Monochrome filter effects

Desaturate a shot and then fine-tune the luminance of various greyscale tones

1 Handy histogram

Most effective black-and-white images contain both black shadows and white highlights. Our edited shot’s histogram has a healthy spread of tones, with some black shadows at the far left and white highlights at the far right. The original shot’s highlights are peaking due to the swan’s sunlit neck. The highlights in the edited image’s histogram aren’t peaking as much. (We’ve included the original histogram at the left of our screengrab, though in practice you can only see one Histogram panel in Capture NX-D.)

2 Picture Control

Click on this icon to access the Picture Control panel and its one-click presets.

3 Latest Picture Control

You could use Picture Control settings that are compatible with the functions on your particular Nikon. For access to the latest tools, set this dropdown to Latest Picture Control.

4 Monochrome

This Picture Control preset instantly removes all of the colour information from your RAW file, leaving a range of greyscale tones. It also gives you access to the Filter Effect dropdown menu.

5 Clarity

This slider enables you to increase the contrast around greyscale midtones, which makes details and textures pop out more. However, an increase in contrast can cause clipping. A little clipping is okay, especially in areas such as the specular highlight on the swan’s beak. To avoid losing detail in important areas use the Clipping Warning feature.

6 Filter Effect

Mimic different on-camera colour filters by choosing various colour presets from the Filter Effect dropdown menu. The Red filter suits our example image best as it darkens the blues in the sky to reveal a trace of lighter cloud. It also darkens the reflected blues in the water. Different filters will suit different shots depending on the colours in the original image, so feel free to experiment.

7 Toning

The Toning dropdown preset enables you to add a wash of colour to your conversions. Check out our walkthrough, below, for more on this.

8 Tone (Detail )

In the Tone (Detail) panel you can drag the Highlight Protection slider right to claw back some of the photo’s over-exposed highlight detail. The Radius slider increases the spread of the contrast change. If you push these sliders too far you’ll see black or white lines appear around contrasting edges.

9 Threshold

This slider reduces the combined effect of the Intensity and Radius sliders, so it helps you get a balance between sharpening detail while keeping image-spoiling artefacts at bay.