One of the more amazingly powerful and least understood features of modern DSLRs are the camera image style presets. I’m speaking specifically about image presets, also called picture styles, not preset shooting modes like aperture priority or shutter priority.

This topic can get a little confusing because of the sometimes fluid nature of photography terms and because some manufactures implement presets that change both the shooting modes and picture style under one setting heading and they all use different terms to describe the same basic processes. That’s why owner’s manuals are your friend. I’ve never been to a professional photography studio where a dog-eared camera manual wasn’t either on the desk or a convenient shelf.

Today I’m focused specifically on image presets. In the Canon line they have names like Standard, Portrait, Faithful, and Landscape. Nikon implements them slightly differently with names like Standard, Vivid and Neutral.

This is another one of those topics where DSLR video and still photography collide and maybe the video guys have a little bit of a lead. In the old days you’d make this selection by choosing a different film type based on the shooting you were doing that day. Today it’s the Picture Styles menu in Canon and Manage Picture Control in Nikon.

If you’re not using styles, you’re missing out on a huge amount of functionality. In Canon you can switch between Standard and Landscape when shooting outdoors which produces more vivid colors in the green and blue range. Switch to the Portrait style when shooting people and your camera shifts the color and saturation settings to those more favorable to skin tones.

You can also create your own custom picture styles by selecting a unique combination of sharpness, contrast, saturation, and color tone and then save them in one of your custom preset menu options.

You can also modify the camera preset by tweaking the settings in the menu options. I don’t really recommend doing that until you have a lot of experience. Better to copy the settings into a custom preset and play around with them there.

The best place to learn the particulars of your camera’s picture styles is the owner’s manual. Read it, understand it, and do some experiments in controlled shooting situations that help you understand what’s happening when you change the image style settings.

Understanding picture styles and presets can make a huge difference in the quality of your photographs. It’s not fun, it’s not sexy, but it’s imperative to becoming a better shooter.