What are your custom picture style settings on your 1DX?

[gail bisson]

I have gotten myself totally confused with this. I have been reading too much...
My current settings are Standard
sharpness +2
contrast -1
saturation 0
color tone 0.
i am concerned mostly about accurate "highlight blinkie warning" on the LCD preview of the JPEG. And yes, I know I should always check the histogram, but sometimes things happen so fast it is quicker to quickly glance down at the LCD.
Please advise if I am correct with this settings and tell me what your custom settings settings are and why?
Thanks,
gail

[Mike Milicia]

I select one of the “User Defined” picture styles and customize it as follows :

Base Style = Neutral
Sharpness = 6
Contrast = -4
Saturation = 0
Color Tone = 0

These settings will have no effect on the RAW file but will be used when generating the embedded jpg which is used for LCD display, to build the on-camera histogram, and to determine when to give you blinkies. Using Neutral and reducing the Contrast will get the histogram to more closely reflect what is actually in the RAW file.

Note that blinkies are only reliable if there are whites in your image. You can easily blow one or even two channels and not get blinkies. With whites, all channels move in unison so if you blow one, you blow them all so the blinkies are more reliable. Likewise, the Luminance (i.e. single color) histogram is also only useful if you have whites so you should always examine the RGB histogram and check each channel individually.

Note that the Sharpness setting above is more a matter of personal preference and has no significant effect on the histogram one way or the other. I crank it up so that if it does not look like the sharpest thing I have ever seen on the back on the camera, I know it is not tack sharp. I don’t have to wonder whether it just needs a bit more sharpening.

[Jim Neiger]

We'll said, Mike. I agree except I set contrast to -2 and sharpness to plus 7. I think -4 is too much reduction in contrast compared to where you will likely end up after post processing.

[gail bisson]

We'll said, Mike. I agree except I set contrast to -2 and sharpness to plus 7. I think -4 is too much reduction in contrast compared to where you will likely end up after post processing.

Jim,
Are you in neutral as well?

[arash_hazeghi]

I use standard.

[Mike Milicia]

My only concern when setting the Picture Style is to try to make the histogram reflect the actual RAW data as closely as possible. Since the settings have no effect on the RAW data, I am not concerned with how they compare to what I will ultimately want to do when I process the RAW file.

Even with contrast set to -4, I find that the histogram and highlight alerts are still a bit overly conservative compared to the RAW data,

[Diane Miller]

Except that there is no such thing as actual raw data. There is only the interpretation of raw data by your raw processing program, and how it correlates with the in-camera jpeg. A good thing to experiment with! Thanks for brining it up!

[Mike Milicia]

When I referred to “RAW data”, I was referring to the 14-bit numbers in the RAW file itself that represent the amount of light that was captured at each of the photosites. With respect to clipping, for example, this is the only data that you really care about. As long as these numbers are not clipped, i.e. do not reach their maximum value, the detail is there for the RAW processing program to recover when you convert the RAW data into an RGB image file.

The problem comes in when the RAW data is NOT clipped but the RGB values in the generated JPEG become clipped as a result of the image processing pipeline which is influenced by your camera settings. This causes a mismatch between the histogram/blinkies and the actual RAW data and may cause you to unnecessarily reduce your exposure even though your RAW file was actually fine.

[Jim Neiger]

Mike,

My point was that since the resulting jpegs affect the decisions you make about exposure, turning contrast down too far may result in blown highlights when you return the contrast to a more normal setting during post processing. You can avoid this by adjusting contrast selectively in post processing, but this may result in an unrealistic look to your image.

[Jim Neiger]

Arash and Mike,

It doesn't matter what picture style is used as long as the individual settings that make up the picture style are set the way you want them.

[Mike Milicia]

It doesn't matter what picture style is used as long as the individual settings that make up the picture style are set the way you want them.

Picture styles are far more than the 4 sliders you see when you create a custom style. Those sliders are simply the parameters that you can use to customize and fine tune the individual styles. The base style determines the overall look and feel of the image much like different film chemistries did back in the film days. For example, Landscape results in a selective saturation boost in the blues and greens. See here for more details :

http://web.canon.jp/imaging/pictures...yle/index.html

You can see this yourself by creating 2 different user defined picture styles with all of the sliders set the zero but with different base styles, e.g. Standard vs. Neutral. You will get different results depending on the base style you choose both in the look of the images and in the histograms even though all of the customization sliders are set the same. The type and degree of the differences will, of course, depend on the content of the image.

[Mike Milicia]

Mike, My point was that since the resulting jpegs affect the decisions you make about exposure, turning contrast down too far may result in blown highlights when you return the contrast to a more normal setting during post processing. You can avoid this by adjusting contrast selectively in post processing, but this may result in an unrealistic look to your image.

I see what you are saying but as I understand things (and I certainly welcome correction if I am off base here), as long as you do not clip anything in the RAW file, you can massage the data in Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom Develop to get whatever aesthetic effects you desire. In your example, if you use the Whites and/or Exposure slider in combination with Contrast, I think you can get the same end result. But by setting the Picture Style so that you can recognize that you have more headroom in the RAW data and then letting in more light at capture time, the darks in the image will be cleaner. I have never had the issue of ending up with an unrealistic look using this approach or, at least, if I did, I was not astute enough to notice it. :-(

[arash_hazeghi]

If you use Canon DPP, each picture style will apply a different tone curve and result in different color response / saturation even if the all sliders are at the same position. But you can always change it in DPP, it will be a bit extra work.

[Jim Neiger]

Thanks Arash and Mike. I learned something new about both DPP and picture styles.

It it all boils down to two things

1. The effect it has on your decisions about future exposures

2. The effect it has on your post processing workflow.

Mike, if you really want to mirror the RAW file, check out UNIWB (universal white balance). It's a custom WB designed to replicate the RAW data as closely as possible. It's a big pain to use for small gain though, IMO.

[Mike Milicia]

Jim, I agree about UNIWB. Yes, it gives an even more accurate histogram but not worth it IMO. Don't like the idea of having to start from scratch to set the WB for very capture. I prefer AWB as it gets me in the ballpark the vast majority of the time and quite often, it's very close to correct, if not spot on.

[Miguel Palaviccini]

Great thread! I was curious about the high sharpness settings. I use the LCD for two things: highlight warning and check of critical sharpness. I haven't done any tests, but I would think that you would want the sharpness set to 0 so that you can better judge sharpness. I'd hate to think an image was tack sharp to later find out that it wasn't quite as sharp as I'd thought. Especially if I had the time to change settings and try something different.

Thoughts?

[arash_hazeghi]

Great thread! I was curious about the high sharpness settings. I use the LCD for two things: highlight warning and check of critical sharpness. I haven't done any tests, but I would think that you would want the sharpness set to 0 so that you can better judge sharpness. I'd hate to think an image was tack sharp to later find out that it wasn't quite as sharp as I'd thought. Especially if I had the time to change settings and try something different.

Thoughts?

I set my sharpness to normal (3), with 0 it looks too soft, if it is too high even soft photos will look deceivingly sharp due to over-sharpening (at least to my eye). It is really difficult to judge critical sharpness on the rear LCD in some situations.

[Daniel Cadieux]

I agree with Arash. If I must cull images from the LCD I will only delete the obviously soft or oof ones. For critical sharpness I prefer judging from the computer monitor.

[BobbyPerkins]

I too use Standard. Also I think as Jim setting Contrast to -2 may help to expose a little tighter to the right. I have been using the sharpness as Standard (+3), and I wonder if bumping it all the way up to 7 as Jim does has any effect on the highlight alert and effect the exposure decisions or not (extra sharpening on the highlight areas)? Sort of like the artifacts of over-sharpening in post-processing can often do. As Daniel states I also judge critical sharpness via computer. As far as culling images in the field it's usually pretty obvious the ones that are grossly out of focus.
The other thing I wonder if that has effect on the image in a positive way? So when you have the sharpness at 3, In DPP that's the default sharpening, so if it's bumped up to say 6-7, are you actually getting sharper shots out of camera?