Great looking JPG images straight from camera
Camera settings for great JPEG images straight out of camera
Alot of photographers shoot JPG images, and so it is more important to configure the right camera settings so those JPGS look their best. First consideration is colour or monochrome, and then how do you like your colour to look; punchy and vibrant or softer with muted tones? All these are determined by the Picture Style, most cameras have an automatic style that switches between Standard, Portrait and Landscape styles depending on the picture. All three are different with Landscape having the most contrast and vibrant colours, portrait having the least. It is a good idea to test out the styles and see which you prefer, but don’t forget to consider the fine detail Picture Style, it looks better than the standard style.
Within the Picture Style there are parameters for contrast and sharpening and while the defaults are good, you may want to adjust them to give you the images you like. Clarity is found in the latest mirrorless models and increases the mid-tone contrast to make images feel sharper and more detailed, but it’s switched off by default so try it with +1 or +2 to see if you prefer the results. Clarity can also be reduced for softer gentle results.
Automatic white balance is perfectly fine in many lighting conditions; if you regularly shoot indoors with warm tungsten lights and want more neutral results, select auto white balance with white priority to reduce the warm tones of normal auto white balance. On cloudy days, you can add a bit more colour to your pictures with the cloudy white balance setting, but reset it after you finish taking photos.
Choose SRGB colour space if you don’t know how to use and work with the Adobergb images on your computer as SRGB is the standard for web images and most printing companies so it makes sense to use it.
When low light forces you to raise the ISO, in-camera noise reduction will optimise your shots. Don’t disable noise reduction, leave it at the standard setting. Lens corrections, particularly DLO, makes your images sharper and all but eliminates lens aberrations, yet the same processing takes twice as long with each Raw file in DPP.
There are more limits with editing JPG images, and there is more flexibility to correct camera settings in the edit. However I am convinced that most photographers who shoot Raw + JPG, rarely use their Raw files.