The following is snipped from my presentation at the Fremantle national bird photography conference. It is advice for users of Canon DPP image editing software.
The first topic I want to discuss is rendering the bird in natural colour. This will certainly be the case if the aim is to produce an image suitable for an identification gallery or photographic guide where subtle differences in tone can be important in identifying the species, sex or age of the bird. If your objective is to catch the eye of competition judges or use gaudy colours to impress unsophisticated viewers on social media, then read no further, this is not for you. A prerequisite is to use a decent size calibrated monitor such as the enthusiast and professional grade models manufactured by Dell, NEC, Ben Q and Eizo. By calibrated I mean external hardware calibration using a device like a Datacolor Spyder or X-Rite ColorMunki. With average use, all monitors need recalibration every couple of months. Regular calibration will correct drift in brightness, colour temperature, gamma curve, white and black point.
I also assume you know how to adjust the white balance so that your image does not have a colour cast. For birds with neutral white or grey parts this is easy; the RGB values for these parts should be approximately equal and can be fine-tuned using the DPP white balance adjustment tools. In other cases it can be difficult and you will need to rely on the pre-set white balance appropriate for the lighting, that is, Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Flash, etc. Even then you may not be satisfied with the colour in which case you may resort to making adjustments to the Blue–Amber and Magenta–Green sliders or the Colour Temperature slider but you should only attempt to do this if you have a properly calibrated screen otherwise you may make the colour adjustment worse.
That brings me to perhaps the most important and least understood part of this discussion – Picture Style. Most bird photographers set their camera to picture style Standard because the user manual describes images recorded with this style as vivid, sharp, and crisp. This is the general-purpose Picture Style suitable for most scenes. It reads like just what we want but is it? Here is my interpretation of what it means; saturated, sharpened, with higher contrast and brightness to produce pleasing out-of-camera JPEGs. Is that what we really want? The other alternative is picture style Neutral which is suitable for processing an image with a computer. For natural colours and subdued images with modest brightness and colour saturation. My interpretation of this is that Neutral is suitable for processing RAW images and is the best picture style for producing natural colours. Now that looks more like what we want and indeed it is.
By all means shoot with picture style Standard; it will produce a pleasing JPEG on the back screen of your camera. It will have a default sharpening amount applied and the brightness will be boosted so that if the ‘blinkies’ are just turning on, when you change to picture style Neutral in DPP for processing the image, no parts should be over-exposed. But what about the assertion that Neutral is the best picture style for producing natural colours? To my knowledge you won’t find a satisfactory answer to this question easily if at all. Camera reviews and photography forums are full of ill-informed comments about all manner of things but especially ‘Canon colour’. Be aware that people are referring to out-of-camera JPEG colour when they talk about Canon colour so it is not even relevant to our discussion. To prove to myself that picture style Neutral is best for producing natural colours, I photographed an X-Rite ColorChecker colour reference target and compared the recorded RGB values with the calibration RGB values supplied with the colour checker. Now this looks like it should be easy but beware; the calibration RGB values were measured with light from Illuminant D65. What’s that you may well ask? Illuminant D65 is an international standard light source used in lighting measurement labs which produces light having similar brightness and spectral characteristics to sunlight on a clear day at mid-day in locations near sea level in mid-latitudes. I decided my local cricket pitch, on a clear day, would be an ideal location to satisfy the illumination conditions for photographing the colour checker. The results were impressive with close agreement with the manufacturer’s colour checker calibration values when the picture style was set to Neutral. For other picture styles there were noticeable differences, especially with Landscape where a significant amount of saturation is applied. The result of all this is that I am now satisfied that picture style Neutral is indeed the best choice for producing natural colours. Some photographers only believe their own eyes so here is a practical example of how different picture styles render blue sky and for comparison I have included a blue sky standard (Fig. 1). I photograph my images with the camera set to picture style Standard and when the image is imported into DPP the first thing I do is change the picture style to Neutral for subsequent processing.
