Pardon my ignorance but has somebody tried comparing D-lighting with an HDR photo (with D-lighting switched off)?
I just wanna see whether it's better to just bracket the photos or rely on D-lighting.
there are two kind of D lighting, one is active D lighting which is applied when you are shooting the picture. The other is just D lighting which can be applied AFTER you take the shot.
The former is more effective as it adjust the shutter speed (actually under expose the shot to minimise highlight clipping) when shooting and then digitally adjust the brightness to achieve a better dynamic range.
The later only adjust the brightness digitally so it's pretty much like the "brightness/shadow" feature in photoshop.
Compare to HDR shots, the advantage of active D-lighting is that you only need to take one shot and the camera will handle the adjustment for you. Downside is it'll increase noise in the shadow area.
The HDR shot on the other hand can give you a much wider dynamic range as you can choose to take as many shots as you want so you can cover a much wider D.R. problem is you'll probably need a tripod or a really steady hand to get a good HDR shot.
oh and if you want to use active D-lightiing feature, make sure you either shoot in JPG or if you shoot in raw you'll have to use Nikon's own software to load and process the NEF file as other software like Photoshop/lightroom doesn't know anything about d-lighting
I have not used D-lighting to the level where I can't live without it. I don't know if you will really miss this as a feature. Canon doesn't have it (I think). How many HDR pics to you take?
(active) D-lighting can give you a bit more details in highlight/shadow... it's quite handy if you shoot JPG and don't want to postprocess. Personally i normally leave mine on low/normal when shooting everyday outdoor picture in JPG to increase the dynamic range a bit.
but it's really NOT HDR