Canon Picture Styles
If you use a modern Canon DSLR (including the EOS Rebel XTi, XSi, 40D, 50D and 5D), then you have access to Canon Picture Styles. Picture Styles are presets that allow you to control the “look” of your image, much like choosing a film stock based on its color or contrast characteristics. Picture Style presets store settings for sharpness, contrast, saturation and color tone (for color picture styles); or sharpness, contrast, filter effect and toning (for monochrome picture styles). These parameters may be easily adjusted in the camera.
In addition, Picture Styles store can contain custom white balance and color correction information. While this data can be adjusted in the camera as well, the user interface is not as intuitive as it could be. Fortunately, Canon’s programmers realized this, and created the Picture Style Editor program. This program allows you to create your own picture styles and save them to one of the user presets in your camera. You may also load them using the Digital Photo Pro RAW converter software.
Now’s probably a good time to mention that Picture Styles affect JPEG files such that, once applied, it’s a permanent part of the file. If you shoot RAW files, the picture style information is stored as part of the the meta-data. If you process your RAW files using Digital Photo Pro, Picture Styles will be applied as you process the file. And, if you decide that a different style should have been applied, you can change it before outputting the file. As of this time, there are no third-party RAW converters that allow this!
Canon has a great web site that’s dedicated to Picture Styles: http://web.canon.jp/imaging/picturestyle/index.html
From this site, you can learn more about how Picture Styles work, and you can download at least seven new styles developed by top Canon photographers.
I’ve played with this some on my new 40D, and when I’m shooting jpeg, it seems to be a rather nice tool. I’m told (though I haven’t tried it) that you can set a picture style to come close to duplicating fugi velvia film. I wonder if Lightroom will ever add the ability to work with & change picture styles from Canon cameras. I suspect they won’t, but here’s hoping.
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Lightroom 2 has some level of this feature, and I’m just now starting to play with it. It also will work in Adobe Camera RAW 4.6. I’ll post an article once I get further along, and figure out how to translate actual picture styles into presets for LR2 and ACR.
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You can download some Lightroom presets online for free which may be helpful.
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