Camera & Craft

Try This at Home

Chapter Six: Controlling the Light

Change the Photo by Not Doing Anything

Mission

To shoot the same scene five times—switching only the Picture Styles (Canon) or Picture Control (Nikon)—and to carefully observe the LCD image and histogram to see the changes.

    Set Up

    Find a scene that has a good range of tones, colors and details. Set up your camera on a tripod, put it in Manual mode and take a meter reading. Choose a deliberate WB—not AWB, because you don’t want the camera to automatically make any changes to your image.

    Dig into Your Camera’s Menu—and Then Shoot

    For this test only, turn off raw—choose Large/High Quality JPEGs. You’re setting the camera for JPEGs, because this “bakes in” the Picture Style. Dig into your menu system, locate your version of Picture Style and simply run through the available options. On the Canon EOS cameras there’s a choice of: Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful and Monochrome. It’s a good idea to take notes to match the image numbers to the settings; that way, you’ll be able to track them later, when you’re at the computer.

    Shoot JPEGs

    1. Take a photograph with each of the different Picture Style options.
    2. Now take one more image—this time, modify your Picture Style so that your camera’s histogram more closely matches your raw file.

    Andy’s settings:

    • Start with Neutral as the Picture Style.
    • Set the contrast down two marks.
    • Set the saturation down two marks.

    Shoot Raw

    Set your camera back to Raw Only and take one more image. You’ll use this image in Lightroom to compare the JPEGS to the raw data.

    Image Review

    Scroll through the image playback to see the change in both the histograms and in the images. (Figure 6.32A). Depending on what you photographed, the differences may be slight or dramatic—but there will be differences.

      Ingest all your images into Lightroom (or whatever raw processing software you use). Organize them into a Collection and move through them, looking at the histograms. Compare all the JPEG histograms to the raw file histogram (at its default setting)—and decide which one is the closest match (Figure 6.32B). When you find the JPEG that’s closest to the raw file, make a note of which Picture Style it was. If the closest match wasn’t the one with our recommended settings (or if it was the closest match, but still very different), then repeat this test with only the closest Picture Style, varying the levels of contrast and saturation until you get as close as you can to the raw file histogram.