going to take a photo and turn it into a monochrome image that you take the color photo and then go to the retouch menu on the camera and change it there because then your original will always be there as an original color image. The PORTRAIT D3400 Picture Control only gives you a small amount of sharpness that can work to make skin appear a little softer in photography, and it also works to make sure skin tones are as accurate as possible. The LANDSCAPE option in the D3400’s Picture Controls is very similar in many respects to the Vivid Picture Control, but it just gives blues and greens a bit more boost and is really ideal for shooting landscapes and natural views.

The last option you have in the Nikon D3400 picture controls is FLAT, and it’s really designed for video. The reason for this is that it really desaturates the image and the footage. When you’re editing a video, it’s much easier to put color and saturation in video post editing than to remove it, so it produces very low-contrast flat footage so you can apply whatever you want to apply. edit and make the video or movie look exactly how you want it without restricting it and restricting it by having too much saturation or too much color in it.

Well, those are the Picture Controls on the Nikon D3400 and how they can affect your images. However, you can actually subtly change the picture controls if you want. You can only do that in semi-auto settings, but if you’re in M, A, S, or P and you go to MENU SETUP and you go to SHOOTING MENU, then under white balance you have the option to SET PICTURE CONTROLS. Now if you choose that you’ll get a list of all the Picture Controls we just looked at and if you press the multi selector to the right you can go to the internals of each of those Picture Controls and change them. You can change the SHARP, CLARITY, CONTRAST, BRIGHTNESS, SATURATION, and TONE, and you can do this by pressing the multi selector which gives you units of 1 or you can use the rotary dial on the top that gives you units of 1/4 , from what you can see that it can be quite subtle in the way it changes these picture controls. Now they only work for M, A, S and P because if you go back to auto settings you only get the standard controls, which have not been edited by you, but worth knowing because you can subtly change the image. so it looks exactly how you want it to be.

Okay, now let’s take a look at the EFFECTS of the Nikon D3400. You could tell from the picture controls that to some extent it was mimicking the kinds of things you could do with analog photography, either with smart print effects or with the filters, which you could put on the front of the lenses. . But with the effects here, these are purely digital and quite impressive. One of the usual things that I think of is that you can set these up before taking the photo or in many cases recording the video and that means you can watch it through the rear screen and decide if it’s right for you sooner. press the button or press record. That’s really impressive, but you can also do most of the effects after you’ve shot the still image by going into the RETURN MENU, scrolling down, and looking for them there. There are a couple of changes when you are in the video settings.

The first of the Nikon D3400 effects is the NIGHT VISION MODE and it is really for use in very low light so it is shot in black and white, allowing a camera to push the ISO to its upper limit. The image itself is quite grainy, but hopefully in low light conditions and I really don’t recommend using this effect unless it’s really necessary. The VIVID option in D3400 Effects really increases saturation and contrast and thus can really give you a very bright and punchy still image or video. POP will also increase the overall saturation of the image, although that tends to work more with pastels than with brighter colors. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION will take a photo and make it look like an illustration. Sharpens outlines and simplifies coloring for a kind of comic or poster effect. The TOY CAMERA EFFECT of the Nikon D3400 gives the impression of an image that has been taken with an old-style camera with a plastic lens. There are some vignettes around the exterior and you can change the color tone to a little blue or a little yellow.

MINIATURE EFFECT modifies a photo by blurring the edges, making the subject in the middle stand out more. In fact, if something is taken from an angle of about 45 degrees and taken from a distance, it can give the impression that the subject is a toy or a model in a diorama. In video, it has a really clever effect of making time-lapse video, again with the miniature blur effect around the outside, but it speeds up the video recording process, giving it a time-lapse effect. It does not record sound at this point, so it will remain silent.

In SILHOUETTE MODE for the Nikon D3400’s effects, the camera sets the exposure for the brightest part of the image so that you can silhouette the subject against the brightest background. Use the HIGH KEY SETTING when shooting a light subject against a light background; the camera applies some exposure compensation to slightly overexpose and add some brightness to the image. Use the LOW KEY ADJUSTMENT when photographing dark subjects against a dark background. This mode also boosts the highlights a bit for better definition between shadows and highlights. The COLOR SELECTIVE in the effects of the D3400 is a really useful way to make a very impressive image. Basically what it allows you to do is choose up to three colors to maintain the image while making the rest of the image black and white. Again, you can do this while taking a photo or recording the video or you can do it afterwards for still images only in the retouch menu. It’s very easy to do.

The image controls itself, as I say, it works in all modes on the mode dial, but you can change them in M, A, S and P and I have shown you how to do it and when you are looking at the effect remember that you can apply them before you take a photo or in many cases after and when you shoot video, you can apply most of them to video, and the ones that don’t instantly translate from stills to video can also give you some really cool effects that are worth the effort. worth looking at. They may not be your usual image requirements, they may not be the things you go to immediately all the time, but they are there and I think they can really make a big impact with your still images and video.