Canon 350D Color Saturation: Adjust on Camera or in Software?

[William Baroo]

I'm in the process of getting to know my old Canon 350D and Sigma 17-70mm macro lens so I can figure out where to go as an upgrade. Today I took some more shots, and I managed to get two that I liked well enough to save and edit.

I noticed that the color saturation had to be jacked up on both photos. They were just too dull. I'll post a small version of one as it looked after I edited it.

I found that Canon put a saturation adjustment on this camera. Should I go ahead and increase the saturation for all shots, or am I better off waiting until I have them on the PC?

 

[wfooshee]

Camera settings like saturation only apply to JPGs that the camera produces, and are not applied to the RAW file you might be bringing in to Lightroom or Photoshop. RAW is just that, the absolute data recorded by the sensor.

So the first question is, is the image you posted a JPG from the camera, or a JPG produced by post-processing such as Lightroom or Photoshop? If you don't want to work with RAW image files, there's nothing wrong with tweaking your camera's JPG settings, but keep in mind that those tweaks apply to everything you shoot. With that in mind, most cameras have a set of presets, or scene modes, which are nothing but built-in default JPG adjustments. There are usually one or two "custom" scene modes that let you apply your own preferences.

 

[Strodav]

Shoot raw, adjust in Post.

 

[William Baroo]

I haven't fooled with RAW images yet. It sounds like the JPG setting is just a way to avoid using software over and over.

 

[wfooshee]

JPG out of camera is just using the camera's processor instead of your computer to produce a JPG file. For a lot of people, the results are completely satisfactory once they've made a couple of adjustments to the camera's processing, like your color saturation. RAW files give you much more to work with in post-processing on the computer, however.