In-camera photo editing - more than a gimmick

When I started exploring my DSLR camera (Nikon D90), I thought that I would not have much use for the in-camera editing options. I had invested in Lightroom and figured that Lightroom would cover all my photo editing use cases. A couple of web searches indicated that many in the Nikon / photo community considered the in-camera photo editing to be gimmicky.

However, I have found the in-camera photo editing to be handy for quick retouching and emergency use. I was recently on a trip with my sister who took some shots of me using one of the pre-set modes (Portrait) on the camera. Since my camera is set to RAW, there was no JPEG version of the images available. On returning home I wanted to show one of these images to some friends and family on something larger than the camera's LCD display - Nikon's RAW format wouldn't display on the computer at hand.

The in-camera editing options came in handy. The original of the photo displayed above was somewhat underexposed. And since I had used a "neutral" white balance setting, the colors of the head dress were muted. I was quickly able to fix the underexposure and change the white balance so that head dress colors popped, right on my camera. I was also able to crop the image and eliminate some of the distractions in the background with the in-camera photo editor. Finally, I could convert the image to JPEG and upload the same to Flickr.

You can check out the results on a larger copy of the image here. Not bad for 60 seconds of work eh?