Picture Styles in EOS cameras

One of the great ironies of the last couple of years (from a Canon EOS photographic point of view rather than a global perspective) is the introduction of Picture Styles (PS). Before PS we had parameters, and they caused a lot of confusion. While we could sort of understand what contrast, saturation, sharpness and colour tone did, no-one ever seemed to do anything with them. So Canon came up with the idea of packaging them as Picture Styles, with some simple names to make them easy to understand. And yet we still have confusion… and people not changing them! 

So, here’s a run-down of the 6 preset Picture Styles and what they are used for. They are split into three groups – Basic, Advanced and Monochrome.

Basic – for general shooting, these are aimed at users who either don’t want to post-process their images, or who don’t want to have to do too much work to their images. Basic includes Standard, Portrait and Landscape. Each setting offers a different level of sharpening, but it the other parameters (see that word creep back in?!) all seem to be 0, and yet if you take the same picture with the three different settings, they’ll look different becasue of the tone curve applied to the image in settings you can’t control.

Advanced – for those that want to post process their images and would like the images to be as untouched as possible from the camera. It includes Neutral and Faithful.
Neutral gives natural colours and gentle tones without boosting the contrast or sharpness.
Faithful adjusts the colours based on a 5200K colour temperature to try and match the colours accurately. Again there is no contrast or sharpening applied.

Monochrome – for black and white shooting. There is also the option to add toning or filter effects at the point of shooting. 

So what should you use? Well, if you use Canon’s DPP software, you can change the  Picture Styles in the post processing as you wish. you can even create your own Picture Stlye in Picture Style Editor and apply that to your image to create a repeatable custom look. If you use a third party RAW software then with the exception of the latest versions of LightRoom/Adobe Camera RAW, Picture Styles will be completely ignored and it will be effectively the equivalent of shooting in Neutral – i.e. flatter tones, neutral colours and no real punch. 

So what about sharpening? Well, the thoughts on sharpening are that it is now a three stage process – capture sharpening, creative sharpening (optional) and output sharpening.  If you use one of the Standard PS settings that applies sharpening, this is effectively stage one done. If not, you’ll need to do it in processing – this means also if you use third party RAW software that ignores PS settings you’ll miss out on the first stage.

If you want to see what Picture Styles look like on an image, here’s a comparison set with nothing done except to change the Picture Style on each one, and a resize to fit the page. 

Standard:

Landscape:

Portrait:

Neutral:

Faithful:

Mono: