Recommended Nikon D850 Settings

Nasim Mansurov

The Nikon D850 is perhaps one of the most advanced DSLRs made by Nikon to date. As a result, it comes with a lot of controls and menu settings that might be confusing for many photographers out there. In this article, I will provide information on what settings I personally use and shortly explain what some of the camera buttons and controls do. Please do keep in mind that while these work for me, it does not mean that everyone else should be shooting with exactly the same settings. The below information is provided as a guide for those who struggle with the camera and just want to get started with an understanding of the camera and its many features.

Before we go into the camera menu, let’s first check out the exterior controls. The Nikon D850 has a lot of menu options, but there are some things that you can only control via specific buttons and controls.

Autofocus Modes and Bracketing

On the front left of the camera, you will find a lever that goes from AF to M, with a button in the middle (big red circle in the image below). Make sure to keep that lever on “AF”, or your lens will not autofocus. If for some reason your lens stops focusing, this is what you need to check first. Pressing the button in the middle of the lever allows to choose between different focus modes.

To activate this change, you need to press and hold the button, then rotate the rear dial with your thumb. As you do this, look at the top LCD and the camera will switch between AF-S and AF-C. I won’t go into too much detail about each focus mode, since it is all explained in detail in this article. Here is a quick recap:

  1. AF-S – this mode is called “Single-servo AF” and it is used only for stationary subjects that do not move. When you half-press the shutter button, autofocus lock on the subject and if the subject moves, the focus will not change, resulting in a blurry picture. Only use this mode for photographing stationary subjects (landscapes, architecture, etc) and when shooting in extremely low-light situations and need the camera to engage the AF assist lamp (via external speedlight).
  2. AF-C – known as “Continuous-servo AF” in Nikon’s lingo, this setting is used for photographing moving subjects. When you half-press the shutter button and your subject moves, the camera will re-acquire focus. I mostly keep my D850 in AF-C autofocus mode and only switch to AF-S in some situations.

If you cannot decide which one to start with, I would recommend to go with the AF-C mode for continuous tracking instead of AF-S.

Now if you rotate the front dial with your index finger while holding the same button, you will get many different options like “S”, “D 9”, “D 25”, “D 72”, “D 153”, “3D”, “GrP” and “Auto”. These settings are there for controlling the focus points that you see inside the viewfinder. Once again, most of these are already explained in detail in my autofocus modes explained article, so I won’t go into too much detail here. If you don’t know where to start, keep it on “S” (Single), which lets you choose one single focus point that the camera will use for focusing. Let’s move on to other external controls.

Right above the AF / M lever, you will find the BKT (Bracketing) button to set up bracketing on the camera. Make sure that bracketing is turned off by holding the button and checking the top camera LCD. It should show “0F” on the left side, which means that bracketing is inactive (the “BKT” letters should also disappear). Using the front dial will allow changing bracketing steps and the rear dial will change the number of frames shot in a bracketing sequence. The Nikon D850 allows bracketing up to 9 frames and up to 3 stops (EV) apart. However, in order to do 3 EV bracketing, you can only enable 5 frames of bracketing or fewer.

Shooting Mode and Camera Mode Dials

On the top left side of the camera you will find a large dial with buttons on the top. The primary function of this rotary dial is to set your shooting mode and the buttons that sit on the top are there for making quick adjustments to image format/quality, metering, camera mode and white balance:

The dial has a bunch of shooting modes like “S” (Single), “Cl, Ch” (Continuous low and Continuous high), “Q” (Quiet), “Qc” (Quiet continuous), Timer and Mup (Mirror Up). For day-to-day shooting, mine is usually set to “S” which only fires a single shot when I press the shutter release button. However, when shooting landscapes, my preferred shooting mode is now “Q” (Quiet), since it can take advantage of the Electronic Front Curtain (EFCS) feature to eliminate camera shake, which I will talk about below. The nice thing is, you can combine the “Q” mode with “Exposure Delay Mode” (more on that below as well), which allows the camera to wait for up to 3 seconds before the exposure starts, eliminating camera shake from physically triggering the camera shutter. The camera behaves similarly in “Mup” (Mirror Up) mode, but there is one main difference – when shooting regularly, one has to trigger the shutter release twice, whereas when shooting in Live View, the camera will take a picture after a single release. This is a changed behavior in the way Mirror Up functions, as other Nikon cameras require you to press the Mup button twice, no matter if you are shooting in Live View mode or not. Just like the “Q” mode, “Mup” also allows taking advantage of the Exposure Delay feature. When shooting action such as sports and wildlife, shooting a single image would not be very helpful and that’s where the “Continuous low” and “Continuous high modes” come into play. Unless you want to deliberately slow down the shooting speed of the camera, you should always choose “Continuous high”, so that the camera shoots at its maximum speed of either 7 fps or 9 fps (when a battery grip + larger battery are attached). I rarely use other shooting modes, although the Self-Timer mode is still nice to resort to when shooting a sequence of bracketed images.

The top buttons are great for quickly changing important settings like Camera Mode, Metering and White Balance. Nikon has moved the “MODE” button from the right side of the top of the camera to this area, so you now have to use two hands in order to change the camera mode (keep in mind that unlike other cameras that typically feature a traditional “PASM” dial, the Nikon D850 does not have such dial and requires using this MODE button instead). So if you need to switch between different camera modes, you need to hold the MODE button with your left hand, then rotate the rear dial. Doing so will reveal 4 different modes: “P” (Program Auto), “S” (Shutter Priority), “A” (Aperture Priority) and “M” (Manual). I mostly rely on Aperture Priority and Manual modes when shooting with the Nikon D850. The exposure compensation button nicely complements the Aperture Priority mode, however, keep in mind that the D850 no longer has a dedicated AE-L / AF-L button, so if you need to lock exposure, you will need to assign another button such as the joystick to do that (instructions on how to do that are provided below).

The “WB” button is there for setting/changing white balance. The rear dial allows you to change white balance, while the front dial allows fine-tuning it. The Nikon D850 comes with three Auto white balance modes: Auto0, Auto1 and Auto2. Auto0 reduces warm colors, Auto2 keeps warm colors, whereas Auto1 sets it to normal. I personally keep mine at Auto1, but depending on how cool or warm you want your images to be, you might want to look into Auto0 and Auto2 as well.

I am not a fan of the “QUAL” button and its location, since I have accidentally switched my image quality format a few times in the past, so be careful with this one. Lastly, to change your metering mode, press and hold the metering button (four squares with a dot in the middle), then rotate the rear dial. Unless situation calls for it, I keep mine in Matrix Metering by default.

To the right of the shooting mode dial, you will find three buttons: “ISO” for changing camera ISO, a video recording button (with a red dot) and Exposure Compensation button. I practically rarely ever record videos, so the two most used buttons here are ISO and Exposure Compensation. The ISO button allows quick change of ISO if you use the rear dial, and the front dial allows switching Auto ISO on and off. While I like the ability to quickly turn Auto ISO on and off, I typically end up mapping the Fn (Function) button on the front of the camera to Auto ISO settings, so that I can make changes to maximum sensitivity and minimum shutter speed (see my notes below under Custom Setting Menu). Exposure Compensation works in a similar way as ISO, except the front dial is deactivated and the rear dial is what you use to tweak your exposure.

Playback Menu

I rarely ever touch anything in the Playback menu, since that’s only used for displaying pictures on the rear LCD. The only two settings that I ever mess with are “Playback display options” and “Rotate tall”. The “Playback display options” can be useful when reviewing images. When you press the playback button on the back of the camera, you can press up/down buttons and you will be able to see different types of information. To keep the clutter out, I have three things turned on: “Focus point”, which allows me to see where I focused, “Highlights” to show overexposure in shots (a.k.a. “blinkies”) and “Overview”, which gives me a summary of my exposure (shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length, etc). I always turn the “Rotate tall” setting off, because I do not want my camera to rotate vertical images to horizontal when I review them – it is much easier to rotate the camera to see a vertical image, rather than having to zoom in every single time. Everything else is default.

Photo Shooting Menu

Let’s now go through the Shooting Menu, which is the first place that I usually go to when checking my settings. I will first provide my values, then talk about the most important settings:

While there are a lot of different settings here, do not worry – you won’t be changing many settings very often. Let’s go through some of the important settings. The first one is “Shooting menu bank”, which allows you to store up to 4 different shooting menu settings. The good news is, you can name each bank with a custom name like “Landscape”, “Portrait”, etc. The bad news is, these shooting banks are practically useless! Many Nikon shooters, including myself, have been puzzled by Nikon’s implementation of the menu banks, which have not been changed for many years now. There are three fundamental flaws with the custom settings banks:

  1. Menu banks are separate for “Shooting Menu” and for “Custom Setting Menu” sections, which means that one would have to store settings in two places and when a change is needed, also have to remember to change in two places. There is no single place to store all camera settings.
  2. There is no button on the camera to be able to instantly select a bank. The quickest way is to press the “i” button on the back, then choose a different bank for “Photo shooting menu bank” or “Custom settings bank”. Lower-end Nikon DSLRs like D610/D750 are much better in this regard, because they have U1 and U2 options right on the PASM dial.
  3. There is no way to save menu banks. Yup, menu banks are supposed to be “memory” banks that allow one to store specific settings. If you pick a specific bank and then end up changing any of the settings, those settings will be preserved, which completely defeats the purpose of memory banks.

I have tried to be organized with my pro-grade Nikon cameras in the past and failed – the above limitations just make memory banks useless for me. The thing is, it is not that hard to get this fixed, as it is just a firmware change. All Nikon needs to do is add a few options like U1 and U2 to the camera MODE button, then allow saving all camera settings into these memory banks (including autofocus settings) and the problem is solved! I don’t know why Nikon keeps pushing the same useless banks over and over again to the pro-grade DSLRs…

Enough of ranting, let’s move on to other shooting menu settings. The next important setting is “Secondary slot function”, which allows you to choose a role for the second card slot when shooting with multiple cards. You can set the camera to save images in three different ways. You can set it to “Overflow”, which basically saves images to the first card, then when the space runs out, the camera starts saving to the second card. I usually set mine to Overflow, unless I am working on something really important and need to backup images. And speaking of backup/redundancy, that’s what you use the second setting “Backup” for. Once selected, the camera will save photos to both memory cards at the same time. The last setting allows you to save RAW files to one card and JPEG files to another. For your day to day shooting, just leave it on “Overflow” and if you really need to make sure that your photos are not lost if one of the cards fails, then choose “Backup”.

“Image quality” is obviously set to RAW, since you should always be shooting in RAW. “NEF (RAW) recording” is always set on mine to 14-bit Lossless Compressed. I choose 14-bit to get the best image quality the camera can deliver and “Lossless” compression results in much smaller files than “Uncompressed”. “White Balance” is Auto and all other settings like Picture Controls, Active D-Lighting, HDR, etc. are turned off, since none of them (with the exception of “Long Exposure NR”) affect RAW images. Remember, RAW files contain non-manipulated data and require post-processing, so the above settings only impact images displayed by your camera’s LCD screen (each RAW file contains a full-size JPEG image, which is what is used to display images on the LCD) and if you use Nikon’s proprietary software like Capture NX-D, those settings can be applied to RAW images automatically. Since I use other third party software to store and process my images, the second part does not apply to me. Everything else is turned off.

Although color space does not matter for RAW files, I use AdobeRGB because it gives a slightly more accurate histogram (since the camera shows histograms based on camera-rendered JPEG images, even if you shoot exclusively in RAW).

The big menu setting that I frequently change is “ISO sensitivity settings”. When shooting hand-held, I mostly use Auto ISO, because it is a great feature that saves me a lot of time. Instead of specifying ISO for every shot, I just have it set on Auto, with its base ISO set to 64, Maximum sensitivity set to 3200 (my personal limit for “acceptable” noise levels) and Minimum shutter speed set to “Auto”. The “Auto” minimum shutter speed setting is great, because it reads the focal length of the attached lens and automatically adjusts the minimum shutter speed to the focal length of the lens. If you have shaky hands, you can change the Minimum shutter speed Auto to be one step closer to “Faster”, which basically uses a faster minimum shutter speed. For example, if I have a 50mm lens mounted on the camera, my minimum shutter speed will go from 1/50 to 1/100 of a second with one step up. If I move it all the way to the end (Faster), it will speed up the shutter speed again to 1/200 of a second. When using a Vibration Reduction (VR) lens, I often lower the “Auto” minimum shutter speed to “Slower”. Unfortunately, Nikon has not yet implemented a way to automatically compensate for VR, so you have to adjust this setting based on the lens you are using. When photographing landscapes or architecture with the camera mounted on a tripod, I turn Auto ISO off and use ISO 64 for the highest dynamic range and lowest noise levels.Movie Shooting Menu

I am not going to go through the movie recording features, because it highly depends on what you are trying to do. Some of the features won’t work depending on whether you shoot in 4K or 1080p, so if you see anything grayed out or not working, you might need to switch to 1080p video capture in order to enable them.

Custom Setting Menu

This is where a lot of people get lost, since there are so many different settings. Here are the settings that I personally use:

Once again, I won’t go into details about each setting, so let me just go over the most important ones that you should know about. The “Autofocus” section is pretty important, because it controls the way your camera autofocus is configured. The first two settings “AF-C priority selection” and “AF-S priority selection” are there to assist in shooting in Single or Continuous modes. I personally prefer to set the “AF-C priority selection” to “Release + focus”, which puts priority on focusing after the first shot. However, this can reduce your continuous shooting speed when the subject is not in focus, so if you are planning to use the D850 to capture fast action, it is probably best to leave it at the default “Release” option. The “Focus” setting in the “AF-S priority selection” selection forces the camera to acquire focus before taking the shot. Unlike earlier DSLRs like Nikon D700, the D850 will still let you take a shot if you “focus and recompose” in AF-S mode.

The next setting is “Focus tracking with lock-on”, which I normally keep at the default setting of “3” for “Blocked shot AF response”. This setting controls how quickly your autofocus will re-engage when it detects focus errors. When shooting birds in flight, I tend to reduce that setting to short delays, because I want autofocus to re-engage even with smaller changes. The rest of the time, I keep it in normal and almost never go up to long waits. “Subject motion” is set to the middle by default, which works pretty well, but you might want to change this depending on whether the subject movement is steady or erratic. I like keeping Face detection on for focusing, so 3D-tracking face-detection is turned on, while the watch area is set to “Wide”. I like storing focus points for vertical and horizontal shooting separately, so “Store by orientation” is set to Focus point.

The “AF activation” setting on my D850 is always set to “OFF” (AF-ON only) to allow me to use the dedicated AF-ON button on the back for focusing. If you have not read my article on the Focus and Recompose technique, now is a good time to do it, because it explains this feature in detail. Basically, once you switch the autofocus function from your shutter release (half-press) to the AF-ON button on the back of the camera, your camera will no longer autofocus through the shutter release button and will only respond to depressing the rear AF-ON button. It is a neat feature that I always use by default on all of my cameras.

I do not like when my focus points roll over to the other side of the screen when I am in the corners and I like to shoot with all focus points enabled, so my “Focus point wrap-around” is turned off and “Focus point options” are kept at their default settings.

If you shoot sports or wildlife, the D850 has a couple of menu settings to limit the number of focusing options, which is nice. This is known as “Limit AF-area mode selection”. If you never shoot in say Dynamic-area AF 9 points or 3D-tracking, you can now disable those in the menu. Once you do that, pressing the AF-area mode button on the front of the camera will not show those options, which is neat! The same goes for “Autofocus mode restrictions” – if you never shoot in AF-S, you can now turn it off completely to prevent potential focusing issues in the field.

I never mess with any of the “Metering/exposure” settings, so I would just recommend to leave them at default values. I would also skip the whole “Timers/AE lock” sub-section, aside from perhaps the “Self-timer” option, which I normally set to either 2 or 5 seconds.

Under “Shooting/display”, the two main settings are to note are “Exposure delay mode” and “Electronic front-curtain shutter“. The former option is very important, because it allows one to set a delay before each time an image is captured, which can help completely eliminate camera shake. Basically, with “Exposure delay mode” turned on, the camera first lifts the camera mirror (which generates a lot of vibrations), then waits a specified amount of time and only then opens up the shutter to capture the image. The nice thing is, you can specify up to 3 seconds of delay, which can completely eliminate the dreaded “mirror slap”. So if you do not have a camera remote (remote cable release) with you, you can use this feature to reduce camera shake and it works really well. You can use it in conjunction with the Self-timer feature, or better yet, if you use either the Mirror Up or one of the Quiet shutter release modes, once the “Electronic front-curtain shutter” is turned on, you can completely eliminate vibrations from both mirror slap and the camera shutter! This is a great feature that I highly recommend to use when photographing landscapes and architecture in low light conditions / very slow shutter speeds. Thankfully, Nikon has added the ability to use the Electronic front-curtain feature with the Quiet shutter release modes, so I would suggest keeping your camera on the “Q” release mode by default if all you do is shoot landscapes / architecture. If you often use the camera’s Live View for focusing (which you should), my recommended approach would be to default to Mirror Up. Nikon has changed the way this feature works on the D850 – you no longer have to press the shutter release twice as you had to on previous generation Nikon DSLRs. Now with Live View fired up, you simply press the shutter release once and the camera will take a picture. Combine this with the “Exposure delay mode” or “Silent live view photography” and you will end up with zero vibration from the camera – you will only need to watch out for wind and tripod stability, as all other camera vibrations will be eliminated.

If you are planning to use the focus peaking feature in Live View, I would recommend to set your desired color. For me, the Red color works the best, but it will all depend on the color of the subject you are photographing, so make sure to select the appropriate color from this menu.

The “Viewfinder grid display” is a neat feature that creates vertical and horizontal lines inside the viewfinder. I use those grids all the time when composing my shots – they are great tools for aligning the horizon horizontally or vertically and having a better visual look at my framing / composition.

I won’t go into Bracketing/flash sections, because that’s a big topic on its own. The only thing that I usually change here is Bracketing order – I like to have my frames underexposed, normal, then overexposed, so I set “Bracketing order” to “Under > MTR > over”.

The “Controls” section is something I always change, because there are some time-saving features there. First of all, go through the “Custom control assignment” section and pick your favorite selections for each assignable button. For me, the key features are Fn1 button, which I default to Exposure delay mode (you can press the button and rotate the rear dial to toggle between different delay modes), so that I can quickly pick a specific delay without going into the camera menu. Next, I assign the Fn2 button to “MY MENU”, so that I can quickly access anything I need from the MY MENU section (you can add any menu options to that area). Since the AE / AF lock button is now gone, it is best to set the joystick to take over that function – all you have to do is press the joystick button and hold it when you want to lock down the exposure and focus (say when doing panoramas). Lastly, I am still a bit too used to having the “MODE” button on top of the camera, so I set the Movie record button to serve that function, which is nice, because I don’t lose the movie recording button anyway if I were to switch to movie mode in Live View. This way, I can still change the camera mode using just the right hand.

The “Multi selector center button” is now set by default to zoom into the image when you press it in playback mode, which is nice! However, make sure that it is set to 1:1 magnification, since the default is 50%. If you find yourself frustrated by constantly pressing the zoom in button until you get to the right magnification level, then you will absolutely love this feature. It literally saves 6 zoom in button presses!

I would skip the rest of the Controls section and keep it all in default and if you shoot video, take a look at the Custom control assignment under “Movie” to make sure that the function buttons are set to your liking.

Setup Menu

Not much to go over here, because this is the area that you will only use for particular tasks like setting time/date, adding image comments, adjusting LCD brightness, formatting memory card, etc. The only thing I would do is set up “Image comment” and “Copyright information”. Basically, these settings add text information that gets embedded into each photograph. If you ever happen to lose your memory card somewhere (which I personally have in the past) and someone finds it (let’s just assume that you have no labels on the card with your info) leaving your Copyright and/or Name could help big time in finding/locating you. Plus, you are writing data into RAW files, so if you ever needed to prove that you are the author of a photograph, the RAW file along with your contact info could make for great evidence.

If you are planning to use the WiFi features of the camera to send images to a smartphone or a tablet, you will find all the available menu options here, as well as other options such as enabling touch controls on the LCD.

Make sure to add a few important items under “MY MENU”, so that you can have quick access to them. Personally, I add a few menu options here such as “ISO sensitivity settings”, “Interval timer shooting”, “Focus shift shooting” and “Exposure delay mode”, but that’s all a matter of preference.

Lastly, don’t forget that you have the feature to automatically calibrate your lenses. You will need your camera set up on a tripod, with a high-contrast subject set to desired distance, then you need to fire up Live View, press the AF mode button on the side of the camera and the video recording button at the same time, and after holding the two for a few seconds, you will receive a notification on the screen. Press “Yes” and the lens should automatically calibrate. If you want to find out about how AF micro adjustment works, see my article on lens calibration.

I hope you found this article useful. Once again, these are settings that work for me and they might not necessarily suit your needs. It is best that you explore your camera and learn about each setting as much as you can in order to take advantage of all the available features and customizations!

Exit mobile version