Nikon released D3 in December, 2007, and D3 has been positioned as the flagship camera in the line-up of Nikon Digital SLRs. The word “flagship” says a lot to professional photographers. Especially D3 has been being considered the no.1 “flagship” DLSR among all other brands. Simon Joinson, the professional Camera reviewer, said that Nikon D3 has absolutely raised it another notch above previous flagship DSLRs .

D3 is special DSLR in that it has full-frame format, featuring a 36 x 24mm 12.1 megapixel CMOS sensor. Also, it shows significantly improved features including EXPEED (a new image processor), nine-frames-per-second continuous-shot, high sensitivity support upto ISO 6400 with 25600 available as a boost option, dual CF card support, and a 3.0″ 922,000 pixel LCD monitor. You should notice that this camera has been designed for “speed” (both in ISO sensitivity, auto-focus and continuous shooting). Its shooting time  is so fast that D3 always seems to be one step ahead of you. Check out two sample images below.

 As you can see, both of the images have been taken under extremely low light and fast-moving subjects. ISO sensibity set was 3200 for both. How amaging the continuous focusing system is following the objects in the ISO of 3200. 

Also, D3 has a stunning noise-reduction system employed in it. While increasing the sensitivity of the sensor, EXPEED is processing the noise reduction system to show smooth image in high ISO sensitivities. Check out the astonishing noise level in the sample below (ISO 1600).

As you may know, Nikon flagship DSLRs has been built for speed. Of course, some of the image details could be offset by focusing on speed. The image quality of those cameras is a little coarser than that of low-speed DSLRs. D3, however, is an exceptional one – it shows higher image quality than any other low-speed DSLRs. So a single camera actually does two jobs at the same time: high speed shootings and the high resolution works. Also, D3 makes an astound upgrade to the D2X and D2H (the previous flagship models of Nikon). You get higher resolution (8MP vs 12.1MP), way better high ISO performance, faster continuous shot, and all the other improvements.

Yes, it is groundbreaking camera. It is no surprise to discover that D3 has been embraced by the Nikon professional photography community and has made a lot of Canon users consider a switch to Nikon.

D3 is possibly the most competitive and all-round professional digital SLR ever made.

Links to Kenrockwell’s review on D3

Links to Thom Hogan’s review on D3

Check out the four sample images below. I wrote down what lens had been used for the each image below.

 

 Lens used: Canon EF 70-200mm f2.8L IS

Lens used: Canon EF 50mm f1.2L 

Lens used: Canon EF 17-40mm f4.0L 

Lens used: Canon EF 50mm f1.2L

 

 

Lens used: Sigma 30mm f1.4 EX

 

 

I have been crious why bloggers and reviewers have criticized that LightRoom is not like Photoshop, it lacks the tools and functions of Photochop, and that its interface is different with that of Photoshop. They might not understand that Lightroom is not Photoshop.

Lightroom has launched by Adobe in an effort to to set a new paradigm, instead of Photoshop, in retouching photographies. Lightroom is targeting to the professional photographers who use RAW files instead of JPGs. Although Photoshop has been known as the most useful tool for digital images for more than a decade, it is not necessarily the best package for handling RAW files. When Photoshop was first developed, about 15 years ago, photography was mostly done by chemical (not electronic) films, which could be easily converted to JPGs by scanners. Thesedays, however, professional photographers, even habbists, prefer RAW files to JPGs when they shoot photos using digital-SLR cameras. Lightroom has now been conceived to meet the needs of digital photographers.

Lightroom would not necessarily replace Photoshop. Graphic designers and artists would continue to regard Photoshop as the the package of choice. However, I insist that with its easy-to-use and effective ability to sort, classify, convert, process, batch-edit, and print RAW files, Lightroom would be the package of choice for the most professional photographers who use RAW files instead of the JPGs that is perceived to have lower quality than RAWs.

So, instead of blaming that Lightroom is different from Photoshop, why don’t we start helping to define a new way of handling and retouching digital images.

I have been using Photoshop for many years, but still I don’t know every single functions of it. Even though Photoshop is known for one of the most user-friendly and most effective package for retouching photos, it is not an easy-to-use software for beginners. If you are starting from scratch, I would recommend you to first try other basic photography software: Google’s Picasa 2 for PC and iPhoto that comes for free with every Apple Mac computer.

How to Learn Photoshop

There are a number of ways that you can learn a bunch of useful techniques of Photoshop. However, the best way to learn it is, I recommend, to follow the basic steps from a introductory Photoshop Classes, books, and online lectures, so that you can learn the basics of adjusting colors, solving white balance problems, and controlling the exposures of images. These basic adjustments would also be covered in this blog. By visiting this blog regularly or getting RSS feeds, you would be comfortable in these basics in order to reach to the higher techniques for Photoshop for getting high-quality images. 

Photoshop also has built-in help function. As I mentioned above, I do not know every single tools of Photoshop. When I find some obscure tools and don’t know how to use those tools, I just type the name of the tools from the ”Help” search.

Here I listed the links to get the various versionsof Photoshop:

Newest CS4 for Windows

Newest CS4 for Mac

Older CS3 for Windows 

Older CS3 for Mac