EOS RP picture style settings - what picture style do you use ?

So I have the RP .. and I shoot (mostly) RAW .. but I do want to get an excellent looking picture directly OOC. It's like I want the OOC JPEGs to look as good as possible and as close to the end-result as I like to see it. So I shoot in Fine Detail (5,2,4,0,1,0)

My workflow is shoot RAW, import in DPP, and export/convert ( almost without editing ) the images into JPEG. DPP 'takes' all the in camera settings, so this is for me a very efficient workflow. In case I do not edit in DPP, the JPEG from DPP is identical to the OOC JPEG, so the below is hopefully also useful for JPEG shooters. In case I do want to or need to edit, I can do it stating from RAW.

I was looking for the best picture style setting for a range of shooting conditions, including landscape, nature, street, architecture, some macro and people pictures.

I know that for each shot you can set an "optimal" picture style, but I was looking for a "2 size fit's all" solution:

- one for ALL my pics where people / portraits are the main focus and

- one setup for ALL others.

This first thread is about " the picture style I use for ALL others.

I found not too much info on this topic on WWW, so I decided to share my findings with all of you.

Each Canon picture style has a unique combination of sharpness, contrast, saturation and color tone. You can see in camera the possible sections for sharpness, etc, but for each color profile the individual colours are 'boosted'/'saturated' to a different level. This info is very hard to get. But as an example in picture style Landscape, the greens and blues are extra "boosted/saturated'. These specific differences are less easy to identify in other picture styles.

On my old 1100D I always liked landscape best, but that was typically less optimal when 'other than green / blue' was present, so I started to look for something "better" and I found, with some small modifications, Fine Detail to be the most of my liking.

I actually shot in most of them, but will not share the entire journey - that would use up too many pages here on the forum.

As of now, for landscape, building, macro, street, my setting is: Fine Detail, Sharpness set the same as for the Landscape profile ( so 5,2,4, because this gives clean, crisp, sharp images, the in camera Fine detail settings are more for high resolution sensors ) and Saturation set to +1 ( because when set to the default '0" the images are too flat. The contrast and Color Tone I leave at 0. So the full set it: 5,2,4,0,1,0.

It's also much better to shoot people pics with Fine Detail than landscape. Shooting people with Landscape always makes them look a bit green. But I need more time to find the optimal people picture profile.

Some sample pictures with some explanations.

This is my preferred "look and feel" for nature - this is the standard Landscape profile, but for pictures with more and additional color - Landscape does not render those nicely.

Fine detail (5,2,4,0,1,0) - this comes VERY close to the standard "landscape" look I like. Nice greens, nice blues and a nice level of "pop" but not overdone. Image is nice and sharp, also in the horizon.

Fine Detail (5,2,4,0,1,0) - nice brownish and whitish tints on the skin. Shot the cows also with "Landscape" but they look a lot "flatter" and "plain white" in that case. ( The cows were walking towards me - so sorry for the slight back focus) ( When I pulled my eye from the view finder I realised .. Objects do look bigger in real life .. )

Standard. Shot indoor, with a mix of daylight and led lamps. Notice how the fruit is almost subdued in the wooden bench.

Landscape. I like this already better than Standard.

Fine Detail (5,2,4,0,1,0) Slightly warmer on the wood when compared to Landscape. The white wall becomes a bit "coloured" which adds to the warmth of the picture.

Standard picture style. Actually this is quite realistic from color point of view - but also a bit "boring".

Fine Detail (5,2,4,0,1,0) The fruit stand out, the brown tints of the wood are warmer and the whole is not overly cooked. The reds are much more "red" as when compared to Landscape and Standard.

So what picture style do you use for your general purpose pictures ?

I still need to check which settings I like best for people - it's probably going to be "Picture Snapshot" which you can download from the Canon website. I will go test it out and report out later. Any other suggestions ?

Why not Portrait?

Hi Bat,

Not sure what you mean, but:

I still need to find the most optimal picture style settings for shooting portraits. Actually I hardly shoot portraits - I need a picture style for shooting people. Sometimes "headshots" but often its more like an upper torso.

I need to check if the color settings from Fine Detail color profile would fit - and I think its a good chance that it will. The Landscape profile is not the best for people / skin tones .. it makes them look greenish...

I do not like the color profile ( and sharpness settings ) that are in camera for Portraits. I neither like it for taking pictures of people and also do not like it for shooting landscape / street / etc.

I've been down this rabbit hole many times, and, let me say, I start with standard, and usually switch to either Landscape or Fine detail, and tweak those. I shoot RAW+S JPEG and do in-camera RAW conversion. Autumn hues and Portrait get some use too.

I find the LCD on the back of my R, is more color accurate than the monitor on my 2014 MBPR 15". Blasphemy, I know. But, you start seeing the subtle changes in-camera RAW editing when you switch on Adobe RGB and SRGB. I use SRGB for compatibility sake, even with my own machine which doesn't do Adobe RGB either. But, I toggle it to see what colors are impacted, and usually mimic those with a profile, or modified profile and then some artistic flare if desired. Less is more.

Bottom line. There is not goldilocks with these sorts of things. Very context specific so you need multiple profiles for multiple things. I've done actual picture profile creation, and it's worth noting that there are a couple "baselines"

Standard - Emphasizes with Canon's unique proprietary formula certain colors, which are probably based off AF or metering if I had to guess. Bumping saturation with this profile impacts those areas more, if that makes sense.

Neutral - just that. Flat. I avoid.

Faithful - Sometimes I use.

Landscape - Emphasizes Greens and blues, but also has a different contrast curve, not just contrast. Very important distinction.

Fine Detail - Another Canon proprietary. Sorta like Standard, except, minus the emphasis on context, but still gives punch. Reduced over sharpening. Also modifies contrast curves, which often I either use it for, or avoid because interestingly enough. Watch your highlights and you'll see what I mean.

Autumn Hues - Based off Landscape I believe, but emphasizes Reds and Oranges very subtly instead of Green and Blue.

Portrait - Pinks and Reds get emphasis. However, it often upsets the subtle balances of color, so I'll try it at times but in fact rarely use. When it works, it works though. When it works, it's usually portraits where it's head and shoulders or tighter, or, something I want to give more red/pink emphasis with, say red fruit. Go figure.

When all else fails, don't forget you can mess with a profile directly, standard with +1 saturation or Fine Detail also with +1 Saturation, or -1 Color tone, get use.

I've found it's very delicate. If you want to mimic the punch of older Canons, use Standard, then Fine detail (if the former fails) with -1 Color Tone and +0.5 Saturation (you can only do a 1/2 stop in DPP4, not in camera). I've found this too results in too much sway to do cart blanc, thus, I've given up the goldilocks approach and instead fine tune certain "special" shots, and leave everything else standard these days and go back to RAWs (like I have lately) if desired to tweak.

Hi Rlight, thanks for sharing.

your note very much summarizes my findings, and I was privileged to partly the same journey ;-).

Your summary of the different picture profiles is spot on when compared to my experiences.

I even found the ‘auto’ profile to work well .. but the tricky part is before you take the shot - you are not sure what you will get (and i do like some predictability )

I only process in DPP, and hence it is very easy for me to change PP and/or contrast, sharpness, etc later on in the process.

It is indeed also personal preference and the choice of picture profile also depends on what you shoot ( that sounds very obvious ...;-) .. still happy that i can have a good and well predictable ‘starting profile’ which in 95% of my pics needs no further attention.

When shooting i prefer to focus on composition and exposure triangle .. and post processing should be minimal for most images.

Enjoy !!

Hallo!

My first message on this forum. Nice to meet you!

I have the RP since last week. As usual (being a jpeg shooter) i have spent some hours with test shots developed with the in-camera raw converter, in order to find a general purpose setup. (Note: DPP conversion is not quite the same of in-camera conversion)

My settings are:

- high iso noise reduction OFF

- white balance : auto with white priority (otherwise too warm under tungsten lights)

- auto light optimization OFF (ALO tends to made the final exposure unpredictable)

- picture style AUTO 7,5,5,0,1,0

AUTO picture style is  to my eyes an hybrid between standard and landscape. Some web text says that also portrait hues are involved, but in my experience it's just the standard picture style with bolder blues, greens and reds. I prefer +1 saturation also, which is quite pleasing to my eyes without being overdone, and under tungsten light gives a bit of warm tones to the scene. I like also fine details colors, but the skin tones are too red imo ...

As far as sharpening, i don't use to print big or view at 100%, so big radius and strong sharpening edges coupled with masking (treshold) marginally higher than standard, gives pop to my images when viewed at regular size/distance ... most probably 100% view will show artifacts and oversharpening halos, but i don't care of what i can't see without a microscope.

At high iso, i found all settings except OFF to be too invasive, wiping all details and waxying out expecially skin and hairs details

I will be glad if somebody will try my settings and tell what he thinks about

Cheers

Update after few more shots. 7,5,5 for sharpening showed me some artifacts and too harsh edges on some pictures. So i tuned down my values initially to 5,3,5 and now to 5,2,4

I am still keeping Auto as picture style with +1 saturation.

There are certain situations under tungsten lights where i prefer to keep saturation back at 0, some other times i found tungsten preset or white priority awb works best... ideally i would prefer an awb in the middle between the warmth of normal and the clinical coldness of white priority.

Hi Sandro, thanks for sharing.

Indeed auto does a very good job in most cases !

When i shoot people or indoor I use the ‘snapshot portrait’ and use AWB.

I do agree a white balance ‘ 50/50 AWB / AWB-W ‘ would be nice ..

what other settings do you use for people / indoor / low light ?

( i try to have 3 settings on C1 /C2 /C3 : landscape - outdoor - daytime street ( which uses the above fine detail setting ) / indoor - people - low light / sports - action. )

Lost99999 wrote:

Hi Sandro, thanks for sharing.

Indeed auto does a very good job in most cases !

When i shoot people or indoor I use the ‘snapshot portrait’ and use AWB.

I do agree a white balance ‘ 50/50 AWB / AWB-W ‘ would be nice ..

what other settings do you use for people / indoor / low light ?

( i try to have 3 settings on C1 /C2 /C3 : landscape - outdoor - daytime street ( which uses the above fine detail setting ) / indoor - people - low light / sports - action. )

Glad to see someone else found snapshot portrait useful. I find, with either portrait or snapshot portrait, WB is a touchy subject.  Color temp and click WB can sometimes be of use as is presets like daylight, shade, cloudy, etc.

Lost99999 wrote:

Hi Sandro, thanks for sharing.

Indeed auto does a very good job in most cases !

When i shoot people or indoor I use the ‘snapshot portrait’ and use AWB.

I do agree a white balance ‘ 50/50 AWB / AWB-W ‘ would be nice ..

what other settings do you use for people / indoor / low light ?

( i try to have 3 settings on C1 /C2 /C3 : landscape - outdoor - daytime street ( which uses the above fine detail setting ) / indoor - people - low light / sports - action. )

I have preset c1 for general photography woth Fv mode, single af single af point, c2 same of c1 but with awb(w) and c3 for action, with servo af with expanded af zone (1+8points) burst and shutter priority at 1/500... and i then programmed the lens ring to be exposure compensation and m-fn button to picture style, with 3 user presets, user1 auto 5,2,4,0,1,0, user2 auto 5,2,4,0,0,0 and user3 monochrome 5,2,4,3,y,n

I never found light optimizer to give useful improvements, except slightly raising the shadows at the expense of some contrast... but i prefer deep shadows and contrasty images

My mission is to use as much as possible the ooc jpegs, so other then checking the exposure, when the evf or the lcd shows me wrong colors with "default" c1, i rapidly switch between c2 or user2 picture style. If the colors are still off and i've no time to adjust K wb or a white balance shift ... it's monochrome time

All the above is still under study...

The main problem i am still fighting with, is that sometimes, changing the wb settings avoid me from giving consistent look to my pictures: some of them come out too different from the others (too cold or dull) that's why i keep raw for backup...

Andthat is why i have auto WB for all 3 custom modes .. so at least the pictures are somewhat consistent + its also the reason i shoot raw  .. allthough i’m not sure it hurts inage quality when you change AWB on a jpeg.

My experience is that on jpegs you can made some minor editing on whatever you want (exposure, wb, highlights/shadows, contrast, noise reduction, sharpening ) with no significant degradation, however the latitude of adjustments before the image start falling apart is limited (and you can do it only once of course and can't go back.)

However if you have a slow computer lacking memory or processing power, jpeg editing is a good choice if done wisely...

I have played further with the sharpening settings, and i would like to share my findings :

the default values of 4,2,4 are ok, only a bit on the soft side when your subject is plenty of textures.

I found that the finesse of 2 is an happy medium for any situation : going to 1 made the sharpening quite subtle and should be used imho only on high megapixel sensors, while numbers above 2 gives a "rough" artificial effect, thus i would avoid them.

Threshold is a tricky one: it is useful to sharpen very small textures on flat surfaces (for example on a leaf), but the results are often very subtle, if visible at all. 1 threshold amount shall be paired with finesse at 1, otherwise oversharpening artifacts will immediately arise in your picture (the facts is that thickness of sharpnened edges will be bigger than the space between the edges themself) Standard amount of 4 is very similar to 5,with just a tiny bit more details but never intrusive in skin tones, sky, or other situations where too much details are not welcome (so no big reasons to choose 5) while 3 is in my opinion the worst choiche: noise and visible artifacts with negligible improvements on fine details enhancement. Amounts lower than 4 tend to sharpen the noise of your images, expecially in shadow areas, and while i found usually not disturbing the kind of noise produced by the RP (in facts i always keep my noise reduction OFF) , the sharpened noise is very digital and unpleasing to my eyes

Finally the amount : 4 enhance the sharpened edges but with just a bit of softness (which should be ok for many people) , 5 is almost perfect (sharp but not overdone) , while 6 is a bit over the top, but still fine if you want very scenic images, and is also perfect for detailed printings (in my experience, print will take away part of the noise and part of the sharpening from yr images)

So, after having tried hundreds of possible combinations of the 3 parameters of sharpening, my preferred choices are:

5 or 6 amount

2 finesse

4 threshold

If shooting only at low iso, i would consider also threshold at 2... but only few real world situations will get real sharpness benefits from low threshold numbers.

These are my findings. I will be pleased to know if any of you went through same toughts

Here below few (boring) jpeg shots, taken with picture style Auto 6,2,4,0,0,0 and AWB ambience priority. They are straight out of camera jpeg, except two of them which i straightened and cropped at 16:9 for use as desktop wallpapers on my pc

I would like to post some words i have received from a friend abt this topic on another forum. He is not subscribed here, and my words are a free translation, however he told me to post as below

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My rp gives me great results mostly at its defaults ... i am a 100% jpeg shooter since my first mirrorless camera (olympus em5), and after having spent too much time on settings on my previous cameras, now when i put my hands on a new model i just tune down as far as possible the noise reduction: noise reduction is always detrimental on iq, on any camera, on any shot ... apart from nouse reduction, all other things like colors, contrast, saturation, tone curves, etc are really too much variable depending on the situation and you can't ever find a "one size fits all" setup much better than factory defaults  (side note: sharpening settings imho are almost irrelevant unless you view or print at very big sizes, which should not be the case for a "take-it-easy-and-shot-jpeg" user) ... just trust your camera jpeg engine and concentrate on focus and exposure, you will enjoy your camera much more than fiddling with settings or raw converters" ... unless you have artistic purposes, for which raw is still the only way to go...

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