Understanding the Nikon D3400 DSLR Camera Retouch Menu

To access the Nikon D3400’s Retouch menu, press the menu button on the back of the camera and use the multi-selector to scroll down the main menu. So the first one is NEF or RAW processing. NEF is the suffix that will go into a raw image and RAW is how they are commonly known. RAW images are images that are not compressed in any way and therefore save all data. As a result, they are much larger when saved to disk and you need specific software to open and work on them. When saved, they are saved as JPEG files. Many professional photographers will shoot in RAW and there is a significant difference between opening a RAW image that has not been compressed and has all the data and a JPEG image. You can see the difference when you look at the two side by side, but JPEG, particularly JPEG Fine, is a very good way to save images as and because RAW images are then saved as JPEGs, it doesn’t necessarily save a lot. in the end result. Most photographers I know, if they are working on fine or detailed images, will save them as RAW. But invariably, when they send their images to their clients, they send them as JPEG files. Here you can work on a RAW image, not very effectively, there are not too many options and they are quite forceful instruments. You can, for example, change the size of the file; you can change the white balance, exposure, and image style, but if you bother saving a raw image, you’ll probably want to open it up on a big screen and work on it with some more subtle settings.

The one under the RETOUCH MENU on the Nikon D3400 is TRIM and it does more or less what it says. Allows you to change the cropping of the image. When you shoot 35mm (and this is effectively a 35mm camera), you shoot 3 x 2, 3 in 2 down. you can cut this out and cut it to 4 x 3, 5 x 4 and square one by one. Again, you could also do that on a computer. The bottom one is RESIZE. Now this allows you to resize the image down – you can’t resize or increase the image size, but it might be useful if you want to save images for downloading on social media before you’re on Snapbridge. You have the option to do this automatically so you don’t have to go through this process if you’re downloading through Snapbridge.

D-lighting, found below the d3400’s retouch menu, gives you the opportunity to apply lighting after you’ve taken the picture. D-lighting reduces the amount of contrast, highlights, and reduces the bandwidth of color and tone, so you might as well use it right now. And QUICK RETOUCH is a very basic option that just adds a bit of brightness or reduces brightness slightly. It just gives your image a bit more punch if that’s what you feel you need. Below is RED EYE CORRECTION, which can be quite effective. This is a digital way of reducing red eye and if you’ve taken a photo that has more than you’d like, you can apply it. Again, it will be easier and probably more subtle to do this on editing software and a computer, but if you need to do it in-camera then this is an option for you. STRAIGHTEN obviously straightens the image by making the horizontals horizontal which can be useful for landscapes. There is nothing worse than having a horizon that is not really level. It’s a misstep in landscape photography. DISTORTION CONTROL in the RETOUCH MENU of Nikon D3400 will try to reduce the amount of distortion, perhaps that may have occurred on a wide angle lens or wide angle shot. PERSPECTIVE CONTROL will also attempt to control perspective.

Then we move on to the options here for fisheye. Fisheye now does the exact opposite of distortion control and if you have a normal looking image you can give the impression that it was taken with a fisheye lens by using this option. It’s not perfect, but it barrel-distorts the center of the image, giving the impression of a fisheye lens. Below is FILTER EFFECTS. You can put filters on the front of the lens and that will obviously affect the light that goes through the lens. This allows you to add filters digitally. Here we have four possible filter effects. The one above is SKYLIGHT and that takes some of the blue away. The warm image filter will add a bit of orange to the image and make it feel warmer. The cross screen is a pretty good filter because it will add a starburst to the light in the image and just make it stand out a little bit more and finally you have a soft filter that softens the image and gives it a slightly warm tone like good. That can be used with portraits and can also be used with landscapes to great effect.

Next on the D3400’s RETOUCH MENU is MONOCHROME. That turns a color image monochrome, but not just black and white – it’ll give you sepia and cyanotype, which is also effectively blue and white. Below is an image overlay that can only be used with raw images and allows you to overlay one on top of the other. The next three: COLOR OUTLINE, PHOTO ILLUSTRATION, and COLOR SKETCH, are effectively variants of the same process. They basically make photography look like a form of illustration. So the color outline will remove all the color and make it look like an outline drawing. The photo illustration will give you the impression that it’s a pretty stylized comic effect of the image, and the color sketch will desaturate it to have hints of color and basically turn it into an outline drawing with some hints of color.

MINIATURE EFFECT in the D3400’s retouch menu can be quite useful and I like it, especially if you do it beforehand. This blurs the outside of the frame so that the subject in the middle stands out much more and is really quite impactful. If you take a picture of a road or cars on a road from, say, 45 degrees, from the second or third floor, towards the street, you can make the cars look like models. They stand out so vibrantly and brightly from the image and background blur that it looks like they are a model. It works great and I quite like using it. Below that in the Nikon D3400 RETOUCH MENU is SELECTIVE COLOR. Now selective color could also be called the Schindler’s List effect. If you remember that scene from the black and white movie with the girl in the red coat, then this is indeed what he does. It makes the whole frame black and white except one, two or three colors and you can select those colors and decide what they are and by doing that you can create a very powerful image. It works very well. Below that is PAINT, which effectively makes your photo look like a painting.

Finally we have at the bottom EDIT MOVIE. Now these are pretty blunt edits. They are not very subtle at all. Essentially what you can do here is choose the start and end point. You can cut and edit the movie in terms of length, but not in other ways. You cannot change the colors or the way you shoot. You can also save a selected frame of it, but that’s pretty basic, and again, if you’re shooting movies with this, I’d expect to be able to do most of your editing in editing software on a big computer.

Those are the options you have in the RETOUCH MENU of the Nikon D3400. As you can see they are not very subtle and are a bit blunt but if you need to make changes to an image you can do it here and the only saving factor is that you have to make editing changes to an original. image, then the original will be saved and any changes will be created in a new image so you don’t lose anything trying to make edits on the back of the camera.