What 'picture style' settings do you use on your t2i or t3i?

[Crush]

I'm trying to take pics that are very 'faithful' to the original colors as i'd prefer to do that in post.

Also what about sharpness? I kind of love/hate sharpness settings on my devices. They sometimes hurt, sometimes help I find. It's so dependent on the device.

I'm hesitant about sharpness because I know in some devices when you put the sharpness below a certain points, it actually begins to blur the image on purpose rather than turn sharpness off.

What do you guys have your camera set to?

 

[oldmacman]

99% of what I do is with manual settings. I'll throw it on auto to snap a pic of my kids that is intended as just a snap shot. Because I shoot in RAW, I sharpen to taste in post.

 

[MTVision]

I have my camera profile set to camera neutral. As for sharpness - I usually sharpen the picture in post processing. I think even when you have the camera add sharpening - it still may not be sharp enough because of the anti-aliasing filter. I'm not sure but.....if you shoot RAW I'm not sure how much those settings actually affect the image. My JPEGS out of the camera are not even close to how sharp my RAW images are after editing.

I'm not a pro nor do I have a lot of experience so take what I say with a grain of salt.

 

[Overread]

A lot of this depends on your workflow.

1) JPEG with direct printing or little to no editing -- in this case you're looking for suitable shots straight out of the camera and chances are that you might well find using some of the in-camera editing settings will better let the camera give you the result you want to create. Its crude editing, but suffices for many - esp if you have to produce things at speed.

2) JPEG with some editing - you might get some bonuses using a few, but in general you'll want to avoid using any extreme settings. Of course the more editing you do the more likely you'll be using neutral/faithful settings in the camera.

3) RAW - in this mode your in camera settings won't be having any effect on the final RAW at all and will only be used as default starting positions by some RAW processing software (eg canons own); whilst others will simply ignore the info and give you a regular default position.


Note that in all modes (even RAW) the histogram you see on the back of the camera will always be based of an edited JPGE with the in-camera settings. Thus applications of boosted brightness and sharpness will affect how you expose and work your camera. Note also that if you are working in RAW those boosted stats will mean that you will miss slight increases to exposure that you might otherwise have been able to take.

Further point (especially applies to sharpening and noise) all in camera editing is global and applied uniform to each shot; thus you are limiting any selective editing bonuses that you can get out of camera. This also causes problems as you vary what you shoot since some shots will want more or less sharpening/noise/other values. Out of camera editing is always going to give you an edge in getting the more perfected final shot - but, as said above, there are cases when you might want/have to forgo that and simply push for a faster workflow.



Myself I shoot in RAW mode and keep all my in-camera settings to neutral/faithful values so that my histogram is always as close to the RAW histogram as I can get it.

 

[dots]

Set it to zero not minus, if you can.

in some devices when you put the sharpness below a certain points, it actually begins to blur the image on purpose rather than turn sharpness off.

What do you guys have your camera set to?

 

[Christapher81]

I use manual settings as well and shoot in RAW format and edit in Adobe Lightroom. If you haven't checked into post processing very much, I would suggest going to Adobe's website and downloading a free 30 day trial of one or more of their programs. Unless if you already use one of those programs, then disregard this post.

 

[Crush]

Thanks for the advice. Pics looked good in testing.

This one person said that sharpening in his camera produced 'much better' results than doing it in post. I haven't tried but can't find a difference. Maybe tonight I'll shoot in raw and see if it makes any difference.

 

[Overread]

Internal editing in the camera is almost never superior to proper editing out of the camera - however proper editing is something many people pick up in parts here and there; so its very easy for people to be using the wrong method or a weaker method of editing out of the camera and thus get the impression that the camera is superior.

In addition remember RAWs are unprocessed so they will always look softer than a JPEG. A RAW nearly always needs to be sharpened and this is done in two stages. First capture sharpening; this is done as an early stage sharpen in the RAW processing stage itself (by default most RAW processing software applies capture sharpening) and is done to remove a lot of the softness of a shot introduced by the AA filter on the sensor. It gives you a working shot that has a clarity that a photographer can work with.
The second stage of sharpening is output sharpening which is the last stage of editing before you resize (any resizing also needs to be sharpened after - to varying degrees depending on how much resizing was done).

More details here: Sharpening in Photoshop -- Part I

 

[jaomul]

I shoot in both raw and jpeg and find that my jpegs generally look ok with a custom picture style set at standard and the sharpness set at 5 with colour tone at +1. Obviously this is just a preference and will vary person to person. If I want a better finish which I normally do I pp the raw file. It is nearly always possible in my opinion to improve on the jpeg with a processed raw file. The example settings are based on using canons own raw converter DPP.

 

[Ulriksen]

To start of, I never go below the Program mode, I always use program and the manual modes above that... Program gives you the same functions as full auto, including the option to force the camera to change aperture and shutterspeed with the same exposure...