Rich colours

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Name
Ben
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Hi I'm new to this and have been looking at the Motorsport section. How do you get such rich and vibrant colours in the pictures? I had a play with a friends d40 and the pictures were rather dull looking,
 
Lots of reasons! You can set the camera to give more saturation, and you can do far more colour-boosting in post processing. This is especially so if shooting in RAW. RAW images often look flat until they've been processed.A lot of people switching from a compact to a dSLR are initially disappointed at the `dull` shots they can produce, as most compacts have loads of saturation built in.

And of course the light may have been poor, or the lens a cheap one, or the exposure incorrect...it's all part of learning photography.

PS: Welcome to TP! :wave:
 
The D40 is quite a colourful little camera in its normal settings, but if you want to crank a bit more out of it, go to Optimize Image in the shooting menu and select Custom. Set colour mode to IIIa and saturation to + . Leave the other settings as they are, or your colours will go a bit squiffy.

Nikons of that generation will often over-expose ever so slightly, which will take some of the richness out of the colours, so set your exposure compensation to about -0.7

The other big factor will be the weather. On a nice bright sunny day, you'll get nice bright colours. On a manky dull day, you'll get manky dull colours.
If possible, position yourself so that the sun is behind you, or off behind your shoulder for maximum colourfulness.
 
You could choose more vivid settings for the jpegs in camera (I am fairly sure the D40 can do that) but I shoot my shots neutrally then pull them up *just a little* in photoshop - but its not just saturation, its also black point and curves boost to increase contrast....
 
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