Highlights on Nikon D100

[mcanyes]

There really isn't enough info in your post to get a handle on the problem, but I'll take a shot at some possible causes.

First, you may have some small blown out spots in an image, and not be doing anything wrong. Some things like reflections, white paint in the sun, snow, etc. can be completely white.

However, you should be able to set the camera on P, and normal settings for everything else and not blow out a lot of the picture. Check that you don't have something set wrong in the menus - use the default settings in the manual.

Finally, although it sounds like something is set wrong, you might have a defective body. If you can, compare your body to another and see what happens.

Good luck,
Michael

[nokind100]

Thank you Michael & Roy.  I will confirm that the body is not defective, and I will also make sure that my menu settings are set correctly as soon as I get home tonight.
Secondly, I was not aware that the camera provided two options on their settings, one for highlights and the other for blown-out highlights.  I have the manual somewhere here in the office and will read up on that once again, must have read the manual 3x so far.

Thanks again!

[nokind100]

Having problems getting rid of blown highlights.  I've tried everything...different f-stops from f 2.8 to f 22, plus and minus .03 to 2 stops on EV and still no luck.  I still see a portion of my image blinking (flashes on D100) when checking the histogram.

What am I doing wrong...please help.
 

[Roy]

The flashing display on the D100 shows the highlights (see the manual), not just the blown-out highlights.

Nikon, in its characteristic arrogance, doesn't trouble us with the details of what the threshold is for calling a pixel a highlight.

The display is still useful. If a large portion of the image is flashing and you can see a spike at the right of the histogram, you have blown highlights and depending on your intent you may decide to adjust the exposure.

If the histogram is good and only the part of the image that has almost highlights flashes, you have done everything right. The flashing pixels are near being blown-out, but are not necessarily blown-out.

You can easily check in Photoshop. Try that with a few images that you think are right but still have flashing areas when you view them on the camera. You will get a feel for how it works.

Personally, I find the higlight display more useful than a blown-out highlight dispaly, but I wish Nikon would not insult our intelligence and let us know the criteria for "highlights."

[mcanyes]

You need to have both the histogram display and the highlight display enabled. The manual gives a good description of how to use the histogram and there is a lot of stuff like that on the web and on this site.

As Roy points out the highlight warning flashes a little early. pixel values are 0 - 255 and it flashes at about 245. It is possible for the display to flash and not have something blown out, just very white. It is only a warning and you do need to look at the histogram and exercise some judgement as to whether the exposure is correct or not.

One final thing, be sure you have the meter set to matrix, not spot. This is the knob to the right of the viewfinder.  If you don't realize it is on spot you can get very erratic results.