Do it in style (or not)

Another page from my upcoming book, Mastering Your Camera – The Ultimate No-Jargon Guide To Using Any DSLR (ISBN-978-0-9918636-2-4) whose release is imminent. Planned for January 14, but it may well be earlier: STAY TUNED. I will announce release here and on https://www.facebook.com/CameraTraining.


Most cameras allow a “Picture Style” choice. This choice allows you to set the camera up to produce photos with a particular “look and feel”, like Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Monochrome, and various others:

This setting effects sharpness, contrast, saturation, and colour tone. And again, as in previous “in-camera editing” options, this only affects JPG pic- tures and a RAW image’s built-in JPG, i.e. the preview you see on your screen. So when you shoot JPGs, yes, do explore these options and how they all look.

Even if you shoot RAW, if you use your camera maker’s provided software (e.g. Canon’s Digital Photo Professional application), you can then have the RAW image “tuned” the same way on your computer, so in that case there is some utility to this. You can even make your own styles. Nevertheless, if you shoot RAW, I think the advantages versus the drawbacks of not using Adobe Lightroom or similar weigh towards not doing this, and just leaving it on “Standard”.

If you shoot JPG, I would not use the “Monochrome” setting—as discussed before, this will throw away all colour info and make it impossible for you to adjust the B/W conversion later.

Play with styles if you shoot JPG; else, my advice: leave the camera on “Standard” and do all editing in Lightroom. And: you can emulate most cameras’ styles in Lightroom in the DEVELOP module, in the CAMERA CALIBRATION pane, by changing the PROFILE setting. Play with that!

 

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