Canon 30D - Manual (Page 28)

Page 28 of 35 © Ken Rockwell 2006
COLOR TEMP lets you set the images to exactly your preference of warmth
or coolness (amber or blue.)
Press MENU, spin the dial to COLOR TEMP, press SET, spin the dial to your
choice, and press SET to lock it in.
You can't use this setting until you select [K] with the WB button. Canon
makes this simple setting needlessly complex. Canon makes you do this
because they combined the WB button with the AF button.
Nikon does this correctly by having a dedicated WB button which lets you use
the first dial for selecting AUTO, DAY, Custom, K or whatever, and the second
dial to select the exact K value or shift the WB. I prefer Nikon here, which lets
you do this directly without menus.
COLOR SPACE allows you to use the default world-standard sRGB for
accurate and vivid colors, or screw them up and get duller colors by selecting
Adobe RGB. I explain this under color spaces. Just leave it at sRGB. Adobe
RGB doesn't get any wider range of colors on any of the printers I've used
(inkjet, giclée, lightjet or supergloss), but almost ensures that someplace
along the line the colors will get screwed up and look too dull.
Canon makes this much easier to set than Nikon. Unfortunately this is
something that should be buried, since you shouldn't use it unless you really,
really know what you're doing, and print everything yourself from start to
finish.
PICTURE STYLE settings are important. "Picture Style" is bad English for
what should be called "critical artistic adjustments." This is where you set the
critical "look" of your images. It's where you set Contrast, Sharpness,
Saturation and even color shift (called color tone by Canon).
Nikon hides these deeper in its menus than Canon does. Nikon calls the
same thing "Optimize Image."
There are nine memory banks, or sets, of "Picture Styles," of which five are
locked and four are available for adjustment. The 20D only has six total, but
the same number of adjustable ones. The 30D provides more presets, which I
ignore.
The 30D has five preset (locked) sets of parameters, named Standard,
Portrait, Landscape, Neutral and Faithful. Those names don't mean very
much. You can see what settings these use for contrast etc. when you look
through them, which is better than Nikon, which makes it almost impossible to
see what values are used for their color presets. No big deal, if you're wanting
to set your own you probably don't care about the canned values.
The next four are adjustable. One is B/W, called "monochrome," and the other
three are color. Canon calls these three banks of color settings User Def. 1, 2
and 3.