How to use Picture Controls & Styles

Ever look at your photos and wish you could tweak the colors, contrast and sharpness with little to no effort?

Today I want to share with you a little known feature that makes it easy to apply “filters” in-camera to get a creative look.

Whether you prefer vivid colors, softer pastel hues or black and white, Picture Controls (Nikon) and Picture Styles (Canon) give you the ability to “edit” your images beforehand and without an extra step.

A couple things to keep in mind…

1. Picture Controls/Styles are applied to JPEG images, so the image quality has to be set to either JPEG or RAW+JPEG.
2. Once a JPEG photo has been taken with a certain Picture Control/Style, you can’t go back and reverse it to something else. So if you shoot a JPEG photo in black and white, it will be black and white forever. I recommend shooting in RAW+JPEG, that way you have a RAW image that retains the color in case you want to reverse it later on.

If you’ve played with Picture Controls/Styles recently, I’d love to see them. You can post your photos to my Facebook page.

Thanks again to each of you who respond each week with a like or comment, it really does mean the world to me. Happy shooting! :)