It is tempting to assume that a setting of 0 in one style will produce the same result as a setting of 0 in another style. These are the settings for the following three Styles, in the order sharpness, contrast, saturation, and colour tone.
Standard 3, 0, 0, 0
Portrait 2, 0, 0, 0
Landscape 4, 0, 0, 0
We might expect that the only difference between these styles would be in their relative sharpness, but this isn’t so. Each is designed to produce different colour results. For example, the Landscape setting produces stronger blues and greens while subduing the reds, and Portrait modifies magenta, red, and yellow to produce more realistic skin colours.
Standard is designed to be all things to all people and is probably the easiest to run with. However, it can apparently over-saturate strong colours, e.g. reds, and detail may be lost.
I like the idea of shooting in Neutral and then adding sharpness, saturation, etc, after the event. I’m not used to doing this though, so this will mean a steeper learning curve for me. An advantage comes in using BreezeBrowser to convert to RAW, as this software picks up all the Picture Style settings and allows me to override them individually, although I haven’t experimented with this yet so I can’t comment on how effective it is.
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