Perhaps predictably, after about a year I became dissatisfied with the colour in the photos I was getting from my Canon EOS 100D, using my variation of the Prolost Flat setting. I mostly shoot landscapes as both a record of where I have been, and/or as a record of how my world is changing, and I felt that there was still something lacking. In one comparison shot with my favoured compact camera, I was disappointed and surprised to see how much the sky differed between the two cameras. Had I overdone the Auto White Balance (AWB) setting on the EOS that badly?
Once again the video people on the Internet confirmed what I had been seeing: the Canon Neutral colour setting produces strong greens and magenta in the blues! So Neutral colour was actually turning my distinct blue skies to washed-out blue-grey, and also doing strange things to the colours of the clouds. (Apparently the Canon Faithful colour setting is similar to Neutral but boosts the reds.) So no wonder that my picture of the ruined Corfe Castle on a sunny summer afternoon failed to draw my eye afterwards.
I had already come to the realisation that depicting a convincing and natural blue sky — when present — is an important ingredient of my photographs. (I was leaning in the same direction for watercolour landscape paintings.) A particularly good test is the pale cyan sky that can be seen on sunny days with small cumulus clouds on the horizon. Indeed I might go as far to say that if the sky looks right, then the rest of the image shouldn’t be too wrong. To then discover that a camera colour setting is doing unkind things to my skies clinched it: I needed to revise my colour settings.
Given that most of the other Canon camera picture modes influence the colour in known ways, the obvious choice was to return to the Standard colour mode setting. Thanks to previous camera forum comments and my own experiments, I knew that the contrast needed to be turned right down. I also knew that the saturation had to be reduced below zero to tone down the colours: I experimented with -2 and -1 saturation before settling on -1. I increased the sharpness by one to 4, which is probably as high as I dare risk it going by other Internet comments. Lastly, I tweaked the Auto White Balance compensation to A3 + G2. I think this is now pretty close to what I am expecting to see. (See the top image. For comparison, the second image was taken within a few seconds of the first and shows what my variation of Prolost Flat looks like using A4 + G4 AWB. Hmm, no surprise that I thought there was something missing...)
To summarise, the settings I am now using are (S, 4, -4, -1, 0), with A3 + G2 AWB. I know that most other people who care about this sort of thing “shoot raw” — but someone might find this useful.
Given that most of the other Canon camera picture modes influence the colour in known ways, the obvious choice was to return to the Standard colour mode setting. Thanks to previous camera forum comments and my own experiments, I knew that the contrast needed to be turned right down. I also knew that the saturation had to be reduced below zero to tone down the colours: I experimented with -2 and -1 saturation before settling on -1. I increased the sharpness by one to 4, which is probably as high as I dare risk it going by other Internet comments. Lastly, I tweaked the Auto White Balance compensation to A3 + G2. I think this is now pretty close to what I am expecting to see. (See the top image. For comparison, the second image was taken within a few seconds of the first and shows what my variation of Prolost Flat looks like using A4 + G4 AWB. Hmm, no surprise that I thought there was something missing...)
To summarise, the settings I am now using are (S, 4, -4, -1, 0), with A3 + G2 AWB. I know that most other people who care about this sort of thing “shoot raw” — but someone might find this useful.
