PICTURE STYLES
The Canon Magazine 83
CONTROLLING COLOUR
t might seem odd
that an EOS camera
has no colour setting
available in the menu. Rather
than give you lots of individual
picture characteristics to
tweak, Canon groups the most
used picture correction options
together as Picture Style
profiles. Each Picture Style
offers a different blend of
saturation, sharpness, colour
tone and contrast, and although
some are labelled according to
the type of image they might
suit you can apply any of them
to any image or movie clip.
You are able to alter the
colours by adjusting the
parameters of a Picture Style.
Not only can you adjust the level
of saturation for either bolder or
subtler results, you can bias the
colour tone towards red oryellow – although this
option is designed to help
fine-tune skin tones.
To tweak these parameters,
you’ll need to dip into the
Picture Style sub-menu, which
you can access through the red
Shooting menu or the Quick
Control screen. The EOS 7D
Mark II, 5D Mark IV and 5DS/R
also have a but ton on the lef t of
the body that takes you to thePicture Style menu, but
many other cameras allow you
to add the function to one of
their customizable buttons via
the Custom Functions menu.
In addition to modifying
Picture Styles, you can register
your favourite setups under the
three ‘User Def.’ slots.Adjusting the saturation
What is a colour space?
How to edit a Picture Style to pump up the colour, or tone it down
How your choice of colour space determines the range of colours you can see
I
A
WB
SET AFISOChanging the saturation
BOTH OF these shots were taken using the Landscape Picture Style preset,
but with the saturation parameter taken to each extreme. The min setting
shows more subtle shifts in gradation, but looks a bit pasty, whereas the
max setting will give a much bolder presentation straight out of the camera.
Shifting the colour tone
THE COLOUR tone slider is also effective at boosting sunset shots or giving
images of flowers a different feel. Adjustments are usually better made in
small increments, but here I’ve taken the sliders to the extreme red
(‘minus’) and yellow (‘positive’) settings to show the effect.Minimum^ Maximum^ Red^ Yellow^
colour space
dictates the specific
range of colours that
can be reproduced, and it’s a
way of ensuring that these
colours can be presented
consistently across
different screens, printers,
internet browsers, software
programs and more. If there
wasn’ t any consistency, if each
of these devices used a different
space, then your pictures would
look different depending on
how it was being viewed.
The most widely used colour
space is sRGB. This is the
colour space your images are
recorded in by default when
you shoot JPEGs, and it’s
supported by most devices.
EOS cameras also give you theoption of switching to
Adobe RGB – you can
find this option in the
red Shooting menu.
Adobe RGB is a larger
colour space, so it gives
you a wider range of
colours to work with.
But bigger doesn’t mean
better; not all devices and
software can display AdobeRGB files correctly, so pictures
can end up looking muddy and
flat in an sRGB environment or
when printed out.