What picture style to use for my 60D

[fotomumma09]

I was shooting indoors and found standard to have a horrible orange colour to it. Would neutral be more appropriate? Does anyone have any articles that may be helpful? TIA

 

[Big Mike]

That's not really a 'picture style' issue. It has to do with the white balance (WB) setting. (Read your manual)
You probably have your WB set to 'auto', which usually works well, but some situations will fool it and you end up with weird colors.

Either way, neither pictures styles or White Balance matter all that much, if you shoot in RAW mode...because you have full control of those options on the computer once you have uploaded the images. If you shoot in JPEG, it's much more important to pay attention to these settings.

 

[Derrel]

MOST d-slr cameras perform somewhere between horrible and sub-par when it comes to indoor white balance under artificial lights, as well as the common mixture of incandescent, or fluorescent, or tungsten lighting---often mixed with some daylight coming in from windows. I would say that indoor, artifical light white balance performance is ***the single worst*** performance area for a majority of cameras on the market today!!!!

As Big Mike stated, the Picture Style in use is not the issue causing the problems with poor color. One needs to learn how to set a custom white balance, or to set the white balance manually, in "K", which stands for degrees Kelvin. Indoors, somewhere in the range of 2,800 K to 4,400 K is where many situations will fall, depending on the light sources, and to an extent, the camera model itself.

There are also some factory Pre-Set white balance settings one can set the camera to...the little teardrop-like lightbulb representing incandescent bulbs, the long skinny tubes representing fluorescent bulbs, and so on. Shooting with a custom-derived white balance taken off of a gray card or a white towel, OR using a pre-set factory-supplied setting like "incandescent" allows you to apply corrections later across a bunch of different photos, and makes the corrections work almost universally on pics shot at the same time under the same exposure settings.

 

[fotomumma09]

Thanks so much. I just read up on the custom white balance yesterday. So for my next question, how often should one set the CWB and when?

 

[Big Mike]

If you are going to use a custom WB. It needs to be set for every different lighting scenario you shoot in. So that could be every shot...if you are going from one location to another, or even if you go from one direction to another. It's really only a practical option, when you plan to take a bunch of shots in the same lighting.

That's why I mentioned shooting in RAW. It gives you the ability to adjust the WB on the computer afterward.

 

[fotomumma09]

Thank so much! I do shoot RAW.

 

[TCampbell]

Thanks so much. I just read up on the custom white balance yesterday. So for my next question, how often should one set the CWB and when?

Every time the lighting changes you need to rebalance the CWB. I carry a gray card in my larger camera bag and I pull it out and use it anytime I'm taking a photo where the white balance accuracy will matter (so if I'm just out having fun shooting, I don't pull out the gray card.)

You can use a gray card whether you shoot JPEG or RAW. The difference is that if you shoot JPEG, you shoot a gray frame with the reference card, then set the camera to CWB and tell it to use that gray frame as the reference frame. If you shoot RAW then just take a photo of the gray card and then proceed with the rest of your shooting (but do re-shoot the card if the lighting changes.) The camera won't do any adjustments when you shoot RAW... instead you'll set the white balance when you post-process the images on your computer. But when you do, you can set the white balance for your images by picking the frame with the gray card and applying that same white balance adjustment to every image that was shot in the same lighting.

Here's a fairly extensive video on using gray cards (sort of an infomercial for the Lastolite brand... the brand doesn't matter, all gray cards will work the same): Using Calibration/Grey Cards « Lastolite School of Photography

 

[dimakuzmich]

Ya i would say play around with the Kelvins and if you shoot in RAW, all you have to do is the first and second setting in there would be the white balance and just turn down the warmth to a cooler color to make the yellow go away.

 

[fotomumma09]

Every time the lighting changes you need to rebalance the CWB. I carry a gray card in my larger camera bag and I pull it out and use it anytime I'm taking a photo where the white balance accuracy will matter (so if I'm just out having fun shooting, I don't pull out the gray card.)

You can use a gray card whether you shoot JPEG or RAW. The difference is that if you shoot JPEG, you shoot a gray frame with the reference card, then set the camera to CWB and tell it to use that gray frame as the reference frame. If you shoot RAW then just take a photo of the gray card and then proceed with the rest of your shooting (but do re-shoot the card if the lighting changes.) The camera won't do any adjustments when you shoot RAW... instead you'll set the white balance when you post-process the images on your computer. But when you do, you can set the white balance for your images by picking the frame with the gray card and applying that same white balance adjustment to every image that was shot in the same lighting.

Here's a fairly extensive video on using gray cards (sort of an infomercial for the Lastolite brand... the brand doesn't matter, all gray cards will work the same): Using Calibration/Grey Cards « Lastolite School of Photography

That's great info! Thanks for sharing!

 

[belial]

If you dont have a gray card you can also use a plain white sheet of paper. It wont always be exact but will get you in the ballpark. I just shoot auto wb 99% of the time and tweak it when i process the raw