Triple play-make monster RAW views of the same subject, at the same time, in the same photo

A quirk in the firmware of the Nikon D40X enables you to bend some very serious rules for making incredibly feature-rich photographs. Granted, this oddity might exist in other Nikon DSLRs or even other manufacturers DSLRs, for that matter, but D40X users are guaranteed of being able to build the following enormously dense “image overlays” (Nikon terminology) into a single photograph…in camera without using a personal computer.

How to make triple-play photos

Before you attempt to build these monster photographs, however, ensure that your DSLR is configured for shooting RAW image files. Press the “Info” button for showing the Display Shooting Information screen, then highlight Image Quality and select either of these options, “RAW” or “RAW + B”. Now you’re ready to enter the uncharted territory of monster RAW image overlays.

Nestled away in the oddly labeled “Retouch Menu” lies the first step that must be taken towards building these multiple exposures on steroids. Select the Image Overlay option.

Inside this menu option there are three blank rectangles for entering two existing RAW photographs from your saved image files. Once you’ve populated the first two rectangles with your RAW photos, the third rectangle displays a preview of the image overlay result.

Your editing actions are very limited during this overlay process. Only a modest amount of gain can be added or subtracted from each RAW image. This will slightly tweak the exposure of each image enabling a darkening or lightening of the entire photograph. You can then review the effects from this exposure adjustment in the third image preview rectangle.

When you’re satisfied with the preview image, select the “Save” option and a new photograph as shown in Figure 1 will be saved in the current Image Quality setting (e.g., RAW or RAW + B). Oh, I can see that you aren’t very impressed with Image Overlays, are you? Ho-hum, kinda boring, right? Well, you forgot to “read between the lines” in this recitation of the “standard operation” of the Nikon D40X Image Overlay Retouch Menu option. Check it out!

Certainly, Nikon feels that you will simply follow along with their tutorial and create an Image 1 + Image 2 overlay, but that’s not the complete picture, here. What if you begin by selecting the RAW + B Image Quality setting? This will save each of your photographs as both a Nikon NEF RAW and a JPEG. Therefore, during the Image Overlay process the final Preview image will be saved as BOTH a RAW photograph and a JPG file.

And it is this little trick that will allow us to now return to the Image Overlay menu option and use our previously saved Image 1 + Image 2 overlay RAW photograph as a new Image 1 and then add a new and different RAW photograph for the Image 2. Inside the resulting preview image you will now see the overlay effect of 3 RAW photographs. This is definitely an achievement that far exceeds the limited parochial definition of Nikon’s Image Overlay option (see Figure 2 and Figure 3).

Ironically, the smart folks at Olympus Corporation observed this same multiple RAW image combination concept with the Image Overlay option on their Olympus Pen E-PL1. Inside this diminutive camera’s instruction manual a “tip” is suggested for creating “… 4 or more frames, save the overlay image as a RAW file and use Image Overlay repeatedly.” Hmm, great minds think alike, right?

But you needn’t stop there and just use one triple RAW overlay. Follow your creativity and keep adding quadruple, quintuple, sextuple RAW image sandwiches to one or both of the images within the D40X Image Overlay option. Soon you’ll be squishing huge numbers of RAW photographs on top of each using your DSLR with nary a personal computer in sight. Triple play, indeed (see Figure 4).