Displaying photos one at a time (single-frame playback)

For normal playback — that is, to see each photo one at a time, as shown in Figure 8-6 — take these steps:

1. Press the Playback button, labeled in Figure 8-6 .

   The camera displays the last picture you took, along with some picture data, such as the filename of the photo and the date it was taken, as shown in the figure.

2. To scroll through your pictures, swipe a finger across the touchscreen, rotate the Command dial, or press the Multi Selector right or left.

   I labeled the Command dial and Multi Selector in the figure. To view the next picture using the touchscreen, swipe your finger from right to left across the screen. Swipe from the left to go back one picture.

   In single-frame playback view, you can magnify or reduce the display size by pinching outward or inward, respectively. You also can press the Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons, both labeled in Figure 8-6. The upcoming section "Zooming in for a closer view" talks more about this feature.

   If the picture's a loser, press the Delete button, also labeled in the figure. A confirmation screen appears; press the button a second time to erase the file. (See the next chapter for other ways to delete photos.)

3. To return to picture-taking mode, press the Playback button again or press the shutter button halfway and then release it.

Viewing multiple images at a time (thumbnails view)

Along with viewing images one at a time, you can display 4 or 12 thumbnails, as shown in Figure 8-7, or even a whopping 80 thumbnails.

Use these techniques to change to thumbnails view and navigate your photos:

• Display thumbnails. If the touchscreen is enabled, pinch in: That is, put your thumb and a finger on opposite corners of the monitor and drag both toward the center of the screen. You also can press the Zoom Out button (refer to Figure 8-6).

  Either way, your first pinch or press of the Zoom Out button cycles from single-picture view to 4-thumbnail view; keep pinching or pressing to shift to 12-picture view and then to 80 thumbnail view. One more pinch or press takes you to Calendar view, a nifty feature explained in the next section.

• Display fewer thumbnails. For touchscreen operation, pinch out: Place thumb and forefinger in the center of the screen and drag both toward the edge of the monitor. If you prefer, you can press the Zoom In button instead. Each pinch or press shifts you one step closer to full-frame view.
• Scroll to the next screen of thumbnails. Drag a finger up or down the screen or press the Multi Selector up and down.
• Select an image. To perform certain playback functions while in thumbnails view, such as deleting a photo or protecting it, you first need to select an image. A yellow box surrounds the selected image (refer to Figure 8-7). To select a different image, just tap its thumbnail. Or rotate the Command dial or use the Multi Selector to move the highlight box over the image. (This process works differently in Calendar view; again, see the next section for help.)

• Shift directly from any thumbnails display to single-image view. Select the photo you want to view and then tap its thumbnail or press OK.

Displaying photos in Calendar view

In Calendar view, you see a little calendar on the screen, as shown on the left in Figure 8-8. By selecting a date on the calendar, you can quickly navigate to all pictures you shot on that day. A thumbnail-free date indicates that your memory card doesn't contain any photos from that day.

Here's how to take advantage of Calendar view:

1. Pinch in (on the touchscreen) or press the Zoom Out button as needed to cycle through the Thumbnail display modes until you reach Calendar view.

   If you’re viewing images in full-frame view, for example, you need to pinch or press four times to get to Calendar view.

2. Select the date on which you shot the images you want to see.

   A yellow box highlights the currently selected date. In Figure 8-8, for example, February 23 is selected. To select a different date, tap it in the calendar display or move the highlight box over it by using the Multi Selector or rotating the Command dial.

   The number of the month appears at the top of the screen. To quickly scroll to a different month, tap one of the arrows on either side of the number. You also can use the Command dial or Multi Selector to travel from one month to the next.

   After you select a date, the right side of the screen displays thumbnails of pictures taken on that date.

3. To view all thumbnails from the selected date, tap the Zoom Out icon at the bottom of the screen, press the Zoom Out button, or press OK.

   The Zoom Out icon is the one labeled "Tap to toggle … " in Figure 8-8. The thumbnail strip becomes active (refer to the right side of Figure 8-8), and you can scroll through the thumbnails by using the touchscreen, Command dial, or Multi Selector. The currently selected image is highlighted by a yellow box.

4. To temporarily display a larger view of the selected thumbnail, hold down the Zoom In button.

   In the zoomed view, the image filename appears under the larger preview, as shown in Figure 8-9. When you release the Zoom In button, the large preview disappears, and the calendar display shown on the right in Figure 8-8 comes back into view. (There is no touchscreen option to perform this function.)

5. To jump from the thumbnail strip back to the calendar so that you can select a different date, tap the Zoom Out icon or press the Zoom Out button again.

   You can keep pressing the button or tapping the icon to jump between the calendar and the thumbnail strip as much as you want.

6. To exit the thumbnail strip and view the selected image in single-image view, tap the thumbnail or press OK.

   If the calendar page is currently active instead of the thumbnail strip, press OK twice (the first press takes you to the thumbnail strip).

After Step 6, you can return immediately to Calendar view by pressing the OK button but only if you don't scroll to the next or previous picture first. Otherwise, you have to cycle through all the thumbnail views to get to Calendar view.

Zooming in for a closer view

When you display a photo in single-frame view, as shown on the left in Figure 8-10, you can magnify it to get a close-up look at important details, as shown on the right. Here’s the scoop:

• Zoom in. Pinch out on the touchscreen or press the Zoom In button. You can magnify the image to a maximum of 13 to 33 times its original display size, depending on the picture resolution (Image Size). Just keep pressing the button or pinching out until you reach the magnification you want.

• Zoom out. To zoom out to a reduced magnification, pinch in or press the Zoom Out button.

• View another part of the magnified picture. When an image is magnified, a thumbnail showing the entire image appears briefly in the lower-right corner of the monitor (refer to the right side of Figure 8-10). The yellow outline in the thumbnail indicates the area that’s consuming the rest of the monitor space. To scroll the display and view a different portion of the image, you can use the Multi Selector or just drag your finger across the screen.

  The bar at the bottom of the navigation window gives you an indication of the magnification level; the closer the white bar gets to the right end of the bar, the greater the magnification level.

  After a few seconds, the navigation thumbnail disappears; just tap the screen or press the Multi Selector in any direction to redisplay it.

• Inspect faces. Try this trick to inspect each face in a group shot: First, magnify the image. The picture-in-picture thumbnail displays a white border around each detected face. (Typically, subjects must be facing the camera for faces to be detected.) An i symbol that sports a face and the word On also appears in the lower-left corner of the screen, as shown on the left in Figure 8-11.

  Next, press the i button or tap that On symbol. A second symbol, decorated with a face and a Multi Selector symbol then appears, as shown on the right in the figure. You can tap that symbol or press the Multi Selector right or left to jump from face to face. Press OK to fill the frame with the selected face. Press the i button or tap the i symbol (now labeled Off) to turn the face-inspection feature off and return to the normal playback zoom behavior. (Like the navigation box, these icons disappear pretty quickly; just tap anywhere on the screen to redisplay them.)

• View more images at the same magnification. Here’s another neat trick: While the display is zoomed, rotate the Command dial to display the same area of the next photo at the same magnification. So if you shot the same subject several times, you can easily check to see how a particular detail appears in each one.

• Return to full-frame view. You can switch from any magnification level to full-screen view by pressing OK.

File Information mode

In the File Information display mode, the monitor displays the data shown in Figure 8-14. Here's the key to what information appears, starting at the top of the screen and working down:

• File number/Total files: The first value indicates the number of the currently displayed photo; the second tells you the total number of files in the same folder.
• Folder name: Folders are named automatically by the camera unless you create custom folders, a trick you can explore in Chapter 10. The first camera-created folder is 100D5500. Each folder can contain up to 999 images; when you exceed that limit, or the last photo you stored in that folder had the file number 9,999, the camera creates a new folder and assigns the next folder number: 101D5500, 102D5500, and so on.

• Filename: The camera also automatically names your files. Filenames end with a 3-letter code that represents the file format, which is either JPG (for JPEG) or NEF (for Raw) for still photos. Chapter 2 discusses these formats. If you record a movie, the file extension is MOV; if you create a dust-off reference image file, an advanced feature designed for use with Nikon Capture NX 2, the camera instead uses the extension NDF. (Because this software must be purchased separately, I don’t cover it in this book.)

  The first four characters of filenames also can vary as follows:

  • DSC_: You captured the photo in the default Color Space, sRGB. This setting is the best choice for most people, for reasons you can explore in Chapter 5.
  • _DSC: If you change the Color Space setting to Adobe RGB, the underscore character comes first.

  Each image is also assigned a 4-digit file number, starting with 0001. When you reach image 9999, the file numbering restarts at 0001, and the new images go into a new folder to prevent any possibility of overwriting the existing image files. For more information about file numbering, see the Chapter 1 section that discusses the File Number Sequence option, found on the Custom Setting menu. (I recommend keeping this option turned on.)

• Date and Time: Just below the folder and filename info, you see the date and time that you took the picture. Of course, the accuracy of this data depends on whether you set the camera’s date and time values correctly, which you do via the Time Zone and Date option on the Setup menu.
• Image Quality: Here you can see which Image Quality setting you used when taking the picture. Again, Chapter 2 has details, but the short story is this: Fine, Normal, and Basic are the three JPEG recording options, with Fine representing the highest JPEG quality. Raw refers to the Nikon Raw format, NEF (for Nikon Electronic Format). If you captured the picture in both formats, you see Raw+Fine (or Normal or Basic). Only one thumbnail appears to represent each file.
• Image Size: This value tells you the image resolution, or pixel count. See Chapter 2 to find out about resolution.

Figure 8-15 shows you some additional symbols that appear when you use certain after-the-shot camera features, as follows:

• Rating symbol: Chapter 9 explains how you can rate a picture or movie, assigning it one to five stars or, if you're totally disgusted with the file, labeling it with a trash can so that you can easily locate it to delete it. The rating shown in Figure 8-15 indicates a five-star photo, for example. (I grade on a curve.) If you don't assign any rating, this area of the playback screen appears empty.
• Protected symbol: The key icon indicates that you used the file-protection feature to prevent the image or movie from being erased when you use the camera’s Delete function. See the next chapter to find out more. (Note: Formatting your memory card, a topic discussed in Chapter 1, does erase even protected pictures.) Again, this area appears empty if you didn’t apply protection.
• Retouch symbol: This icon appears on images that you created by applying one of the Retouch menu features to a picture. (The camera preserves the original and applies your alterations to a copy of the file.) Chapter 11 explains this feature and other Retouch menu options. See Chapter 7 for help with the movie-editing function found on the menu; for edited movies, you see a little scissors icon instead of the Retouch symbol shown in the figure.
• Send to Smart Device symbol: After you tag a photo for Wi-Fi transfer to a smartphone or tablet, this symbol appears. Chapter 9 explains the Wi-Fi feature. (You can't transfer movies via Wi-Fi.)

Highlights (blinkies) mode

One of the most difficult problems to correct in a photo-editing program is known as blown highlights in some circles and clipped highlights in others. In plain English, both terms mean that highlights — the brightest areas of the image — are so overexposed that areas that should include a variety of light shades are instead totally white. For example, in a cloud image, pixels that should be light to very light gray become white due to overexposure, resulting in a loss of detail in those clouds.

Highlights display mode alerts you to clipped highlights by blinking the affected pixels on and off. But just because you see the flashing alerts doesn't mean that you should adjust exposure — the decision depends on where the alerts occur and how the rest of the image is exposed. If your subject appears fine and the blinkies are in the background, don't worry about it. If you adjust exposure to get rid of the blown highlights, your subject will then be underexposed. In other words, sometimes you simply can't avoid a few clipped highlights when the scene includes a broad range of brightness values.

Like all playback display modes except File Information, Highlights mode is disabled by default. Follow the instructions in the "Viewing Picture Data" section, earlier in this chapter, to enable it. You can get a look at the Highlights display in Figure 8-12; there's not much to it except the label Highlights at the bottom of the screen and the number of files/total number of files at the top. The rating, retouch, protected, and send-to-smart device markings also appear if you used those features. (Refer to Figure 8-15.)

RGB Histogram mode

Press the Multi Selector down to shift from Highlights mode to RGB Histogram mode, which displays your image as shown in Figure 8-16. Again, you can view your picture in this mode only if you enable it via the Display Mode option on the Playback menu. (See “Viewing Picture Data,” earlier in this chapter, for help.)

Underneath the image thumbnail, you see just a few pieces of data. As with File Information mode, you see the Protected, Retouch, Rating, and Send to Smart Device icons if you used those features. Beneath that, you see the White Balance settings used for the shot. In the figure, the data shows that the picture was captured using the Auto White Balance with zero adjustment along the blue-to-amber axis and zero adjustment along the green-to-magenta axis. (Chapter 5 details White Balance options.) At the top of the display, you see the File number/Total files data, also part of the standard File Information display data.

The keys to this display mode, though, are those chart-like thingies called histograms. You get two types of histograms: The top one is a Brightness histogram; the three others are known collectively as an RGB (red, green, blue) histogram.

The next two sections explain what you can discern from the histograms. But first, here’s a cool trick to remember: If you press the Zoom In button in this display mode, you can zoom the thumbnail to a magnified view. The histograms then update to reflect only the magnified area of the photo. Use the Multi Selector or drag in the image thumbnail to scroll the display to see other areas of the picture. To return to the regular view and once again see the whole-image histogram, press OK.

Reading a Brightness histogram

You can get an idea of image exposure by viewing your photo on the camera monitor and by looking at the blinkies in Highlight mode. But the Brightness histogram provides a way to gauge exposure that’s a little more detailed.

A Brightness histogram indicates the distribution of shadows, highlights, and midtones (areas of medium brightness) in an image. Figure 8-17 shows you the histogram for the spice photo featured in Figure 8-16.

The horizontal axis of the histogram represents the possible picture brightness values — the maximum tonal range, in photography-speak — from the darkest shadows on the left to the brightest highlights on the right. And the vertical axis shows you how many pixels fall at a particular brightness value. A spike indicates a heavy concentration of pixels at that brightness value.

Keep in mind that there is no “perfect” histogram that you should try to achieve. Instead, interpret the histogram with respect to the distribution of shadows, highlights, and midtones that comprise your subject. You wouldn’t expect to see lots of shadows, for example, in a photo of a polar bear walking on a snowy landscape. Pay attention, however, if you see a very high concentration of pixels at the far right or left end of the histogram, which can indicate a seriously overexposed or underexposed image, respectively.

When shooting subjects that contain a significant amount of white, I usually underexpose the photo just a hair. That way, I make sure that I don't blow out highlights. In such cases, the histogram may show no or few pixels at the right end of the scale. Again, though, you have to read the histogram with an eye toward getting the exposure of the main subject correct. Had I increased exposure enough to grow the highlights pixel population for my spice photo, I could easily have created blown highlights in the silver edges of the spice bowls.

Understanding RGB histograms

When you view your images in RGB Histogram display mode, you see two histograms: the Brightness histogram, covered in the preceding section, and an RGB histogram. Figure 8-18 shows you the RGB histogram for the spice photo.

To make sense of an RGB histogram, you first need to know that digital images are known as RGB images because they’re created from three primary colors of light: red, green, and blue. Whereas the Brightness histogram reflects the brightness of all three color channels rolled into one, RGB histograms let you view the values for each channel.

When you look at the brightness data for a single channel, though, you glean information about color saturation rather than image brightness. (Saturation refers to the purity of a color; a fully saturated color contains no black or white.) I don’t have space in this book to provide a full lesson in RGB color theory, but the short story is that when you mix red, green, and blue light, and each component is at maximum brightness, you create white. Zero brightness in all three channels creates black. If you have maximum red and no blue or green, though, you have fully saturated red. If you mix two channels at maximum brightness, you also create full saturation. For example, maximum red and blue produce fully saturated magenta. And, wherever colors are fully saturated, you can lose picture detail. For example, a rose petal that should have a range of tones from medium to dark red may instead be a flat blob of pure red.

The upshot is that if all the pixels for one or two channels are slammed to the right end of the histogram, you may be losing picture detail because of overly saturated colors. If all three channels show a heavy pixel population at the right end of the histogram, you may have blown highlights — again, because the maximum levels of red, green, and blue create white. Either way, you may want to adjust the exposure settings and try again.

A savvy RGB histogram reader can also spot color balance issues by looking at the pixel values. But frankly, color balance problems are fairly easy to notice just by looking at the image on the camera monitor. See Chapter 5 to find out how to correct any color problems that you spot during picture playback.

Shooting Data display mode

Before you can access Shooting Data mode, you must enable it via the Playback Display Options setting on the Playback menu. See the earlier section “Viewing Picture Data” for details. After turning on the option, press the Multi Selector down to shift from RGB Histogram mode to Shooting Data mode.

In this mode, you can view up to five screens of information, which you flip through by pressing the Multi Selector up and down. Figure 8-19 shows just the first two screens of data.

Most of the data you see won’t make sense until you explore Chapters 3 through 5, which explain the exposure, color, and focusing settings available on your camera. But I want to call your attention to a few facts now:

• The upper-left corner of the monitor shows the Protected, Retouch, and Send to Smart Device icons, if you used these features. If you assigned a rating to the file, the rating appears in the lower-left corner. Otherwise, these areas are empty, as in the figures. (Refer to Figure 8-15 to see each of these icons.)
• The current file number and total number of files appear in the upper-right corner of the display.
• The Comment item, which is the final item on the third screen, contains a value if you use the Image Comment feature on the Setup menu. I cover this option in Chapter 10 also.
• If the ISO value on Shooting Data Page 1 appears in red (refer to the left screen in Figure 8-19), the camera overrode the ISO Sensitivity setting that you selected in order to produce a good exposure. This shift occurs only if you enable automatic ISO adjustment in the P, S, A, and M exposure modes; see Chapter 3 for details.
• The fifth data screen appears only if you attach the optional GPS unit to the camera. The GPS location data appears on this screen.

Overview mode

In this mode, the playback screen contains a small image thumbnail along with scads of shooting data — although not quite as much as Shooting Data mode — plus a Brightness histogram. Figure 8-20 offers a look.

The earlier section “Reading a Brightness histogram” tells you what to make of that part of the screen. Just above the histogram, you see the Protected, Retouch, and Send to Smart Device symbols, if you used those features, and the File number/Total files data appears at the upper-right corner of the image thumbnail. If you used the Rating feature, the rating appears under the thumbnail. (Again, refer to Figure 8-15 to see these miscellaneous symbols.)

One more tiny symbol to notice: The speech bubble just above the histogram indicates that you enabled the Image Comment feature (Chapter 10). To actually read the comment, you need to go to the fourth data screen shown in Shooting Data display mode.

To sort out the maze of other information, the following list breaks down the five rows that appear under the thumbnail and histogram. In the accompanying figures as well as in Figure 8-20, I include all possible data simply for the purpose of illustration; if any of the items don’t appear on your screen, it simply means that the relevant feature wasn’t enabled when you captured the shot. Also note that if you're looking at a movie file, the screen shows only the third row of data, and the histogram represents the exposure of the first frame of the movie.

• Row 1: This row shows the exposure settings labeled in Figure 8-21, along with the focal length of the lens you used to take the shot. As in Shooting Data mode, the ISO value appears red (as in the figure) if you enabled auto ISO override in the P, S, A, or M exposure modes and the camera adjusted the ISO for you.
• Row 2: This row contains a few additional exposure settings, labeled in Figure 8-22. See Chapter 3 for explanations of all these settings except Flash Compensation and Flash Mode, which I cover in Chapter 2.
• Row 3: Items on this row, labeled in Figure 8-23, pertain to color options you can explore in Chapter 5.
• Rows 4 and 5: The final two rows of data (refer to Figure 8-20) show the same information you get in File Information mode, explained earlier in this chapter.