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Picture Style Editor Tutorials. By: Bruce Dorn May 18, 2011. A Picture Style adds a unique look/feel to your still or moving images, and can be used to achieve repeatable and uniform results. Aug 15, 2016 A Picture Profile, or Picture Style, is how the camera treats color in your shot. Select 'Manage Picture Control' and choose your custom NPC. I'd like to share my vault of Canon Picture.
␡- Adjusting Picture Styles
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Adjusting Picture Styles
Your camera probably has a second setting to help you control the way that the equipment records color. Canon calls it 'Picture Style,' but other manufacturers have their own terminology. Here are a few of the popular brands and their names for this function:
- Nikon: Picture Control
- Sony: Creative Style
- Pentax: Custom Image
- Olympus: Picture Mode
I'm a Canon user and accustomed to using the Picture Style function, so I'll use that term through the rest of this article.
The Picture Style setting is the digital equivalent of film type. When shooting with film, you can select the type of film that suits your subject. For example, Fuji Velvia is popular with landscape photographers because of its low ISO and saturated colors. However, that effect is a bit strong for portraits, so a portrait photographer would choose a film designed for portraits, such as Kodak Portra. Portrait films generally create softer, less saturated images and are designed to render skin tones in a flattering way. If you want to take a black-and-white photo, then you need to use black-and-white film.
Obviously, digital cameras don't have film that you can change; instead, you achieve various effects by changing the Picture Style. The latest Canon EOS cameras offer six Picture Style settings (see Figure 3): Standard, Landscape, Portrait, Monochrome, Faithful, and Neutral. The first three settings are the ones that you're likely to use the most: The Standard Picture Style is designed for general use, the Landscape Picture Style enhances green and blue tones such as grass and blue sky, and the Portrait Picture Style creates good skin tones.
Figure 3 Picture Style options available on Canon EOS cameras.
Nikon cameras have similar names for their Picture Control settings: Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Monochrome, Portrait, and Landscape. The names make each setting fairly clear. If your Nikon camera lacks some of these Picture Controls, you can download them from the Nikon website.
One really useful Picture Style feature is that you can alter the settings to suit the look you're trying to create. Most Canon Picture Styles have four parameters that you can alter (see Figure 4): sharpness, contrast, color saturation, and color tone. Nikon Picture Controls are similar, giving you the additional option of adjusting brightness.
Figure 4 Most Picture Styles have four adjustable parameters.
The Monochrome Picture Style and Monochrome Picture Control work differently; instead of adjusting color saturation and hue, you can dial in colored filter and toning effects (see Figure 5).
Figure 5 The Monochrome Picture Style has color filter and toning effects instead of color saturation and color tone parameters.
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Included Profiles
- CineLook.pf3 - In camera cinematic look profile
- CineTech.pf3 - Low contrast version of CineLook
- VisionColor.pf3 - Color optimization profile
- VisionTech.pf3 - Low contrast version of VisionColor
One-time-payment. License never expires.
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The VisionColor™ Picture Styles bundle for Canon EOS DSLRs. Including the original VisionColor & VisionTech color optimization profiles and CineLook & CineTech in-camera cinematic grading profiles.
Compatible with all Canon EOS digital SLR cameras that support custom picture styles in pf3 format. See installation instructions below.
Battle tested and loved by tens of thousands of filmmakers and photographers.
VISION vs. CINE/What’s the difference?
The VISION Profiles (VisionColor and VisionTech) are color optimization profiles that were designed to get the highest quality color out of the camera for subsequent editing and color correction for video and JPEG capture. They are the next best thing when shooting RAW is not an option. The technical specifications below explain our approach in more detail.
The CINE Profiles (CineLook and CineTech) take this approach even further by offering a fully automatic, contemporary cinematic color grade right out of the box. Cinelook delivers images and videos unmatched even by advanced colorists and has been optimized to fully leverage Canon proprietary in-camera image processing.
VisionColor /VisionTech
The only difference is in the profiles’ gamma response curves. VisionTech has a slightly lifted black point for better low level color accuracy and a more gentle uper gamma rolloff into blow out. The minute color difference you may observe between the profiles is largely due to the default in-camera color tone setting as both profiles use the same custom color matrix.
- VisionColor: Standard Rec.709 video profile. Clips at 0% black and 100% white.
- VisionTech: Standard Rec.709 video profile. Clips at 4% black and 100% white.
CineLook /CineTech
When we made CineTech we wanted to create a profile that had the exact same color response as the CineLook profile while keeping the contrast as flat as possible. CineTech has contemporary color-offsets that make color correction incredibly simple while giving the user complete control over how much contrast should be applied to each shot.
Tip: A quick side-by-side comparison of both profiles will immediately give you an idea of the visual differences.
Tip: Experimentation is key in finding your prefered picture style! There are no rights and wrongs about using either as long as you have a basic understanding of how the profiles perform in different situations.
Technical Specifications
8-bit coding space limitations
The inherent problem with 8-bit encoded image data is its lack to store enough color values to accurately represent subtle tonal gradations. 8-bit means 255 distinct values for each of the R, G and B channels.
By transforming linear RAW sensor data to a logarithmic curve and thereby further compressing the range to even less values, all tonal gradation in the 8-bit coding space is sacrificed.
Chroma banding and severe image degradation are often the result when color grading logarithmically encoded 8-bit comressed footage back to a regular Rec709 or sRGB viewing gamma.
Comparison chart:14-bit linear RAW sensor data to
- 12-bit losslessly compressed ProRes (Arri LOG-C encoded) - 4096 values
- 8-bit h.264 compressed video (Cinestyle) - 150 values
- 8-bit h.264 compressed video (VisionColor) - 255 values
It is therefore recommended to shoot with camera profiles which utilize the entire 8-bit tonal range while preserving as much usable dynamic range and color information the image sensors have to offer. Subtle adjustments in post production are key to retaining image fidelity.
Luminance/data-compression correlation
While the VisionColor profile utilizes the entire tonal range available in the 8-bit coding space, clipping at 0 and 100% IRE (RGB 0-255) VisionTech performs a slight boost of the blackpoint to 3% IRE. (RGB 9-255).
This enables the camera to encode hue and saturation information where in other profiles no such data could be encoded due to a luminance value of 0. (Black can't hold color values)
In still image and video compression schemes, chrominance data is processed separately from luminance to exploit the limited resolution of color over relative brightness perception in the human visual system. However as our ability to accurately distinguish between subtle luma differences falls roughly into the range around 'middle grey' (18% reflectance) and gets worse as brightness drops, compression algorithms assign less data to the lower parts of the gamma range.
An estimated luminance/data-compression correlation of the internal compression codec has been taken into account for the lift adjustment of the VisionTech curve to prevent any negative side effects like chroma banding and other poterization artifacts that are commonly introduced in the midtones and highlights by profiles from other developers due to poor data distribution across the luminance range.
Canon Picture Style Editor Download
Dual Illuminant Profiling
All of our camera profiles are dual illuminant camera profiles. This means that your camera will automatically interpolate between two distinct transform tables, one for daylight temperature, one for fluorecent, based on your white balance setting. The method used by Canon internally is inverse correlated color temperature.
Installation
Follow these simple steps to successfully install your new picture styles on your Canon EOS camera:
- Extract the .pf2/.pf3 Picture Style files from your downloaded archive. If your operating system doesn’t extract .ZIP archives natively we suggest using WinRar (Windows) or UnArchiver (MAC).
- Make sure that you have Canon EOS Utility 2.6 or higher installed on your computer
- Switch your camera ON and turn the wheel to “M” for manual.
- Connect your DSLR using the USB cable that shipped with your camera.
- Start the EOS Utility Software and choose “Camera settings/remote shooting“.
- Click on “Register User defined style“
- Select one of the three slots, click the folder icon and navigate to your Picture Style .pf2 file and select it.
- Hit OK. Close the application, unplug your camera.
You can now select the installed picture style in your camera.
Installation for Video Mode (Optional)
In most cases the basic installation will automatically make the profiles available in your camera’s video mode but in case they’re not showing up follow the steps below:
Canon Custom Picture Styles Download
- Do the basic installation as described above.
- Switch the camera to movie mode.
- Press the menu button and navigate to the picture style menu.
- Select the slot for the first/second or third custom picture style and press the DISP. button (or any other button that lets you adjust the settings).
- This takes you to a sub-menu where you can adjust the in-camera parameters for sharpness, contrast, saturation and color tone.
- At the very top of the page the base picture style can be selected from a dropdown list. In your case the first Custom Style should be set to the custom profile you wish to install.
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