White balance and colour
Canon has one of the best, if not the best white balance system currently available and it didn’t throw up any surprises during this test. When shooting in early evening shadow, my images taken with the automatic white balance settings are suitably cool, without being excessively cold – which appears to confirm Canon’s statement that the AWB has been made more neutral and less warm. My shots taken when shooting under the artificial lighting of a night-time velodrome have a slight warmth that suggests the lighting isn’t natural, but without spoiling the images.
Like Canon’s other DSLRs, the EOS-1D Mark IV has a collection of Picture Styles (Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful and Monochrome) that may be used to adjust the appearance of JPEG images. As usual, the Standard option is a good starting point and it produces vibrant but natural-looking images. Canon has increased the level of sharpening and saturation that is applied in-camera to make images more ‘press ready’, so that a sharpness of 3 on the EOS-1D Mark IV is equivalent to a setting of 5 on the EOS-1D Mark III.
However, those who want to specify the processing that is applied to the JPEG files can opt to tweak the sharpness, saturation and contrast settings for any of the colour Picture Styles, or save three of their own Picture Styles in-camera. Alternatively, the bundled Picture Style Editor software can be used to produce a bespoke image style that can be saved and registered to the camera.
