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Nikon camera settings - Tone Compensation

Your Nikon camera’s tone compensation setting is a way of adjusting image contrast. For JPEG shooting, this is a critical setting. Too much contrast will mean that shadow and highlight details may clip and be therefore rendered unrecoverable. For this reason, I suggest you leave your camera tone curve set to “low” whenever you shoot JPEGs, as it is much easier to add contrast than recover lost detail later on.

Low contrast is also very useful for wildlife photographs, where you are trying to capture as much shadow detail as possible (like in fur and feathers). For raw, I suggest you leave the camera set to “low”, but switch to the“normal” tone curve when you are shooting landscapes and other subjects where you want to increase contrast. Don’t usually use the “Auto” tone curve, because you have no idea what the camera is thinking when it applies it!

Summary

Set in camera to 'low' for general use, or 'normal' for landscapes.