Nikon software

Adjust colours selectively using Capture NX-D’s Luminance, Chroma, Hue panel

One way to make your photographs stand out is to use Nikon Capture NX-D to give your colours a subtle boost. This can be especially useful if you’re trying to promote your work amid a sea of competing thumbnails on social media platforms such as Facebook or Flickr. However, if you boost all the colours in a shot equally, you may end up with garish, over-saturated photos that bear little resemblance to what you actually saw when you pressed your Nikon’s shutter release. Some areas in an image, such as a pale blue sky, might benefit from a boost in saturation to give them more impact; other areas, such as Caucasian skin tones, can end up looking far too magenta or orange if you apply the same generic boost.

Fortunately Capture NX-D features the powerful LCH (Lightness, Chroma and Hue) panel, which enables you to selectively boost the colour saturation to suit the needs of different parts of your picture. You can give skin tones a subtle boost in saturation while giving a bigger boost to other areas. The LCH panel also enables you to lighten or darken individual colours. This is particularly useful when adding impact to a weak blue sky (see our threestep walkthrough, right).

Many of Capture NX-D’s editing tools, such as exposure compensation and white balance, will only work with RAW files. However, the good news is that the Curve-based tools in the LCH panel can be used to edit JPEGs. Read on to find out how to get the most from this powerful panel...