Overusing Ac tive D-Lighting

Nikon’s Active D-Lighting can be a great option for automatically adjusting brightness and contrast – it’s useful in situations where you’d struggle to reveal detail in both the highlights and the shadows of an image, particularly where you can’t use an ND grad or can’t face additional editing work later. However, it can make low-contrast scenes look flat, and it can also cause problems if you’re applying exposure compensation – a shot may still appear too bright, even though you might have dialled in some negative exposure compensation. As a result, it may be worth de-activating Active D-Lighting in these situations.

Active D-Lighting is useful, but reserve the highest setting for high-contrast lighting, and de-activate it for low-contrast subjects. You can always apply it later when you process shots