Camera Settings - 5D

[dsp78]

Hey all! I am new to posting here and I have a question about my new 5D. I am going into natural light portrait photography and it seems that my camera picks up a lot of red in people's faces. I cannot seem to get white faces in certain settings (shade, etc.) and was wondering if my camera settings are off. When I hit MENU and go to PICTURE STYLE, I have it on the PORTRAIT setting, which has the following settings:

SHARPNESS: 2
CONTRAST: 0
SATURATION: 0
COLOR TONE: 0

Should my saturation be -1, -2, -3 or -4??? What are your settings for portraits or should I be looking in a different place? It just seems that my Mom's Canon Rebel, which is less $$ than mine takes better photos color-wise when it comes to getting that white face.

Please help, camera gurus! TIA!

[OsmosisStudios]

Shoot RAW, and edit.

[jdepould]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

Shoot RAW, and edit.

+1, that's what most of us are doing.

Having said that, picture settings can still affect the preview and histogram. I leave mine set to the neutral preset.

[Vagebond]

You can adjust the sharpness, contrast, colour tone and saturation settings of the picture styles, or make a custom style based on one of the existing ones. Read the manual and experiment.
Remember, the styles provided with the camera are somebody else's taste, emphasis on different colours etc. So your portrait style may start with standard. Question of taste.

[BCampbell]

Really it's probably a white balance issue.

As others have said, shooting in RAW will help, you can adjust WB easily after the fact.

If you want to shoot JPG, try different WB settings. If none work how you want, learn to set custom WB. You can also adjust individual color channels in the curves dialog -- dropper on the face and drop the red channel a bit where it points, to start.

[dsp78]

Thanks everyone! If I shoot in RAW, I will need to buy a memory card because I take upwards of 700 photos a session because I am on locationa nd my sessions usually last 2 hours. I will try to also use the dropper tool too in pp to see if that helps. Thanks!

[OsmosisStudios]

Originally Posted by dsp78

Thanks everyone! If I shoot in RAW, I will need to buy a memory card because I take upwards of 700 photos a session because I am on locationa nd my sessions usually last 2 hours. I will try to also use the dropper tool too in pp to see if that helps. Thanks!

My camera takes SD and CF cards: I have 16GB in CF cards and 12GB in SD cards.

[private]

Holy cow! 700 pics - you are gonna kill yourself with post processing - and thats just the weeding out of photos you do not want to present.

And yes, it probably is a WB issue. Try never to use Auto WB (I learned the hardway) it will change the WB with every pic, if you choose anything thats constant, it'll be much easier to make sure all the pictures have the same WB and tint. So you can change it all at once in PPing...