Neutral vs. Faithful picture styles - with a color chart on a vectorscope

R

robotsound

Well-known member
The conventional wisdom is to shoot using the Neutral picture style on Canon DSLRs. After doing my own tests and reading up on the differences in picture styles on Canon's web site, I decided that I liked Faithful better.

Today I just ran across this blog, where someone took the time to shoot a color chart and compare the results of the different picture styles on a vectorscope.

http://www.negativespaces.com/blog/2010/6/25/canon-picture-styles-and-chroma-du-monde.html

I would encourage everyone to try both Neutral and Faithful and see which one you like better.
 
well i'll tell u from a very quick and dirty eye test turning all parameters to 0 excpet colour tone, faithful did remain faithful in the blues and greens. Neutral dialed down turned blue a bit purple/violet. but to be honest such neglecgable differences dont bother me.
 
great comparison, but I'm not sure what's supposed to be "better", even if I just-kind-of know what each thing on those graphs means

my personal experience with real-world footage is as follows: I initially followed the web's recommendation of shooting "neutral, minimum sharpness, minimum contrast, saturation two notches down", but after some first hand use I've moved to "portrait, sharpness two notches above minimum, minimum contrast (but lift it if I don't need the dynamic range), saturation two notches down", because I just couldn't retrieve healthy-looking skin tones in post with my current tools (just the most basic stuff, plus MBmojo) (maybe I'm doing something wrong, but there's someone else on this forum complaining about the clay-like skin tones from canon DSLRs, and that's basically what I was getting)
 
I have found similar results on the 7D. I have found that either shooting in faithful or shooting in neutral with the color tone 1 notch left yields almost identical results, but neutral @ color tone of default, with sharpness and contrast all the way down and saturation down 2 notches leaves a slightly greenish hue in skin tones that is somewhat imperfect. Either going to the 1 notch tone shift or faithful seems to yield better results.

Also, on a similar note I had been shooting pretty much exclusively in sRGB for the entire time I have shot on the 7D, until someone mentioned that adobe RGB was actually potentially yielding better results. Sort of shocked with myself that I hadn't even tried, I have been testing it a lot lately and while the difference is very small from what I can tell, it does seem to have the nicest skin tones by a tiny bit. Anyone else experiment at all with this yet?
 
I know Shane Hurlbut is a proponent of Adobe RGB. I have tried this, and the results were extremely subtle.

Adobe RGB was originally designed with the goal of maintaining more colors for printing photos in CMYK color space. CMYK is subtractive color (add ink to a white paper to get black), where everything we do is in additive color (add light to a black frame to get white). I don't claim to be an expert on color spaces, but it's just something to keep in mind.
 
I thought it didn't matter which colour space you selected, since in movie mode everything gets sRGB no matter what.
Dave
 
This is about as close as we can get to hitting our targets with the Canon 5D Mark 2. In my opinion this setting doesn't look as nice as Saturation -2 so as always, your eye is really your best tool for image evaluation.
Click to expand...

This was my favorite part of the article. Pretty much negates everything said. Sometimes, eyeballs, in all their mystery, are the best tools.
 
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