Not making the most of Picture Controls

Don’t leave the Picture Control setting in its Standard position for every shot. By shooting in RAW, you can preview the effect that a Picture Control has on an image during Live View or playback, but the original image will remain unaffected. This is particularly useful when shooting for black and white: using the Monochrome Picture Control enables you to judge how a picture will work in greyscale, while the RAW file will be saved with all the colour information intact. This allows you to carry out the conversion later. It’s a different matter when you shoot JPEGs, as the Picture Control is ‘baked’ into the file. If you don’t like the look delivered by the Picture Control you’ve set, you can try to fix things in Photoshop, but image quality will suffer. It’s important to get a handle on Picture Control when shooting HD video too, because every frame of a movie is basically a JPEG image, so colour, contrast and sharpness are fixed at the time you record the footage. Filmmakers tend to use the Neutral or Flat Picture Controls, as these give low-contrast results that hold up better to enhancements in video-editing software.

If you shoot in RAW, the image will retain all its colour information, enabling you to visualise how an effect will work – but if you want to change it later, you can still do so (see page 78)