picture style profile canon eos dslr flat best color grading visioncolor

What happens when you lock a cinematographer, a director and a color scientiest in a space with some unprofiled cameras, charts and a computer? Pure #$!@ing magic, that’s what!

Meticulously programmed over a period of 12 month we have created what we believe are the only Canon EOS picture styles you’ll ever need.

Just some of the reasons you’ll love working with them are the improved

color contrast
skin tone accuracy
highlight-rolloff
noise performance
compression behavior of the 8-Bit h.264 Codec

I’m madly in love with VisionColor. The DPX workflow is enhanced by this picture style more than any other. I gain the full 10 stops latitude from the Canon sensors and the most gorgeous colors from any picture style I’ve ever used.
- Kahleem Poole

VisionTech 2.0 – My favorite picture style!
- Hugo Camara

I’ve shot in many environments, lighting I could control, run and gun, magic hour, natural lighting etc. And I simply love it. Skin tones just look amazing, I’d compare it to the way the Alexa handles skin tones but let’s not go crazy this is a DSLR after all.
- Ethan Donelly / Act Zero Films

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(More comparisons can be found here.)

How is VisionColor different ?

By adjusting over 200 individual color tones, the VisionColor and VisionTech Picture Styles do what most “flat” picture styles desperately fail at; By taking a unique chrominance based approach, they retain as much color and luminance information as the camera’s sensor and the 8-bit h.264 compression codec have to offer. Where most picture styles simply de-saturate all of the colors globally and therefore lose important data on neutral and underexposed parts of the image, VisionColor Picture Styles only de-saturate extremely vivid parts of the image to prevent clipping in the individual color channels. Less saturated parts of the images are slightly boosted to create the richest image possible that offers maximum control for color grading in post.

VisionColor is what Canon’s Neutral profile should be; they should pay you for it. VisionColor fixes all the problems with Neutral and saves me hours every project in color correcting and color grading. It is the only picture profile we use now.
- LightSource Films

picture style film look visioncolor visiontech vision color
(Graded – Image by Jonathan M. Ochmann)

Does VisionColor have a “baked in” look?

No. The VisionColor and VisionTech Picture Styles were designed to be color graded in post. The color-processing that these picture styles do in-camera only makes your job in the DI alot easier. With our profiles you get wonderfully balanced skin-tones under all common lighting situations that need absolutely no tweaking in post. They effectively surpress green/yellow colo.r casts aswell as flesh-tone anomilies/banding that usually occur with tungsten lighting

If you’re looking for something that needs absolutely no color correction in post and deliver professional looking results check out our CineLook picture style!

(Ungraded – Image by Kahleem Poole)

What about dynamic range?

Ok. Mythbuster time. NO picture style in the universe can increase the actual dynamic range of your camera’s sensor and we’re not going to tell you that VisionColor can just for marketing purposes. Generally speaking what a picture style can do is electronically raising the shadows and lowering the highlights (creating an inverse S-curve) AFTER the image has been captured by the sensor (which, depending on your camera comes with a fixed dynamic range) but BEFORE the h.264 compression is applied. This can result in an increase in perceived latitude but most of the time just creates excessive noise, banding and weird color anomilies that ironically make proper color grading in post impossibly difficult.

Our VisionColor Picture Styles come with a meticulously programmed gamma response curve that mimics the linear response of 35mm film as closely as the digital sensors allow. They don’t crush the shadows like some other popular picture styles out there but don’t electronically raise them aswell* (like Cinestyle for example). The gamma curve is somewhat similar to Canon’s Neutral picture style with the Contrast at -4 (recommended value by Phillip Bloom, Stu Maschwitz etc.)

* the VisionTech picture style (which comes for free with VisionColor) actually does lift the black point to enable the camera to encode low light color information more accurately, not to increase DR.

(Ungraded – Image by Kahleem Poole)

How does it handle image noise?

Pretty well. Just like dynamic range though, noise is not really determined by the picture style but the ISO you’re shooting with and the camera’s sensor. Generally the VisionColor Picture Style has a perceived noise-level similar to Canon’s Neutral PS. CineLook is even less noisy because of its subtractive curve. For best noise performance we recommend you find out what your camera’s native ISOs are and as a rule of thumb don’t shoot over ISO 1250.

For heavy color grading ALWAYS de-noise your footage first. Always. In 16-bit please (To blend pixel values together and create an even richer negative)!