Color Grading
Picture Control recipes — Overcast days
In-camera Nikon Picture Control recipes for flat gray light: a punchy Standard, a soft Rich Tone Portrait and Deep Tone Monochrome for rain.
Why overcast needs its own recipe
Flat light kills contrast and pushes everything toward gray. The defaults look muddy. These recipes add contrast in the mid-tones, keep the highlights soft, and warm the white balance a little so the gray sky does not go blue.
Gray Day Standard
Standard Picture Control, contrast +1, clarity +1, mid-range sharpening +1, saturation −1. White balance Cloudy, fine-tuned A1 toward amber. Active D-Lighting off. Exposure compensation +0.3. Good for street work around Five Points and downtown when the sky is solid cloud.
Soft Rich Tone
Rich Tone Portrait, contrast −1, clarity −1, saturation 0. White balance Auto, fine-tuned A1. Active D-Lighting Low. For portraits and anything with skin: quiet and smooth. It needs a little contrast added if you print.
Wet Pavement Deep Tone
Deep Tone Monochrome, contrast +1, clarity +2, red filter effect. Exposure −0.3 to keep the dark road heavy. Made for rain: it keeps the reflections bright and gives the wet street weight.
Saving them, and Imaging Recipes
Save them as Custom Picture Controls C-1 Gray Day Standard, C-2 Soft Rich Tone and C-3 Wet Pavement Deep Tone, and copy them to the card as a backup. Imaging Recipes from Nikon Imaging Cloud load into the same slots over Wi-Fi; try one at a time against these before replacing a slot. Lightroom only offers profiles for the base Picture Controls, so custom ones show up only in the JPEGs and in NX Studio.