When photographing flowers, where it is very difficult to tell if the colors are accurate.When photographing something that needs to be recorded accurately, such as product shots for a commercial client.You will not achieve accurate color with the portrait, landscape or standard Picture Styles, but you may well end up with pleasing colors.īut what if you simply want accurate color? There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this. Portrait is designed to give good skin tones, landscape for strong greens and blues, and standard to make good reds. Their neutral and faithful Picture Styles are designed to give reasonably accurate colors, but the others aren’t. Let’s look at Canon’s Picture Styles as an example (I’m familiar with these as a long time Canon user). Canon calls it Picture Styles, Nikon – Picture Control, Sony – Creative Style, Pentax – Custom Image, Olympus – Picture Mode and Fujifilm – Film Simulation. This is especially true for JPEG files – if you use the Raw format you have the freedom to change those color settings when you process the file.Įach manufacturer has a different name for the setting used to control color. The way your camera records color is determined by the color and white balance settings selected when you take the photo. Camera manufacturers want you to be happy with the photos that your camera produces, and that means tweaking colors so that they look more attractive.

The key point to understand here is that your camera isn’t designed to produce accurate colors, it is biased towards the second approach. The reason behind this is probably quite simple. If you take a photo of someone wearing a red sweater, then you want the photo of that sweater to have exactly the same shade of red as the real thing. The other way is to produce colors that are pleasing to the eye, rather than accurate. There are two ways you can approach color reproduction in photography. The first is to try and reproduce the colors of the subject as accurately as you can.

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