From retro to film noir

The Picture Style Editor workspace is divided into a main window and a tool palette.

The Picture Style Editor is a handy piece of software that comes with every EOS. As the name suggests, this easy-to-use software allows you to create individual looks for your images.

You adjust the shooting parameters - brightness, contrast, sharpness, hue and saturation - to your liking and save them as a PF2 or PF3 file. You can load these custom Picture Styles directly into your EOS and set them as Picture Style at the time of shooting, or add them to your RAW workflow in post-production with Digital Photo Professional.

The navigator shows the image section and values

The Picture Style Editor workspace is divided into a main window and a tool palette. You can optionally display the Navigator for orientation. This is particularly useful when you use the magnifying glass button in the main window to enlarge your view.

You can use the buttons at the bottom left of the main window to select before/after views or rotate the image.

Below you will also find information about the working colour space, the colour display mode, and the current position of the mouse pointer and the colour values found there before and after the adjustment.

The basic Picture Style settings allow you to adjust sharpness, contrast, saturation and hue.

The first step in creating your own look is to use the basic settings in the tools palette. Select the style you want to use as the basis for your adjustments. This can be a preset EOS Picture Style (other than Auto or Monochrome), or a ready-made Picture Style downloaded from the Canon website. Then it's time to use the sliders to adjust sharpness, contrast, saturation and hue.

Brightness and contrast can also be optimised in a coordinate system using the tone curve - familiar from classic image editing software. Important: This step should always be carried out before making any changes to the "Six colour axes" and "Specific colours" settings.

You can manipulate the hue in six axes.

Use the Six Colour Axis tools to select the colour range you want to change using the button or, more conveniently, the colour wheel.

You can adjust the upper and lower hue limits for the selected range by redrawing the limit lines for each hue.

Use the eyedropper tool to pick up and change colours and their effective area.

Alternatively, you can enter the HSL values directly (H: adjust hue; S: adjust saturation; L: adjust luminance). You can also use "Specific Colours" to define the area of effect on surrounding colours. Simply select the colour you want to change with the eyedropper. You can change the area of effect for hue, saturation and luminance using a selection box. The 'Show affected area on images' option is very handy. When this is selected, the area affected by the adjusted colour flashes on the image.

Now it's time to experiment, as you can of course select and edit several colours in succession.  Once you have created your own image style, you can save it to your computer using the disc icon in the tool palette and start creating your next look.