White balance and colour
Image: A good amount of detail can be recovered from shadow detail in raw files, although some noise is visible
The colours produced by the Canon PowerShot G15 are almost perfect, even in the AWB and default colour style. For the most part they are well saturated, with a fairly neutral colour balance, and it was only in extreme situations, such as shooting in woodland, where I found that the white balance could actually do with being manually set. In this situation the camera removed some of the green from the image, causing it to be slightly more neutral than it should have been. Switching to the daylight white balance setting helped to correct this.
There is a good selection of image styles to suit most people’s tastes, with the usual vivid, neutral, sepia and black & white modes, as well as positive film, light skin tone, dark skin tone and vivid red, blue and green options. Should none of these be appropriate there is a custom colour setting, which allows the main colour and contrast parameters to be adjusted. Sadly, there is no option to alter the settings of the black & white mode. While I found this monochrome image style produced nice images, I would have liked the option to increase the contrast on occasion.
