Best Canon Picture Style
The Fine Detail picture style was first introduced on the Canon EOS 5Ds and EOS 5DS R and differs from the other picture styles in the way it’s designed to maximise the level of detail that can be achieved from the sensor. Styles are indeed an information layer on top of the RAW image data. As you wrote, setting a style is a non destructive operation when you shoot RAW, and the RAW processor (DPP, for example) lets you change styles while developing the image.
Your Canon EOS 70D offers Picture Styles, which you can use to further tweak color as well as saturation, contrast, and image sharpening. Sharpening is a software process that adjusts contrast in a way that creates the illusion of slightly sharper focus. The key word here is slightly: Sharpening cannot remedy poor focus but instead produces a subtle tweak to this aspect of your pictures.
Canon Picture Styles Explained
The camera offers the following Picture Styles:
Auto: This is the default setting; the camera analyzes the scene and determines which Picture Style is the most appropriate.
Standard: This option captures the image by using the characteristics that Canon offers as suitable for the majority of subjects.
Portrait: This mode reduces sharpening slightly from the amount that’s applied in Standard mode, with the goal of keeping skin texture soft. Color saturation, on the other hand, is slightly increased.
Landscape: In a nod to traditions of landscape photography, this Picture Style emphasizes greens and blues and amps up color saturation and sharpness, resulting in bolder images.
Neutral: This setting reduces saturation and contrast slightly compared to how the camera renders images when the Standard option is selected.
Faithful: The Faithful style is designed to render colors as closely as possible to how your eye perceives them.
Monochrome: This setting produces black-and-white photos — or, to be more precise, grayscale images.Technically speaking, a true black-and-white image contains only black and white, with no shades of gray.
If you set the Quality option to Raw (or Raw + Large/Fine), the camera displays your image on the monitor in black and white during playback. But during the Raw converter process, you can either choose to go with your grayscale version or view and save a full-color version. Or (even better) you can process and save the image once as a grayscale photo and again as a color image.
If you don‘t capture the image in the Raw format, you can’t access the original image colors later. In other words, you’re stuck with only a black-and-white image.
The extent to which Picture Styles affect your image depends on the subject as well as on exposure settings and lighting conditions. The following figure shows you a test shot at each setting (except Auto) to give you a general idea of what to expect. As you can see, the differences are subtle, with the exception of the Monochrome option, of course.
I was reading again the manual of my camera (Canon 50D, but I am sure that each DSLR offer the same kind of functionality, albeit I don't know the exact names adopted) and noticed the issue of Picture styles which I had overlooked in my first reading.
In short I think that they are a collection of various calibration settings (more or less enhanced colours, things like that..). Those that are available on my camera are:
- Standard
- Portrait
- Landscape
- Neutral
- Faithful
- Monochrome
- 3 user definable modes.
These styles are so important to deserve a direct button just under the LCD screen of the camera (I guess this is useful for simplifying the use of the camera in the basic modes as opposed to manual / less automated ones).
And now for the question:
- These settings obviously affect the appearance of the picture 'as it comes out of the camera'. But given the raw file I assume that they are all equivalent, a style is not applying a destructive transformation to the raw data, isn't it?
- Shooting raw, is there a reason to favor one of these styles (Neutral?) over the other? Up to now I have been using Standard.
As a bonus (don't know if it deserves a separate question, in which case I will ask it again), what is the difference between Neutral and Faithful?
3 Answers
Styles are indeed an information layer on top of the RAW image data. As you wrote, setting a style is a non destructive operation when you shoot RAW, and the RAW processor (DPP, for example) lets you change styles while developing the image.
If there is a reason to select a style, it is to take out yet another step in the development process. If you know beforehand what style you prefer, setting it on shoot-time will save you changing it in post (same logic applies to the other settable presets, like white balance, etc.).
- Most cameras will encode the selected appearance into the raw file, but the raw data itself will not be affected.
- The setting probably does affect the image you can preview on the camera and the histogram (which is normally created from the JPEG preview, not directly from the raw data).
- Faithful uses a white balance of 5200K, whereas Neutral apparently uses automatic white balance. Otherwise, Canon describes the two similarly.
The image information in the RAW file will not be affected by which Picture Style is used. Which style is selected will be included in the shooting information appended to the image data. If you open the file in Canon's Digital Photo Professional the Picture Style selected when the photo was shot will be used to initially render the picture on your monitor, but you can select another Picture Style and the image on your monitor will change to reflect this.
Jay z reasonable doubt full album download. The Picture Style selected when the image is shot will be applied to the preview JPEG thumbnail that is displayed on your camera's screen.
Neutral uses perceptual rendering, Faithful uses colorimetric rendering. The main difference will be how out-of-gamut colors are translated into the chosen color space (sRGB or Adobe RGB). A perceptual rendering will adjust all colors to 'squish' the scene's color gamut into the chosen color space, while a colorimetric rendering will 'chop off' out-of-gamut colors by rendering them as the nearest in-gamut color.