I have been getting some odd results with shots of greenery. So today I reset all the menu settings. This is done by pressing two buttons on the top plate – ‘QUAL’ and ‘+/-‘ for a second or so until the information in the top LCD blinks and resets.
I was not sure whether this resets every setting in all the menus, and anyway I wanted to work my way through all the settings to make sure they were where I wanted them to be. I am away from home at the moment, so I googled for the D200 manual and came up with Ken Rockwell’s guide to the settings. It can be downloaded as a pdf, but looking at it in his site enables one to hyperlink to different references.
So I discovered that I had the hue setting in SHOOTING MENU > Optimize Image > Custom > Hue Adjustment, set to -3degrees. I have no idea when I did it, but having done it, I decided to google for hue adjustment in the D200. None of the people whose stuff I read suggests altering it and Ken Rockwell says ‘leave it alone!’. Which begs the question of why it is there.
Pressing the info (‘?’) button on the D200 brings up a the following. “Hue adjustment: Adjust color hue. For example, choose positive values to make skin tones more yellow, or negative values to make skin tones redder.”
Which is more of a mystery because I cannot imagine I would ever have wanted to make skin tones redder. It is just not something the D200 needs, because it exposes skin tones very nicely without adjusting hue.
Which leaves the possibliity that I adjusted it ‘blind’ while I was intending to do something else.
Hue corrected to ‘0’
The bottom line is that having seen the result of adjusting hue in the camera settings, I second Ken Rockwell’s opinion – leave it alone.
It may be that the adjustment setting can be re-adjusted in Camera Raw in Photoshop, but I have not had much success and as there are several sliders to move, it is not something I want to do as a matter of course.
Photograph Works 