Portrait Picture Style
If you’re shooting JPEGS, it pays to get an image’s colour and sharpness right in camera
canon’s Portrait Picture Style applies a mix of sharpness, contrast, saturation and colour tone designed to compliment pictures of people. Specifically, it aims to produce ‘transparent healthy skin for women and children’. To do this, it sets a level of sharpness one step lower than the standard setting, for smoother skin texture, and optimizes colour and saturation for skin tone.
As with the other Picture Styles, you can fine-tune the parameters of the Portrait setting, with the Colour Tone option enabling skin – along with the rest of the image – to take on a more reddish or yellowish tone. Since the launch of the EOS 5DS/R, Canon has also been rolling out three additional sharpening adjustments for each Picture Style, which work in a similar way to Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask filter. For instance, you can increase the Threshold setting so that only high-contrast edges appear sharp while areas of skin remain unsharpened and soft – useful if you’re shooting a young model rather than a craggy old seadog.
It’s worth experimenting with these settings on the camera if you shoot JPEGS, as the Picture Style is permanently applied to the image. This doesn’t affect Raw files, although you can still adjust the Picture Style and preview the changes on the rear screen.
I typically leave the Picture Style at Neutral because I shoot Raw files exclusively and Neutral produces a histogram that more closely resembles the exposure information of the Raw file. You then have the option of applying the Portrait Picture Style when you process the image in Canon’s DPP software.
Did you know that Lightroom also has a set of presets similar to Picture Styles? In the Develop module, go to the Camera Calibration tab and click on the drop-down menu next to Profile. You can then start adjusting from there.