My JPEG images look flat straight from the camera. How I can change them without having to do lots of post-processing?

I assume you are shooting JPEG by choice, but I would always recommend using raw files and processing your own images to get the look you want. If you’ve discounted that solution and want a simpler straight-out-ofthe-camera approach, you need to take a look in your camera’s menu settings for picture styles. Different manufacturers use different names, but they’re essentially preset effects to change the look of your photo in-camera.

When you find the styles in your menu, you will see a variety of settings named to give you an idea of what you’ll get from each JPEG style. For example, Nikon Picture Control offers JPEG settings including neutral, vivid and flat while Canon’s Picture Styles include standard, neutral and faithful.

If your camera JPEG setting is neutral or flat, clearly your camera is only doing what you tell it. Camera manufacturers give you a flat style on the assumption that you want a basic result you can fine-tune in Photoshop.

However, you’ll have options at the other end of the scale too. In your case, you might want to change your JPEG setting to something like vivid (Nikon), landscape (Canon) or Velvia (Fujifilm), which give you more vibrant colours and more contrast. You can see the difference in my example images. These two JPEGs are exactly as they came out of the camera; the difference between the muted colour and contrast of the Neutral setting (above left) and the more vibrant Landscape setting (above right) is obvious.

My guess is this alone will solve your frustrations – but if not, it’s possible that your camera will allow you to fine-tune these individual settings too. You can certainly do this in the latest Canon and Nikon SLRs. For example, on my Canon EOS 5D Mark III, I can go into each different Picture Style and alter the amount of sharpness, contrast, saturation and colour tone within the JPEG.

You can only work out how much of each setting you want by trial and error, but as your images were too flat, try increasing contrast and saturation.