Like it or not, this image effectively came straight out of my camera, using a custom picture style.
I shoot entirely in RAW mode, so I never bothered to look into these JPG presets. However, after seeing how far you could push these presets in-camera in this post at Canon 5D Tips, I thought I'd try messing with Canon's Picture Style Editor a bit to see what I could come up with.
The author of the 5D Tips blog post wasn't kidding - the software is very difficult to use. I have no idea what I did to achieve the above image, but it's cool enough that I'm going to keep tinkering to see what else I can come up with. Adobe Lightroom can't use these picture styles, so I had to export my JPG in Canon's DPP. And, since I'd rather swallow a handful of white-hot thumbtacks than use DPP, I think I'll just switch to RAW+JPG for the times when I'm tinkering with picture styles for crazy effects like the one above.
The Canon 40D and 5D Mark II only allow 3 custom picture styles, so I'm going to take only my favorite presets with me. I can always resort to DPP in post-processing, so it's not critical that I have my picture styles with me, but it'll be cool to see how well the effects work with the shots in-camera. Also, I'm no wizard with video processing, so it'll be a nice shortcut to apply these effects to video in-camera as well.
Overall, if you shoot RAW, nothing much is gained here but a little fun while shooting.
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