Nikon Colours

I found this setting on my camera which I think is quite useful. I'm not entirely clear I understand what it all means, to me colour is colour. With something digital, reds, greens and blues are just a pattern of bits. So 0xFF0000 should look the same anywhere, bright red. I don't really see how you can interpret this differently. But seemingly you can.

This relates to my D80, so I don't know which other models have these features, or even if they have different names. But open the menu (press MENU on the back), and go to the Shooting Menu (the little green camera icon, second down). Select Optimize Image (first option.) Then select Custom.

For image sharpening I choose Auto. Apparently this is quite good at making it genuinely sharp without introducing artifacts. I'm not sure yet, but if it causes a problem I'll turn it off.

Tone compression is currently 0, but I might change that. I like contrast, and is the most common thing I change on a photo in lightroom. So I'll see how things go and change if if I feel I would benefit.

Color mode, which I understand is the most important, should be set to IIIa. I have lightroom setup to use the sRGB colorspace, because I read on flickr a lot of people moan about Adobe RGB. But this is where I get confused. Surely RGB is just RGB? And what is the different between I a(sRGB) and III a(sRGB). It really makes no sense to me, but I "read it on the internet" so it must be right. That and the fact I do seem to spend less time processing and quite often can just export direct from Lightroom without touching anything.

Saturation I have on +, or Enhanced. Because I end up doing this in lightroom at lot too anyway, because I like vivid colours.

Hue adjustment I have left at 0. I guess that would be useful if I was shooting under different coloured light (otehr than white) although because I always shoot RAW for the colour depth (yes 12 bit does make a big difference over 8 bit) I can do this in lightroom if it becomes a big problem.

Of course I would ideally never do anything in lightroom. I enjoy taking photos not sitting in front of a computer endlessly moving sliders. So the aim of these settings I hope is to cut down the number of things I do, and increase the number of things the camera can do for me.