EOS 90D: Do you all tweak the Picture Style settings?

[Ramsden]

Hello 

EOS90D here across the pond.

I was recently advised to try turning off lens aberration in some situations. I have to admit to not knowing anything about this feature, so had a go, nervously digging into the inner workings of my camera. It's all part of my ongoing learning process, and getting to know my camera. Great results, and learned a lot.

No obvious connection, but I then started looking at Picture Style settings.

So my question is to the more experienced folk out there, and whether any of you tweak the settings, and secondly, do any of you use the User Def 1, 2 and 3. If so what innovations have you come up with and are you willing to share them?

Hands up, I wouldn't know where to start at the moment.

Regards 

Ramsden 

[LeeP]

There indeed is a tremendous amount of customization that is possible in camera and all of that is worth exploring.

Our definitions of SOOC are slightly different and that is perfectly OK. I appreciate you opening this line of discussion because I appreciate that diversity of perspectives and I always take them into consideration. And yes, I will enjoy tinkering with these options again because of you posing the "what if" angle. So I very much value what you brought up and I will re-examine those options because of this interaction. 

I've played around with those options, but they do not offer outcomes that are leaps and bounds better to my eye. Other people will have other experiences for certain.

The option I've used most is monochrome, but shooting in color and flipping the image to monochrome is more advantageous to me because I can have color and black-and-white.

You've definitely given me something to chew on. I'm going to Ventura CA this weekend, so I may do some playing.

Thank you for stimulating conversation.

[Ramsden]

Thanks for your feedback Lee

Its made me think as well, but as you say, its sometimes difficult to see the differences.

I'll look forward to seeing your photos from this weekend.

Enjoy

Ramsden 

[Ramsden]

I thought you might like this. I asked Google how to convert colour photos to monochrome, following your post, as it is something I haven't done before. Google took me to a stream on this canon community website back in 2013 to show me how to do it. 

But it seems shooting in Raw-JPeg is a good starting point.

Do you agree?

Ramsden 

[jrhoffman75]

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@Ramsden wrote:

I thought you might like this. I asked Google how to convert colour photos to monochrome, following your post, as it is something I haven't done before. Google took me to a stream on this canon community website back in 2013 to show me how to do it. 

But it seems shooting in Raw-JPeg is a good starting point.

Do you agree?

Ramsden 

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Pretty much any photo editing software will have a "button" to change the image from color to monochrome as long as you are shooting in RAW. If you edit via Canon DPP4 you can cycle through all of the, Picture Styles and see the subtle differences.

[johnrmoyer]

I like Canon DPP for converting raw to black and white. I usually use "Standard" in camera because it is more consistent from one Canon camera model to another. With auto exposure, the picture style will sometimes change the exposure that the camera would choose. If editing in DPP, then style will be a shortcut for some settings including the color curve.

[LeeP]

For me, it's literally a slider affair. I simply remove the color saturation which is 90% of the conversion. Converted color photos typically need a little added contrast and sometimes a bit more exposure so that the blue sky doesn't come out totally dingy gray.

Shooting in monochrome is better of course, but then I lose the color option. Two years ago I won 4 awards in the county fair, all of which were black and white. Two were by my R8 in monochrome mode and two were unsaturated color. A lovely blue sky in color can come out to a depressing grey in the desaturation process. 

To be frank, I will sometimes look at a color image of mine with a slightly blown-out sky and instead of fabricating a fake blue sky with Pinterest-perfect clouds, I remove the saturation and see what it's like in monochrome. Sometimes a "miss" in color is a "hit" in black and white.

Nearly a year ago, one of my photographs was featured in the Fall (I think) portfolio here and it was an unsaturated color image.

And that's as far as I go in post i.e. if needed I do minor adjustments to exposure, contrast, saturation, shadow, and highlights. I don't stray from the ethic I was taught when I began my photography training which was to get the exposure and composition right in camera, and do minor adjustments in the darkroom. Thus, I don't erase things in the picture, or Frankenstein together several shots and be dishonest, purporting it to be an SOOC photograph that I took when it's a manufactured image with more work than an aging Hollywood actress.

I've played with the modes and haven't seen any real benefit that makes me go "Wow! I must always choose one" and I would argue that white balance more than anything is the key thing to remember to adjust in camera.

[LeeP]

I leave it at "auto".

Another reason I don't mess with them is that I like doing street/urban photography and I could wind up changing the mode for this shot and then changing for that shot and in the process lose all spontaneity in the moment, or worse be in "this" mode when a spontaneous image would have been better in "that" mode.

I've always seen the mode as being "if all my shots will be X then I need to be in Y mode" but almost never is that true of what I am doing.

[Ramsden]

Makes perfect sense. I've taken about 50 photos this morning, just walking my dog. There's just too many things to remember! 

[LeeP]

And the exposure accuracy and color rendering on my R100 and R8 have been decidedly pleasing to my eye in their default, unaltered modes. I haven't been displeased in the least.

[johnrmoyer]

If it turns out you do want a different picture style, the https://cam.start.canon/en/S004/manual/html/index.html picture style editor has a lot more control than just changing a few things in the camera. It is a free to download program. It seems to me that it has a steep learning curve because the controls do not seem easy to me to map to doing the same thing in DPP. DPP is easier for me to understand because I can usually guess at what algorithms it is using. 

The EOS Utility can load an edited picture style into the camera. The picture style editor can start with a photo from the camera to make a new style file.