If you find the photography basics picture style format is less than what you want, you could do more than just tweak the basic photography style settings by uploading additional Canon Picture Styles. For more choice of Canon Picture Styles you can download additional extended picture styles from Canon website for use with your Canon EOS DSLR camera. And in addition if you want to customize in detail or create your own original picture style you could do so too. But for now I’ll just stick to the ones available provided by Canon.
The additional Canon Picture Styles available for download are the:
- Studio Portrait
- Snapshot Portrait
- Nostalgia
- Clear
- Twilight
- Emerald
- Autumn Hues
You can download all of them at:
- Canon Picture Style Special Site
The files are in .pf2 format and not all versions of Canon EOS camera can use them. Fortunately for me, my Canon EOS 30D could handle the “Studio Protrait” and “Snapshot Portrait” picture style using the EOS Utility. Apparently not all software/Canon cameras support some of the picture style settings.
There are two ways to use these additional picture styles, by uploading into the DSLR camera for use while shooting or applying the picture style file to the software and perform post-processing on the photos. Well I would rather upload it into my Canon EOS 30D DSLR camera to save time on post processing; especially when taking photography of wedding reception photos event where easily a thousand photos are captured. I don’t want to tangle with post processing each and every picture!
And not a moment too soon, because my brother-in-law called up and said that he secured a photography job for the weekend. After uploading and making sure the photos came out ok, I went for the wedding reception photos shoot. Turn out the picture style works like a charm. I was using the “Snapshot Portrait” that according to Canon Picture Style website said it “expresses translucent skin with well-modulated contrast irrespective of whether the shots are taken indoors or out.”
I kept my colour saturation a little less as I notice the photos in Time magazine photos is going for a milder colour tone with unlike the National Geographic photos is goes very strongly in colour saturation and tone. It was an interesting style and brings out facial features without being too harsh on the colours. The colour style is a matter of preference because my brother-in-law wasn’t too keen on the shallower saturation and lighter tone, so I bump up the saturation and tone a couple of notch but still remain using the “Snapshot Portrait” Canon Picture Style.
A few days later my church was having a Children Church event called Vacation Bible School or VBS where there were lots of fun activities for the children, and so I got another chance to try out “Snapshot Portrait” Canon Picture Style for another round of non-stop whole day shooting. Yes, I was really tired out and my right hand was pretty strained from all this shooting (it took me a week for my hand to recover from these two events!)
The photos that came out seem to fit nicely with the children skin colours and tone despite the colour t-shirts that they were wearing. Not too saturated and blend but enough to bring out the colour.
Instead of the usual photography basics picture style, using the uploaded Canon Picture Style you now have another angle to play around to get a different feeling to the picture that you want to capture.
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