Your Canon EOS 70D offers Picture Styles, which you can use to further tweak color as well as saturation, contrast, and image sharpening. Sharpening is a software process that adjusts contrast in a way that creates the illusion of slightly sharper focus. The key word here is slightly: Sharpening cannot remedy poor focus but instead produces a subtle tweak to this aspect of your pictures.
- Open the box, find the battery and charger and plug it in. If you have another charged battery available, you can continue to the battery-required steps without a wait.
- While the battery is charging, unpack the other items you want from the box. For me, this is primarily the camera, the neck strap and the Canon Solution Disk.
- Install Canon Solution Disk software to get support for the latest camera(s). Canon Digital Photo Pro (DPP), EOS Utility, Photostitch and Lens Registration Utility are the options I manually include in the install.
- Attach the neck strap.
- Insert the battery (after charging completes).
- Power the camera on.
- The date and time setup screen will show at startup the first time. Use the Rear Control dial and the Set button to update this information. The GPS feature, if enabled, should take care of precise date/time maintenance going forward.
- Insert one (or two) memory card(s) (format them via the tools menu option before taking pictures).
- Set the camera's mode to one other than fully auto (the GreenSquare+ mode only provides a small subset of available menu options), C1, C2 or C3 (Custom modes do not retain settings for use in other modes).
- Scroll through all of the menu tabs to configure the cameras as follows:
- Shooting Menu, Tab 1: Image quality: Use top dial to set RAW to 'RAW' and Rear Control dial to set JPEG to '–'
- Shooting Menu, Tab 1: Image review: 4 sec.
- Shooting Menu, Tab 1: Beep: Disable
- Shooting Menu, Tab 1: Release without card: Disable/off
- Shooting Menu, Tab 1: Lens aberration correction: All disabled (though I suggest leaving CA correction enabled for most uses – all can be applied in DPP)
- Shooting Menu, Tab 2: ISO Speed range: 100-H2(51200)
- Shooting Menu, Tab 2: Auto Lighting Optimizer: Off
- Shooting Menu, Tab 3: Picture Style: Neutral with sharpness set to '1' (Note: the low contrast 'Neutral' picture style provides a histogram on the back of the camera that accurately shows me blown highlights and blocked shadows on the camera LCD. I usually change the Picture Style to 'Standard' in DPP after capture.)
- Shooting Menu, Tab 3: Long exposure noise reduction: I usually have this option set to 'Auto', but my choice varies for the situation.
- Shooting Menu, Tab 3: High ISO speed noise reduction: Off (noise reduction is destructive to images details – I prefer to add NR sparingly in post)
- Shooting Menu, Tab 4: Anti-flicker shoot: Enable
- AF Menu, Tab 2: AI Servo 1st image priority: Focus (I want the images in focus more than I want the time-priority capture)
- AF Menu, Tab 2: AI Servo 2nd image priority: Focus (same reason)
- AF Menu, Tab 4: Orientation linked AF point: Separate AF pts: Area + pt
- Playback Menu, Tab 3: Highlight alert: Enable (flash portions of images that are overexposed)
- Playback Menu, Tab 3: Playback grid: 3x3
- Playback Menu, Tab 3: Histogram disp: RGB (I want to monitor all three color channels for blown or blocked pixels)
- Playback Menu, Tab 3: Magnification (apx): 1X
- Tools Menu, Tab 1: Auto rotate: On/Computer only (this provides the largest playback image size on the camera LCD)
- Tools Menu, Tab 2: Viewfinder display: Viewfinder level: Show, VF grid display: Enable
- Custom Functions, Tab 3: Custom Controls: Set: Playback; Multicontroller: Direct AF point selection; AF area select lever: Direct AF area selection
- Custom Functions, Tab 4: Default erase option: [Erase] selected
- My Menu: Add tab; Register the following options for Tab 1: Long exposure noise reduction, Mirror lockup, Format card, Date/Time/Zone (great for determining what time it is), Sensor cleaning
To copy this configuration would mean that you intend to shoot similar to how I shoot – including shooting in RAW-only format. While my setup works great for me (and Sean's setup is nearly identical), your best use of this list may be for tweaking your own setup.
If you can't remember your own menu setup parameters, keeping an update-to-date list such as this is a good idea. Anytime your camera goes in for a service visit, the camera will be returned in a reset-to-factory state. Your list will ensure that you do not miss an important setting while putting the camera back into service.
B&H has the Canon EOS 7D Mark II DSLR Camera with EF-S 18-135mm IS STM Lens in stock and I expect the body-only version to be available soon (preorder for earliest delivery).
The camera offers the following Picture Styles:
Canon 7d Mark Ii Picture Style Settings
Auto: This is the default setting; the camera analyzes the scene and determines which Picture Style is the most appropriate.
Standard: This option captures the image by using the characteristics that Canon offers as suitable for the majority of subjects.
Portrait: This mode reduces sharpening slightly from the amount that’s applied in Standard mode, with the goal of keeping skin texture soft. Color saturation, on the other hand, is slightly increased.
Landscape: In a nod to traditions of landscape photography, this Picture Style emphasizes greens and blues and amps up color saturation and sharpness, resulting in bolder images.
Neutral: This setting reduces saturation and contrast slightly compared to how the camera renders images when the Standard option is selected.
Faithful: The Faithful style is designed to render colors as closely as possible to how your eye perceives them.
Monochrome: This setting produces black-and-white photos — or, to be more precise, grayscale images.Technically speaking, a true black-and-white image contains only black and white, with no shades of gray.
If you set the Quality option to Raw (or Raw + Large/Fine), the camera displays your image on the monitor in black and white during playback. But during the Raw converter process, you can either choose to go with your grayscale version or view and save a full-color version. Or (even better) you can process and save the image once as a grayscale photo and again as a color image.
If you don‘t capture the image in the Raw format, you can’t access the original image colors later. In other words, you’re stuck with only a black-and-white image.
The extent to which Picture Styles affect your image depends on the subject as well as on exposure settings and lighting conditions. The following figure shows you a test shot at each setting (except Auto) to give you a general idea of what to expect. As you can see, the differences are subtle, with the exception of the Monochrome option, of course.
When you photograph a scene or image on your Canon EOS 7D, your camera sensor captures the colors and subtle nuances of shadow and light to create a faithful rendition of the scene. At times, however, you want a different type of picture. For example, when you’re photographing a landscape, you want vivid blues and greens in the image.
You can choose from a variety of picture styles and create up to three custom picture styles. When you take pictures in Full Auto mode, this option isn’t available. To choose a picture style:
Press the Creative Photo/Comparative Display button.
The Creative Photo options display and the Picture Style option is selected by default. Note that you can also access this option by choosing Picture Style from the Shoot3 menu.
Press Set.
The Picture Style menu displays on your LCD monitor.
Press Set again and then rotate the Quick Control dial to choose one of the following styles:
Auto: The color tone will be adjusted automatically to suit the scene or subject matter you are photographing. Images photographed with this style will have vivid colors. This is a great mode for landscape photography to ensure vivid blue skies and crisp bright greens.
Standard: The default style captures crisp, sharp images and is suitable for most photography situations.
Portrait: This style renders a soft image with flattering skin tones. This style is ideally suited for portraits of women and children.
Landscape: This style renders an image with vivid blues and greens. Landscape is ideally suited for — you guessed it — landscapes.
Neutral: This style renders an image with no in-camera enhancement and is ideally suited for photographers who will be editing and enhancing their images with a computer image-editing application, such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Lightroom. The resulting image has natural colors.
Faithful: This is another style ideally suited for photographers who like to edit their images with a computer image-editing application. When you photograph a subject in daylight with a color temperature of 5200K, the camera automatically adjusts the image color to match the color of your subject.
Monochrome: This style creates a black and white image. If you use this style and choose JPEG as the file format, you can’t convert the image to color with your computer. If you use this style when using the JPEG format, make sure you switch back to one of the other picture styles when you want to capture images with color again.
User-Created Styles: These slots are for styles you’ve created.
After choosing the desired option, press Set.
All JPEG images will have the style applied to them until you change the style or restore camera settings to their defaults.
If you use the JPEG mode, the picture style will be applied to the saved image. However if you use the RAW picture style, the picture style will show up in the preview on your LCD monitor, but will not be applied to the image when it is saved to your card. In other words, what you see on the monitor is not what you’ll get when you shoot RAW. If you shoot RAW, try the Faithful style.