Bumps, shudders, red-eye and a whole array of other flaws are made redundant by the Retouch Menu you’ll find on a range of Nikon cameras.
Most of us using digital cameras, take a picture, and then decide whether we want to delete it or keep it. Sometimes you take a great snap, but there is a small blemish, like red eye on a face. I’ve found that just as I have gotten used to the ‘keep’ or ‘delete’ selection after taking a few photo’s, it is also easy to get into re-touching your pics on the go.

The best thing about the ability to retouch on the camera is time. I don’t have time to go through the hundreds of pics I take and retouch my images. With built in re-touch, I can take a picture quickly and check how it looks. If I hate it, I’ll delete it. If I like it I can keep it, and if there are a couple of small snags in the image – I can change it before I move on. When you get used to using the retouch it takes literally seconds to remove the red eye or crop the image.

So what is so great about the Retouch Menu on some of these Nikon cameras? It’s hard to know where to start, but here goes.

First thing you should notice, like most of Nikon’s gear it is really easy to operate. You go to the menu on the screen and follow the prompts.

Once there, you will see how simple you can take an average picture and make it great. So, what kind of products are we talking about? Well, for a start, one of my biggest headaches is the aforementioned red-eye you get in portraits of friends and family due to the flash. With a click of a button, it’s gone. Then there is the colour balance ability, which has been a mainstay of Nikon gear for some time.

There is also a straightening feature, which is really handy if you’ve taken a wonky picture; a function that lets you darken or lighten a shot; a trim component that allows you to close crop a person or landmark; as well as filters, which permit you to add a variety of dimensions to your shots. These are just a few aspects to the Retouch Menu – there are a whole lot more to play with.

When all is said and done, probably the most important part of the Retouch Menu is that it can be done on the fly. In other words, you don’t have to hook up to a PC and download content, you can fix it in real time as you go. So what? you might say. Well, just imagine you are on that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Paris, New York or Rome and you didn’t quite get the shot you wanted. At least with the retouch menu you can fix the shot as best you can, and then make a decision to reshoot it if necessary – a hard thing to do if you’re already on the ‘plane heading home.

Once again Nikon appears to be leading the way with in-camera technology with this feature – some how I don’t think it’ll be their last.

By Charlie Brown

Charlie is one of Australia’s cutting edge commentators on lifestyle technology. He is the technology editor for Channel Nine’s Today Show and appears regularly on Nine News and A Current Affair, as well as having a weekly segment voicing his opinions on consumer electronics during the Steve Liebmann Show on 2UE.