Also consider Nikon's 24-85mm D lens. In spite of owning a full quiver of lenses, for versatility reasons that is the one that most of my pix have been shot with.

-Allen

hi,

i think that RGB is better to use with nikon lens, the colors are more accurate and more vivid.

you can see a list of lenses in nice site: www.nikonzoomlense.com

BR

Amit

Which profile is "best" depends on what you want to do with your pictures afterwards. Assuming you plan to keep as many options as possible without compromising on quality, then selecting RAW format and the "Adobe RGB" profile in the camera are best - in that order of importance. Next, RAW files only yield excellent quality if they are properly processed; this takes the appropriate skills and competence as the foremost ingredient – and also a decent RAW converter software such as, for example, Photoshop Lightroom or Capture NX 2 for your Nikon SLR. This expands the range of selectable working colour spaces and profiles that can be embedded upon exporting your files.

Lightroom uses "Pro Photo RGB" natively because it has the largest gamut of those most commonly used in the professional field. The obvious advantage of a large colour space comes at a price however: To retain the finer nuances, data must be stored at 16 bit depth per channel which doubles the file size and is not compatible with compression methods such as JPEG. So if photos are exported after the editing, it is often advisable to convert them to a smaller colour space, either Adobe RGB, sRGB (for general or web use respectively) or the particular printer's profile for direct output.

Capture NX 2 works similarly; here, you can actually select any installed ICC profile for the working space and override the camera setting that is embedded in (but not applied to) the RAW file. For reasons too numerous and too scientific to elaborate here, my favourite working space profile is eciRGB v2 which is also recommended for professional imaging workflows by the European Colour Initiative (ECI). Among the distinct advantages of eciRGB v2 over Adobe RGB, it has a D50 (5000 Kelvin) white point and an L* lightness curve instead of a gamma curve; this translates to a significantly better match with typical printing spaces (Adobe RGB can clip some pure ink colours even in relatively small offset printing spaces, e.g. ISO coated v2) and coding efficiency for 8-bit-per-channel data (which means less problems with soft gradients or skin tones because the L* curve closely matches human perception).

eciRGB v2 is available here: http://www.eci.org/doku.php?id=en:colourstandards:workingcolorspaces

Hi Lawrence,

I'm afraid I lack the time for more details but take a look at page 5 of the Fogra Softproof Handbook:

http://forschung.fogra.org/index.php?menuid=62&downloadid=187&reporeid =122

You can load the same curve as in the CMYK profile's black ink for grayscale and spot colour by loading "custom" gray/spot and selecting the 4c profile (which in the US might be Gracol or SWOP rather than ISO coated v2, depending on what your printer asks for) from its location on the system disk. Finally, you can save the whole setup with the respective button at right in the color settings dialog window. HTH

I was writing about the Photoshop colour settings only – Camera RAW is a different story, the same actually as in Lightroom that also uses Camera RAW for opening RAW files. I know of no workaround to circumvent its limited working space options; if you want to edit RAW photos in Photoshop using eciRGB_v2, you have to first open them through Camera RAW with the Pro Photo RGB profile and in 16-bit mode, then convert the image to eciRGB_v2 (preferably leaving color depth at 16 bit until after you finish editing – I usually keep a layered 16-bit master file without any sharpening if I foresee additional editing of a particular image, but the copies I send to clients are usually 8 bits per channel).

Eric