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What is the purpose of those in-camera picture styles? Are they absolutely useless? Photographer David Bergman explores a few ways where this feature might make your photography life easier and more productive.
Mr. Bergman shares: “In addition to setting your exposure, using aperture shutter speed and ISO you can usually change the look of your images by processing the files inside of your camera. Canon for example, has a Picture Styles Menu, and it gives you the ability to change things, like contrast saturation, and sharpening. Those looks are actually baked into your files if you’re shooting JPEG’s.”
“However if you’re shooting raw, which I highly recommend, then those settings aren’t applied to the files, and you can make those changes in the computer after the fact. So why would you even bother using picture styles in the camera at all? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that it might save you just a little bit of time when you process your RAW files on the computer using the camera manufacturers software. Canons digital photo professional for example will read the picture style settings that you’ve selected in the camera, and apply that to your images by default when you first start editing your photos.”
“If you have a lot of images to work on, you might be able to spend just a little less time sitting in front of your computer, and more time out shooting, but the other reason is actually more important to me. Those picture style settings are applied to the small embedded JPEG that you can see on the back of your screen when you’re shooting, and you can use that to your advantage. So for example if I know an image is going to be black and white. I’ll switch to the monochrome picture style. That’ll help me to visualize how the photo will look in the end, even though the raw file captures everything in color.”
“A little trick I do when I’m photographing someone, is to set my picture style to bump up the saturation, contrast and sharpness, to really make the photos pop off that display. It usually gets an oooh or an aaah, and might help make my subject just a little more comfortable in front of my lens. But when I get back to the computer, I’m never gonna see those oversaturated, over sharpened photos, and can start from scratch using the raw file.”
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