I’ve been meaning to make a quick post (HA. Quick, yeah right. They’re never quick!) about custom user profiles for a while now, but a comment yesterday and yet another Flickrmail this morning prompted me to actually get my butt in gear and write it up!
Your photos are always so crisp and warm, how can I get my photos to look like that?
There are a lot of ways to answer this, and each one would be right, but in my humble opinion there are three key factors in producing images like this, and that’s what I’ll touch on for you. The first would be that I use a prime lens, and a pretty darn good one at that. It’s a Canon 50mm 1.4, but if you don’t use a Canon body I would recommend the Sigma 50mm 1.4! Prime lenses tend to produce a crisper image and allow you to have a shallow depth of field (one small/medium area in focus and the rest of your photo is blurred) and I can guarantee you that the image feel and quality we’re talking about would have not have been possible on my kit 18-55mm zoom lens. Believe me, I tried. (Just last night, in fact!) Does it have to be a 50mm? No. But if you’re looking for crisp without the aid of Photoshop, it should probably be prime. For those of you wondering what the heck a “prime lens” is, it’s simply a fixed focal point! There’s no zoom!
The second trick is using a custom user profile. Sure, you can obtain these colors in Photoshop, but why bothering tinkering around for a few hours on a batch of photos when you can have it almost exactly the way you want it SOOC (straight out of the camera)? Let your camera do the work for you! That’s why you paid for a DSLR, for the magic in the body! Now, I could tell you to refer to your manual on how to create a custom user profile, but because I’m awesome pants, I just happen to have a photo walk through written up.
First off, I use a Canon Digital Rebel XTi, so if you use a different Canon body the menus will be slightly different, but this should still give you a pretty good idea of where to go. If you use a Nikon, I am not sure how to create custom user profiles, but would assume that it’s possible to do so. I apologize but since I don’t have one in front of me to fiddle with at the moment, I can’t list the how-to on that. (Perhaps one day soon! Or perhaps I’ll find a Nikon user to post a how-to!)
From the main screen, you’ll want to select menu, and then move to the second settings menu screen, which will look like this. Select “Picture Style”. (Usually they are “Standard, Portrait, Landscape,” etc.)
On this next screen, scroll down until you reach User Def. 1 and push your blue “Jump” button to advance to the details part of this custom profile.
Now here’s the fun part! You get to take a bunch of photos and decide your profile based on your personal preference. Now, I use three custom profiles interchangeably, one for every day shooting, one for portraits (it’s softer), and one for when I’m inside at night and I don’t want my photos looking ridiculously orange. (You know what I mean!) Pictured here is my every day profile. I selected Standard as my base and then adjusted to taste!
Pretty neat, huh? And super easy, too! Now, if you’re shooting in RAW format you won’t see these colors as much (if at all), they show up on the JPEG format, so be sure you’re shooting in JPEG + RAW (or just JPEG technically but I don’t recommend that simply because you can go crazy with your RAW files!)
All that is left, literally, is to adjust your photo for the web, because trust me, it looks awesome right now on your camera screen and your computer screen but when you upload it to Flickr it won’t look quite so hot. So depending on the photo you’ll need to make different touch ups. For a typical photo I will tweak the vibrancy (Image, Adjustments, Vibrance) and contrast (Ctrl + L), so that it looks like it does on my camera, but that’s all I need!! The times of slaving in Photoshop are over, now you’ll be free to tinker, adjust, and if you happen to enjoy playing in Photoshop (which I absolutely do) it will be four hours of fun instead of frustration.
I hope this tutorial helped you all in some way, please comment and let me know if you found it useful! It’s the first tutorial I’ve ever done and I’d like to know if it helped someone, how I can improve, or if I should make more in the future. And of course, if you have any other questions, feel free to ask and I’ll do the best I can to help!
48 Comments
photoelectric572
8 Aug 2012 at 12:44 amAny individual on here know about them?
Aisling
1 Aug 2012 at 2:23 pmNot sure if my comment posted or if you need to approve them yourself so ignore this if it is the case!
Aisling
1 Aug 2012 at 2:21 pmHey Sara!
I stumbled upon your blog today and I’m very glad I did! I’ve been trying my hand at photography for the past couple of years now as a hobby and have been loving it! I’m considering going into college to study it after school too.
I really enjoyed this post and have applied the settings to my camera and can’t wait to get out to shoot with it 😀 If you don’t mind me asking, what way did you adjust it for portraits? I love the vibrancy and crispness you have to your photo’s they’re beautiful!
Love from Ireland!
Sara
4 Aug 2012 at 4:13 pmHi Aisling!
Thanks so much for visiting and I’m so glad you like my blog! I have since switched cameras and I just use the same setting for portraits! Maybe I’ll increase the sharpness just a little depending on the day! =)
Alyssa
11 Jul 2012 at 10:33 amSara! I’m so glad that I found your blog! Your photos are really an inspiration! I’ve tried to talk to many photographers, but you know how it is. And you are fantanstic for share tips like this. This tutorial was really really helpful to me. I’ve just bought my first DSRL and I’m lost. I’ve just started to “study” it, and this post was like a light to me! I’m wondering…would you mind sharing your setting for portraits? I’ve been trying hard on this, but I think you can bring me some light again. I would love to shoot family and friends out of automatic. Thank you so much for everithig! Love your work!
Sara
4 Aug 2012 at 4:28 pmHi Alyssa- first of all, thank you so much for visiting! I’m so glad you enjoy my blog! I try to share as much as I can, so I’m glad you found it useful.
I’ve since switched cameras and I use the same setting for portraits! I don’t have that old body anymore so I’m not sure what I did for that- it wasn’t much though- I think I just dropped the saturation and maybe boosted the sharpness by a notch. It’s just when you’re doing portraits of people you don’t want the saturation too high or the skin will look strange in certain light! I hope that helps!
Tailynn
14 Sep 2012 at 5:04 pmI\’ll try to put this to good use immeidatley.
Sarah-Cate
1 Mar 2012 at 11:15 amI loved reading this! I use this exact camera and have loved it for many years but I have always wanted to know how you got the softness and warm color in your photos and this was great! I was wondering if you could post the other two settings you use for night and portraits? Or shoot me an email? I’d love to give them a shot.
Thanks! Keep it up!
My Soul is the Sky
28 Feb 2012 at 4:03 pmThis was so helpful. Everytime I go out on a photo outing I think “There’s got to be a way to customize this camera so I don’t have to change the settings every few minutes when it resets.” So thank you!
Sara
28 Feb 2012 at 5:32 pmI’m so glad you found it useful!
Hannah
28 Feb 2012 at 11:22 amSara, would you mind sharing your setting for portraits? Yours look very smooth while not being too soft. Thanks so much!
Hannah
28 Feb 2012 at 11:20 amSara, I am quite curious about your portrait setting on your camera. I am trying to improve portraits and yours look quite smooth without looking too soft. Would you mind sharing your knowledge on this? Thanks so much!
Sara
28 Feb 2012 at 11:26 amSure, Hannah! I’ll send you an email this afternoon!
Jenny
15 Feb 2012 at 3:28 amThanks so much for this, I read it and adjusted my setting last year already. Since then I also bought a Canon 50mm 1.8 lens and am LOVING my photos now!
Just thought I should say thank you
Sara
22 Feb 2012 at 9:45 pmThanks so much for taking the time to let me know, Jenny! I’m glad that I could help! =)
Elizabeth McAlhany
16 Jan 2012 at 3:58 pmMiss Thang, YOU ROCK! Thanks so much for this. Your work is amazing, and you share your tips freely (not like a stingy-indie). LOVE! Muah! You are amazing! I spent all afternoon with my Nikon D3000 adjusting it to do my bidding. THANKS!
Sara
16 Jan 2012 at 5:01 pmI’m so glad you liked it, Elizabeth! I’ve been meaning to do more helpful tutorials, I’m just never sure what people need help with unless I get lots of emails asking the same thing. I hope you have fun with your new profiles!
JTY
27 Sep 2011 at 5:43 pmSuper helpful post. Thank you so much! I’ve been using Canon SLRs for years (currently have a 5D and also love the 50mm f1.4) but have never tried the custom user profile, which seems like a brilliant idea to save post processing time. Looking forward to reading more tips posts, especially is there is one on food photography!
Cecilia
23 Sep 2011 at 5:39 amA great tutorial. I have been testing what you mention and I’m sure I’m going to use it a lot. Now I need to try different settings in order to find my own style 😉 Thanks for sharing Sara!
Lauren
8 Nov 2010 at 6:16 pmHi Sara,
I’ve been reading your blog on and off for over a year now and what keeps me coming back again and again is the ‘feeling’ I get from your photographs. I know I’ll never be you (and don’t want to… but boy, sometimes I sure want to take pictures like you), but I would love to experiment in making some warmer/softer/crisper photos like you share with us.
Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for posting this! I can’t wait to get home and see if my Nikon D60 is capable. That, and I need to dig out my 50mm 1.8 (just wish it wasn’t manual focus… oh the things I would do different if I had the money to buy my camera over again. lol). I’m tickled about the possibilty!
I was also wondering if anyone has asked and whether or not you would consider a post/tutorial about your work flow. For example, say you post 8 photos of pumpkin. Did you take 200? 50? 8? Do you spend hours in photoshop tweaking them? (if you do, I sure can’t tell!) Do you keep every photo you take? Are you ruthless about deleting? I just ask because I struggle with taking a very high volume pictures and then managing them.
Thanks again for sharing so much! Sincerely, Lauren
Sara
14 Feb 2011 at 5:17 pmLauren,
I’m so sorry I missed this well thought out comment! (The sentiment you have about doing this over again when buying your camera the first time- I share those feelings so much!)
Nobody has asked me to do a post about my workflow, but that’s a really good idea! I will work on a more indepth one for a future entry, but for now I want to answer some of your questions for you.
I used to take a lot more photos than I do now. When I first started taking shots I would shoot maybe 50 just to get eight or nine I liked. And I kept them all. (At the end of the year I would always prune through, but still kept mostly a lot.) Now, if I post 8 pictures of Pumpkin, I’ve usually only taken 10-12. And I do keep them all still, and it’s not that the 10-12 are bad- it’s just I either don’t feel they are good enough to share or perhaps I’ve shared eight already and I need to pick and choose. But let’s not forget the times I don’t post 8 pictures of Pumpkin and have taken 12 or 13 more! I take a lot of photos on a daily basis and sometimes I will take ten photos just to get the “perfect” composition for a food photo. But when I know what I want, I will delete the rest once I’ve got the right one. (I hope that makes sense. It sounds like I’m contradicting myself!)
Again, I used to love editing in Photoshop, (I still do but it’s a different love) and I would edit my photos like crazy – with wild colors, or subdued hues, I even went through a purple phase! But in the end I got tired of that, and I really liked the more natural look overall. I do still like vivid photographs, however, so sometimes I will increase the saturation or levels to make those colors pop- but that’s it! (Aside from a sharpening method described in one of my other tutorials!)
The fact that you take a lot of photos to me says that you really love the hobby. Never be afraid to take a gazillion photos, because in the end you will learn from each and every shot. I know that sounds really sappy, and I don’t mean it to, but I honestly believe it’s true. Trust me. I have folders and folders of photos I take and don’t share. But that’s exactly how you get better. Slowly you’ll find yourself taking less photos, but the ratio of keepers to mess ups will be greater. Trust me. =)
fatma
1 Sep 2010 at 8:27 amHello Sara, i just tried it on my Nikon D90, and it worked amazingly 🙂
Thank you so much 🙂
Jana
18 Jul 2010 at 7:58 amIs it possible for you to send me your custom profile for portraits, that you said are softer, and as well for when you’re inside, like you wrote you have? I just bought my EOS 500D last week, and I am already becoming little bit obsessed. But, I bought it with original EFS 18-55, and for the beginning it’s more than enough. Just, the thing that worries me the most, is how to get great pictures when it’s dark and I’m outside, and is it possible to get a great picture without using flash. I already don’t like how pictures end up being when I am using automatic, and I certainly don’t like them now that I have your User Def. 1 Standard profile. 🙂 Love your site.
ARTPIXIE
11 Jul 2010 at 7:06 amThankyou so much for your help!
Lola
6 Jul 2010 at 10:24 pmHi, im 14 years old and im looking into buying a dslr camera, i know im pretty young to get a big camera. Would you recomend i get one?
Sara
7 Jul 2010 at 6:37 amLola, I don’t think age should have too much to do with it. I know a lot of 14-17 year old girls on Flickr with DSLRs. If it’s something you’re passionate about and something you’ve put a lot of thought into, well then, it’s your decision!
I guess, if it were me, I’d think about how often I would use it, will it last me a long time, and will I enjoy it?
For me, memories are one of the most important things in life, so I’ve always had a camera at my side. For me it’s worth it. But it’s something to think about and be sure about, and that is the case for everyone, regardless of age.
There’s a strong chance you’ll buy that first DSLR and your 50mm 1.8 lens and it will last you until you’re 18 or 19. I’d say that’s a pretty darn good purchase. I bought a guitar when I was your age! (And I STILL have and use it!) It’s all about your passions.
I hope that helps!
Lola
10 Jul 2010 at 4:16 amThank you Sara! 😀 my dad has bought me Canon EOS 400D, without the lenses :/ not sure which lens to buy. I thought buying a dslr camera would be very difficult to use but its not, its really easy, what lens do you recommend i buy? since everyone’s giving me different options
Sara
10 Jul 2010 at 12:37 pmCongratulations Lola! I have and cherish my 400D! I would really recommend a 50mm 1.8 lens to start! Everything on my site that you’ve seen so far was taken with a 50mm 1.4, but the 1.8 is a cheaper and great alternative.
I can’t wait to see your photos, will you be on Flickr?
Ashling
11 May 2010 at 9:48 pmThanks for sharing this Sara! I’m constantly tinkering with my shots in Photoshop, so this might save me a lot of time ^_^
liz
9 May 2010 at 6:15 amOn Nikon d40 it’s on the shooting menu -optimize image and the custom setting under the portrait, black and white, etc.
On Nikon d90 its in shooting menu- set picture control then you can adjust each pre set one such as vivid, normal etc with the right arrow for adjusting and then save and name the profile. It shows up in the set picture control menu after that 🙂
Thanks for the tutorial, I’m going to try this!
Sara
10 May 2010 at 11:53 pmThanks for letting me know about how to do it on the Nikon! Fabulous!
Tom
8 May 2010 at 6:47 pmThanks so much for posting this. It’s something I’ve never played around with before, but I have been tinkering with the Parameter settings for the last ten minutes it’s going to help a great deal with my photography!
Sara
8 May 2010 at 10:27 pmI’m glad you found it useful! I see you’ve just started a 365 project! I wish I had done a regular year long project with just a photo a day instead of a portrait project, I’d be having a lot more fun, I think! Good luck!
Tom
9 May 2010 at 7:24 amThanks! I’m really enjoying it so far, and I think it’s really going to improve my photography.
Emily
8 May 2010 at 6:44 pmNice tutorial 🙂
There are quite a few professional (as in, BIG names in the business) photogs who also shoot JPEG + custom color profiles. It’s definitely tempting to spend less time on my computer and just let my camera do the post-processing for me!
A word on lenses: it’s not just the prime focal length that gives the 50 1.4 (or 80 1.4, etc.) the advantage over a lens like the 18-55 (and believe me, mines a Nikon and I hate it too). It’s also the quality of the glass and the variable aperture of the kit lenses that lends them to soft photos. The 50 1.4 is also worlds better than the 50 1.8 – both primes, but the 1.4 is higher quality glass. And I think both Nikon and Canon have the 70-200 2.8 – it isn’t a prime lens, but it is a GREAT lens that makes great *crisp* photos. Of course, it’s also about $2,000.
Sara
8 May 2010 at 10:24 pmI love that you just went all geeky on me! I’ve actually been whining (mostly internally) because the next lens I’m thinking of getting isn’t prime, so I was afraid I’d lose that beautiful feeling I love so very much, that and I just love primes – but then I had to remind myself that it’s a really, really high quality lens (even more so than my 50mm 1.4) and so sometimes I have to remind myself that even though I favor the primes, it doesn’t mean this new lens isn’t going to rock my socks. In this business, it usually pays to pay more and get higher quality.
Emily
9 May 2010 at 12:34 amYeah, because I can’t afford the upgrade just yet, I’m renting Nikon’s 24-70 2.8 and 70-200 2.8 for a wedding next Saturday. I have a feeling it’s going to be hard to send them back.
Jessa
8 May 2010 at 6:27 pmWow, this was insanely helpful! I received a smaller Pentax K-2000 dslr about a year ago. I never thought I would end up at college for photojournalism, so now I find myself wanting a more professional dslr for work and class. The info about the custom user profiles (which I had no idea about before) will keep me happy, color-wise, while I’m saving for my new baby. =)
Kym
8 May 2010 at 2:45 pmWhat an awesome thing you have done. Love the tips. <3 U!!!!
Sara
8 May 2010 at 4:58 pmThank you!
Charley
8 May 2010 at 2:20 pmFab tutorial, thank you. I love photography but I know nothing about it really. I’m after getting a slim line camera with some very simple to use settings because I dont really know my way around camera settings and it need it to be very portable and convinient. However, my husband is after a dslr for christmas so be sure to tweet your guide to those cos that info would be very helpful.
Sara
8 May 2010 at 2:29 pmHey there, Charley, thanks so much for commenting! The DSLR starter buyer’s guide is next on my list to post don’t worry! I’ve been feeling the same way about DSLRs for years now! They’re so big and hefty, which is nice, but with all our technology you’d think we’d be able to have the same quality in a smaller more convenient frame!
Luckily for us, Panasonic just came out with a point and shoot that still allows you to change out the lenses!
It’s a bit too expensive and new for me, but hopefully we can look forward to these cameras in the future!
phoenixdreaming
8 May 2010 at 2:20 pmAm using a 1000D/XS – nearly exactly the same menus except the Disp(lay) button is used instead of Jump
Ashling
11 May 2010 at 9:47 pmI have a Canon 500D and this also uses the ‘Disp.’ button. (The 500D doesn’t have a ‘Jump’ button.)
phoenixdreaming
8 May 2010 at 2:20 pmwow, fantastic tutorial. I’d never even *heard* of the custom user profiles
Sara
8 May 2010 at 2:21 pmThank so much and also thanks for the rec, I was simultaneously checking out @photobird thanks to your tweet!
tam
8 May 2010 at 1:39 pmSara! This is so helpful… thank you for sharing. We’re making big plans to upgrade my camera after the wedding expenses pass and I’m definitely going to need your input. Though my heart is still set on the same rebel that I’ve wanted for years.
Sara
8 May 2010 at 1:54 pmIt’s funny that you mention that, because the next “tutorial” or FAQ question on my list to answer is recommendations for a first DSLR! (But of course I can help you in detail, too!)
Because wedding photographers are so expensive now-a-days, and there aren’t any in the area that shoot in the same style I like, we’ve decided to spend money on camera stuff instead and have my mum and her friend take a lot of the photos. It means I get to do all the processing AND keep the equipment! A whale of a deal!