Picture Style for Raw?

[marco_de_biasi]

<p>As far as I know the raw image retain full information. Thus, if I shoot using the B&W picture style on my Canon, the raw will look with full colors. Same if I choose Super flat. The question is: is there a way to retain the picture style also for Raw and not only for jpegs?</p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

[jeff_schewe]

<p>Only if you process the raw image through the camera makers proprietary raw processor.</p>

[sarah_fox]

<blockquote>

<p>The question is: is there a way to retain the picture style also for Raw and not only for jpegs?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>No.</p>

<p>The RAW file is a record of how much light fell upon each photosite on the sensor. It's not decoded/demosaiced. The only camera setting that impacts the RAW data would be the ISO, which sets the gain of the amplifiers when the photosites are read.</p>

<p>The RAW file also has a record of the settings you have chosen, including picture style, but those settings do not alter the RAW image data in any way. The picture style settings are used by the manufacturer's RAW converter to render the RAW data in that style on your screen. You can change the settings as you view the image, to change how the image is rendered. That's half of the benefit of shooting in RAW -- being able to make these adjustments in the computer. It would not be useful to permanently alter the RAW data per your choice of picture style.</p>

[paddler4]

<p>You can retain the information in two ways. DPP will capture the picture style settings from the raw file's metadata and apply it. If you use Lightroom, as I do, it used to be the case that Adobe produced pretty close copies that you could download and then apply to the raw file instead of the Adobe standard profile. I did that a few years ago, but I ended up using them only two or three times, so I don't know if they are still provided. I didn't find them very useful, since the point of raw is in part to have control of those variables themselves. i found that I also liked the adobe standard profile better as a starting point.</p>

[marco_de_biasi]

<p>Thank you for your replies.<br>

I see the advantages of raw, in fact I use it all the time. Nonetheless I was wondering about this chance to retain picture styles since I could see more room to work on the shadows starting from a superflat style.<br>

I didn't know about DPP, I'll give it a try, thanks :)</p>

[lachaine]

<p>This is the beauty of using raw files in conjunction with the camera-supplied raw software. You don't need any picture style in the camera, because they are all in the software on your computer. Using an in-camera picture style is a shortcut to having it already set-up like that when you open the raw file in DPP. But you don't have to. You can use any picture style in the camera while not remaining committed to it. It doesn't matter which one you used, because while the information is in the file to tell DPP which one you used in-camera, it's not really burned into the file. So, in the scenario you are talking about, once you open the raw file in DPP, simply choose the "Neutral" picture style, and you've got the flat starting image you want, regardless of what you had set in the camera.</p>

<p>One advantage of using the neutral picture style in camera as well is that the camera will show you the histogram of the picture with that neutral style applied to it.</p>

<p>I've used both Nikon's ViewNX and Canon's DPP, and I can tell you that I'm definitely not among those who automatically dismiss the manufacturer's software as being useless. In fact, it's all I use. Zoombrowser and DPP together meet all of my needs except when I want to add a slight border for web display purposes. For that, I use a free image viewer, such as irfanview or faststone viewer.</p>

<p>In fact, the ability to use DPP is the ONLY reason I shoot raw unless I have a good reason not to.</p>

 

[digitaldog]

<p>The question I’d present is this: does using a picture style and shooting raw+JPEG with the manufacturers software (which I don’t use) really give you an identical result between the two?<br /> You can mimic the picture style’s with other raw converters by working to produce presets. I don’t think you’ll get an exact match but who says that picture style from the camera is ideal? And with a converter that supports DNG profiles, you can edit the profiles to again, get closer to the picture style.</p>