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Fast Agile Beautiful - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2010

The Beauty Shot

We took advantage of a mentoring session being run by Damian McGillicuddy to test the D3S in a studio situation. Damian's students had set the lights up in much the same way as he explained in his feature in the August-September 2009 issue.

We passed the camera to Stephen Iles and his shot is reproduced here. The image is a landscape crop but is reproduced pixel-for-pixel. Coming back from a DX chip the most obvious difference to us was the stepping back to a full-frame chip, and getting just what you expect from a 105mm focal length! With no more than a click on the background to correct for colour temperature, we obtained a very pleasing set of skin tones shooting at 200 ISO.

Our model Charlie's striking hair was also beautifully reproduced.

Although the pixel count is a modest 12mp (to improve the noise performance), a full-sized image, dressed with a border, easily covers a double-page spread at 300ppi and extends to 27" by 19" at inkjet resolution.

Colour Testing

We conducted this test in the normal way, making an accurate exposure of the Macbeth Chart and then assessing this before and after calibration using ACR Calibrator. The progression towards a calibrated shot is shown in the composite image, right. The average error was reduced from 6.8 ?E00 as-shot to 4.5 ?E00 after correction for white balance and exposure, then down to 3.2 ?E00 after calibration.

There was some uncertainty in the calibrated values as we were unsure if ACR was working correctly on this beta version of the ACR handler. No corrections were made to the camera-specific settings and it is unusual that this should have been the case, unless the tuning of the chip was very close to optimum. However, tests performed afterwards (in different lighting) did correctly register changes, suggesting that we were looking at a real effect. The software for the D3S did not include RAW settings for effect (vivid, neutral, portrait, etc) although there are about nine for most other Nikon cameras. It is a reasonable assumption that these will follow in due course.

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