I’ve had my D800 for a day now and I am still scanning the menus to set it up for my type of shooting. I finally made it to the touch-up menu and was surprised at the number of interesting features Nikon decided to include in this camera, features that you wouldn’t expect from a pro-level camera, rather a more consumer type model like the D7000. On second look , however, I noticed that some of these are actually pretty powerful tools that just might come in handy for the working photographer who needs some in-camera processing in the field. There are the expected “selective color”, “fisheye effect”, “miniature effect”, “color outline” and “color sketch” which I generally associate with a consumer camera, but then there are the tools.  Great tools, like:

1) Distortion control-  Now you can correct in-camera the barrel distortion from your wide angle lenses. The  menu offers a + – 5 steps of correction. This of course only applies to the JPEG, not the RAW image.

2) Straighten-  With the incredible built in on-demand  vertical and horizontal levels you can see right in the  viewfinder or on the back screen, it’s not likely you’ll have many crooked photos, but if you do, Nikon included a straightening tool for you. Nice.

3) Perspective Control-  Real Estate photographers will LOVE this feature. The ability to correct for converging lines in the camera is a powerful and useful Gizmo.

4) Edit Movie-  This Gizmo, hidden at the end of the touch -up menu offers two powerful tools; a) Choose start/stop point on your movie clip. AWESOME….and b) Select a frame from your movie to make a still photo.

Yesterday I posted this video test from my first hour with the D800 and below is a IN-CAMERA screen grab from that short video. I can think of a gazillion applications for this feature. I look forward to testing this more with results next week.

This still was grabbed in-camera from the video clip. The result was a surprisingly good 2.64 MB file.

We will have more tests of the D4 and D800 next week, including side by side comparison shots from  the D700-D800-D3 and D4