Does it matter what picture style I set? they don’t look different in Lightroom.
Alex Douglas, Aberdeen
Brian says… While JPEG images show the effect of the picture style settings, you won’t see them if you shoot in Raw and process the files in Lightroom as, unfortunately, most Raw-processing applications ignore the picture style that was set in camera, aside from Canon’s Digital Photo Professional.
Picture styles were introduced with the original EOS 5D and EOS-1D Mark II N with Standard, Landscape, Portrait, Neutral, Faithful and Monochrome styles. If you set the picture style to Monochrome then black-andwhite images are displayed on the camera LCD. Recent cameras have added Auto and Fine Detail picture styles. Auto selects from Standard, Landscape and Portrait, depending on the content of the picture. Fine Detail is to further aid the resolving power of the current crop of high-resolution cameras.
For each picture style there is a ‘look’ and then a series of parameters that can adjust the image. For example, the ‘look’ of the Landscape style is to saturate greens and blues, with high contrast and sharpness – it looks a little like Fuji Velvia slide film used to. Then additional parameters can be applied to the look, so you can add extra Sharpness, Contrast, Saturation or adjust the Colour Tone, if you like.
Recent cameras have three sharpening parameters; Strength, Fineness and Threshold. These are similar to the Amount, Radius and Threshold sliders in Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask.
Picture Style Editor is included with cameras to allow photographers to create their own custom picture styles. Canon has a number of picture styles to download from http://bit.ly/picstyles