I recently purchased the Nikon D60 camera for shooting virtual tour photos for my company TourVista Virtual Tours. This is a great camera, and my buddy Boosh who is a seasoned professional photographer passed along this advice for getting the most out of my pix:

With the D60 you should have the capability to shoot in RAW and jpg. I have my D200 set to shoot both. The RAW file captures all info and looks like crap at first, no worries, it is literally the RAW capture. Think of it as your negative.

Open in Photoshop (PS) will open a sub program (assuming you have recent copy of PS) that will allow you huge latitude changes. Once your happy with the result, do a SAVE AS, and save off the adjusted image as a tiff file. The next time you open up Adobe Bridge and access that pic, your preview will be that of the adjusted RAW file (so it will look good) but holds onto those adjustments in a side file, leaving the RAW file intact for future adjustments. Then use the tiff version for your work….. So that will help with quality. RAW files are large so you might invest in an exterior drive for additional storage.

Clarity is probably a result of a couple of things, either singular or composite. Shooting inside you tend to have slower shutter speeds, use a tripod or at least a monopod. Changing the ISO of the ‘film’ is OK but I prefer to shoot at iso 100, maybe 200 as the more sensitive you set the ‘film’, the more noise that tends to show up in the image. Or it could be the glass your using. You can have the best camera body made, but with so-so glass its hard to take a sharp image.

Now, for your quick renditions for the biz, that may be fine with a little unsharp mask action. But for anything you may want to print, personal stuff, trips… its better to make a sharp capture and not “fix” it in Photoshop.

Thanks Boosh! See some of his work at www.jeffboucher.com