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

The PICTURE CONTROLS on the Nikon D3400 are similar in many ways to the type of effect you might have if you attached a filter to the front of your lens. Filters change the exposure of your image, sometimes quite subtly, and you can manipulate the image 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’ll see that the Image control is for portrait and if you’re in LANDSCAPE MODE, you’ll see that the Image control is landscape. They’re grayed out, so you can’t change them, but they’re there, so it’s fair to say that Picture Controls apply across the entire mode dial, so it’s worth knowing what they do. Here’s a quick rundown of what the picture controls do and the kind of effects they’ll have on your still images and also your videos.

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

The next of the D3400’s picture controls is NEUTRAL. The neutral setting applies only a small amount of sharpening without other modifications and this can be very useful if you intend to work on the image afterwards in your editing software, because it means it has the most natural look and you can apply whatever you want. you want to make the image easier. VIVID picture control really boosts contrast and saturation and also boosts sharpness. Now this is useful if you want to print directly from the camera or your memory card without doing any post-production work, but it’s often too saturated and the color tones look unnatural. It’s not really good for portraits because it doesn’t do skin tones very well.

Next up in the D3400’s 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 convert it to a monochrome image, take the color photo and then go into the retouch menu in 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 sharpening which can work to make skin appear a bit smoother in the photo, and it also works to ensure skin tones are as accurate as possible. The LANDSCAPE option in the D3400’s Picture controls is very similar in many ways to the Vivid Picture control, but it gives the blues and greens a little more punch and is ideal, really, for shooting landscapes and natural vistas.

The final 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 footage. When you’re editing video, it’s much easier to put color and saturation in post-edit video than to remove it, so it produces flat, very low-contrast footage so you can apply whatever you want to apply. your editing and make video or movie look exactly how you want it without restricting and constraining it by having too much saturation or too much color.

Okay, so those are the Nikon D3400 Picture Controls and how they can affect your images. However, you can subtly change the image controls if you wish. You can only do that in the semi-auto setting, but if you’re in M, A, S, or P and you go into the SETUP MENU and go to the 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 that we just looked at, and if you press the multi-selector to the right, you’ll be able to go into the inner workings of each of those Picture controls and change them. You can change the SHARPNESS, CLARITY, CONTRAST, BRIGHTNESS, SATURATION and HUE and you can do this by pressing the multi selector which gives you units of 1 or you can use the rotary dial on top which gives you units of 1/ 4, so you can see that it can be quite subtle in the way it changes these image controls. Now they only work for M, A, S and P because if you go back to the automatic settings you only get the standard controls, which you haven’t edited yourself, but it’s worth knowing because you can subtly change the image. to make it look exactly how you want it to be.

Ok, now let’s take a look at the EFFECTS on the Nikon D3400. You could tell from the picture controls that, to some degree, I was mimicking the kind of things you could do with analogue photography, either with clever print effects or with the filters, which you could attach to the front of the lenses. . But with the effects here, these are purely digital and they’re pretty awesome. One of the usual things I think about them is that you can set them up before you take the photo or in many cases record the video and that means you can look at it via the rear screen and decide if it’s right for you beforehand. you press the button or press record. Now, that’s really impressive, but you can also do most of the effects after you’ve taken the still image by going to the RETOUCH MENU and scrolling down and finding them there. There are a couple of changes when you’re in the video settings.

The first of the Nikon D3400’s effects is NIGHT VISION MODE and it’s really for use in very low light, so it’s shot in black and white, allowing the camera to push the ISO all the way to its upper limit. The image itself is quite grainy, but this is to be expected in low light conditions and I really don’t recommend using this effect unless you really have to. The VIVID option in D3400 Effects really boosts saturation and contrast, so it 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 brighter colors. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION will take a photo and make it look like an illustration. It sharpens the outlines and simplifies the coloring for a sort of comic book or poster effect. The TOY CAMERA EFFECT on the Nikon D3400 gives the impression of a photograph taken with an old-style camera with a plastic lens. There is some vignetting around the outside and you can change the color tone to a little bit of blue or a little bit of yellow.

MINIATURE EFFECT modifies a photo by blurring the edges, making the subject in the middle stand out more. In fact, if something is shot from an angle of, say, 45 degrees and 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 when making a time lapse video, again with the blur thumbnail effect around the outside, but speeds up the process of shooting the video giving you a time lapse effect. It does not record sound at this point, so it will be silent.

In SILHOUETTE MODE on the Nikon D3400 effects, the camera sets the exposure for the brightest part of the image so you can outline your subject against the brightest background. Use the HIGH KEY SETTING when you’re shooting a bright subject against a light background – the camera applies some exposure compensation to slightly dodge and add some brightness to the image. Use the LOW KEY SETTING when shooting dark subjects against a dark background. This mode also boosts the highlights a bit to get a better definition between the shadows and highlights. SELECTIVE COLOR in the D3400’s effects is a really useful way to create a striking image. Essentially what it allows you to do is choose up to three colors to keep in the image while making the rest of the image black and white. Again, you can do this while you’re taking a photo or video, or you can do it afterward for still images only in the retouch menu. It’s very easy to do.

The Picture Controls, as I say, work in all modes on the mode dial, but you can change them in M, A, S, and P and I’ve shown you how to do that and when you’re looking at the effect, remember that you can apply them before you taking a photo or in many cases after and when you shoot a 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 to make it well worth your while. look at. They might not be your usual everyday imaging requirements, they might not be the things you go to right away all the time, but they’re there and I think they can really pack a punch with your stills and video.