I’ve read some mixed reviews of Nikon’s Active D-Lighting. Some like it, some hate it. From what I can see most of those who love it do so because they process with Capture NX2. Those who hate it use something else (Lightroom, Aperture, something non Nikon) and so don’t see any benefit.

For those of you not familiar with the technology here is a quick catchup;

Active D-Lighting (ADL) analyses a photo as it’s metered and automatically adjusts the highlights and shadows to obtain the widest dynamic range. You set ADL in the ‘Shooting’ menu of your Nikon to one of the following; Auto, High, Medium, Low or Off. You will only receive the benefit ADL if you are processing with Capture NX2, in anything else the adjustments will be lost and the file will just come out looking slightly overexposed.

The end result of all this is that if you shoot with ADL turned on, and you process with Capture NX2 (not the most user friendly of programs but a must if you want the best quality out of your NEF files) you’ll get an image that has a much better dynamic range (almost HDR like in some cases) than shooting without it. The nice thing is that you can always turn the adjustments off in CNX2 if you don’t like what’s been done to the file.

In the past using a HDR technique was great so long as nothing moved between the bracketed exposures. Now you can get almost the same effect with just one shot, no more blurry ghosts as people move between frames…

Which brings me to my example of how ADL can come to the rescue. There are times when you are shooting a dark subject against a bright background (or vis versa if it’s penguins in the Antarctic) when you either don’t have time to set up a flash, the subject is too far away for your flash, it’s not convenient to use one etc. Rather than having to spend hours in post processing blending multiple exposures of each shot for a faux HDR image, or working the contrast / exposure / fill light levels for each shot, switch on ADL. Here’s a ‘with and without’ example (remember you can turn the ADL adjustments off after the fact in CNX2, which is how I got the ‘without ADL’ image).

2 Responses to “Active D-Lighting to the rescue”

1. sprawl says:

   April 10, 2010 at 12:12

   Do you have copy writer for so good articles? If so please give me contacts, because this really rocks!
2. dlscape says:

   May 3, 2010 at 11:14

   Howdy sprawl. Nope, I do all the typing myself Thanks for the nice feedback, it’s good to know someone else reads this blog other than me LOL!