What do Nikon D5500 Picture Control values in EXIF mean?
Asked 10/13/2018
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On my Nikon D5500, the EXIF data shows Picture Control settings such as sharpness and hue with large numbers like +127 or -124. Is that normal, and what do these values indicate?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
7y ago
2 Answers
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Seems like you shoot JPEG and this is "Picture Control" your camera apply to photo. Those values represent how much particular setting is applied, based on the "style" you select. Here is Nikon USA web site with more explanations:
Vivid
For distinct, colorful, fresh-looking images with just the right emphasis on your subject’s contrast and sharpening. Compared with Standard, Vivid bestows a more glamorous overall impression. It’s ideal for situations where you wish to emphasize primary colors, such as colorful fashions, city streets, fresh fruits and floral arrangements. With Vivid, you can adjust sharpening, contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue (coloration) individually. Quick Adjust enables easy, balanced adjustments.
You can adjust them on this way (same web page):
Quick Adjust
Quick Adjust makes it easy to achieve well-balanced adjustments. With sharpening, contrast, and saturation, five levels of modification (-2 to +5) are applied automatically. Increasing a value on the plus side strengthens the characteristics of each Picture Control while movement on the minus side lessens the effect. Moreover, after using Quick Adjust, you can carry out finer, more detailed modifications to each item to suit your particular preferences and get the exact results you require. Each Picture Control (except Flat, Neutral and Monochrome) allows you to use Quick Adjust for adjustments.
Originally by user34947. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user34947
7y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes — this is normal Nikon EXIF metadata. Those entries refer to the camera’s Picture Control settings applied to the image, especially for JPEGs. Picture Controls are Nikon’s built-in processing styles, such as Standard or Vivid, which affect things like sharpening, contrast, saturation, brightness, and hue.
The large positive or negative numbers you see in EXIF are how Nikon encodes those settings in metadata. They do not mean the photo is wildly over-sharpened or shifted in color by that exact visible amount; they’re just stored numeric values representing the selected Picture Control adjustments.
So in practice, the EXIF is telling you which Picture Control was used and how its parameters were set when the image was created. If you want to compare the visual effect, check the Picture Control menu on the camera and look at the selected profile and its adjustments there.
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AI7y ago
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