5D mark iii settings for view on LCD

[Fred Woodman]

What settings are people using in their 5D Mark iii to give the best representation on the LCD screen.?

[Mike Milicia]

When shooting RAW, the image that you see on the camera’s LCD comes from a JPEG that is automatically generated and embedded in the RAW file. This embedded JPEG is affected by ALL of your camera settings. And very importantly, the histogram and highlight alerts that you see on the camera LCD are built from this embedded JPEG rather than from the RAW data itself. Therefore, the histogram and highlight alerts are also affected by ALL of your camera settings.

If you are shooting RAW only, I would not be concerned with how the embedded JPEG image looks on the LCD but I would instead be concerned that the histogram and highlight alerts (based on the embedded JPEG) are a more accurate reflection of what actually appears in the RAW file. For this reason, I would recommend using the larger of the 2 Color Spaces, i.e. AdobeRGB, and using a custom Picture Style based on Neutral with the Contrast set to the minimum value. The images on the back of your camera will look a bit washed out but your histogram and highlight alerts will better reflect the RAW data.

[Fred Woodman]

Thanks Mike you hit the nail right on the head insofar as what I was hoping to do. Right my LCD jpeg ( I shoot raw) isn't accurately reflecting the raw pic as it downloads in LR but I do watch the histogram, Ill try your suggested settings, thx.

[Mike Milicia]

Keep in mind that RAW files cannot be displayed without a fair amount of processing. What you see on the LCD is the result of rendering the RAW data as a JPEG. What you see in LR is Adobe’s default rendering of the RAW data which will never match what you see on the LCD because Adobe does not have access to all of the camera settings or to Canon’s RAW processing algorithms.

This mismatch is not really an issue but if you would like to be able to do a RAW conversion and end up with exactly what you saw on the camera LCD, the only way to do it is to use Canon’s DPP software which has access to all of your settings and which uses the same Canon-proprietary algorithms that you have in the camera.