Utilize picture Styles

Change your photographs’ colours and tones quickly in post-production

On a shoot you can experiment with a range of different looks by changing your camera’s Picture Style setting. You’ll find a collection of Picture Styles in your Canon’s camera settings menu. These preset Picture Styles are labelled to help you choose the appropriate one. For example, the Portrait style will try to produce flattering and natural

skin tones in a range of lighting scenarios. Certain styles (such as Landscape and Portrait) are automatically chosen when you choose a specific option on your Canon’s Mode dial. When shooting in Manual mode you can choose from any Picture Style in the menu.

Each style in your Canon’s settings menu has properties that you can fine-tune by pressing the ‘Info’ button to access the Detail menu. Here you can use sliders to adjust the selected Picture Style’s Sharpness, Contrast, Saturation and Color tone. You can also create personalized User Defined Picture Styles to create distinctive looks for your photographs.

Because Picture Styles change the contrast and colour of a shot you may end up with a look that you’re not happy with. If you shoot in JPEG format then it’s harder to counteract this (or rescue blown out tones). However, if you shoot in Raw format then you can use Digital Photo Professional 4 to quickly experiment with a range of different looks.

We’ll also show you how to use Canon’s free Picture Style Editor app to create custom Picture Styles that can be applied in a click from within Digital Photo Professional 4.