“Picture Style” Settings & How To Use Them

“Picture Style” Settings & How To Use Them

by William Lulow

These days, most camera manufacturers have provided us with any number of settings that can help us “automate” the picture-taking process a bit. The intent is to facilitate the kinds of images we produce with our digital cameras on a regular basis. These settings can alter the hue, saturation, over-all tone and sharpness of our photographs. In the past, photographers had to use filters, film developing techniques or changes in film developing methods to make changes in how the image looked. Now it can all be done electronically. 

The menu for doing this on your camera can be found under the CAMERA heading and looks like this:

The “STYLES” indicate the names of the presets that you can decide to alter within the framework of what the particular camera can do. The AUTO setting lets the camera’s chip decide what filters to use. All the others can be adjusted by the photographer according the the types of images he or she most likes to create. 

The menus under the CIRCLES in the heading look like this:

Here one can see the slider bars that can be adjusted to give the photographer the tones or other settings wanted in each exposure. So, with eight different PICTURE STYLES, three user defined styles and four different possible settings within each, you can see that there are 44 possibilities for every single exposure you can make on a particular assignment. 

So what I have decided is that for my landscape images, I wanted a bit more SATURATION in the color tones and a bit more sharpness in the images. These settings produce images like this where the colors are a bit more vivid:

The colors here are a bit more intense and don’t require any tweaking. I arrived at these settings from much experience changing the tone of my final images in post-production. The new settings simplified the image capture process so that I would have to spend less time editing each image.  

When I’m shooting people, I like a bit LESS saturation in order to produce a bit more natural skin tones because I light these kinds of portraits with flash, which is balanced for daylight, like this:

or, in the studio, like this:

When we talk about saturation or color tonality we are usually talking about the QUALITY OF THE LIGHT, which is measured by the Kelvin scale. This scale (invented by Lord Kelvin, a British mathemetician in the late 1800s), details the relative warmth or coolness of light waves. The higher the number, the “cooler” the light, in terms of light temperature. So, the scale looks like this:

“Cold” light is like that produced by the blue tone of the sky. The “warm” light is like that produced by a household light bulb or, at the lowest end of the scale, a candle. The sky has a temperature of approximately 5500K (5500 degrees Kelvin). The light bulb has a color temperature of around 3200K (3200 degrees Kelvin). Other light sources have different color temperatures as well. Fluorescent light bulbs, usually available in long tubes, can have several Kelvin temperatures. Films balanced for daylight exposures, often rendered fluorescent light a green tone. So, if you were shooting, as I often was, with strobe light which was balanced for daylight, you would need to filter any fluorescent light with the opposite color on the color wheel, which was magenta/red, in order for the light to reproduce normally. 

With modern digital equipment, the color balance of light sources can be achieved either automatically by setting the balance to “AWB” or automatic white balance, or with several other settings according to the WHITE BALANCE menu. I prefer to let the camera decide on white balance, while I make the decisions as to the PICTURE STYLE settings. When you adjust these settings, you need to make sure before you shoot anything, what settings are wanted and make those changes. Some picture style settings can be corrected in post-production, but it takes time and when a great number of images are made, it’s time you don’t want to spend. 

So PICTURE STYLE presets are very helpful. You just need to make sure your camera is set up correctly for each TYPE of image you are creating.