White balance and colour
Although it has worked well in the above image, the vivid setting may need to have its saturation turned down a step
Faced with a variety of different lighting conditions, both daylight and indoors, the G3’s automatic white balance performed well. In bright sunshine the daylight white balance setting produces better results than AWB, retaining more of the blue in the image.
When shooting under tungsten lighting, the AWB setting reduces the effect of the orange/yellow hue, but fails to remove it completely. The incandescent white balance setting is quite clinical, removing almost all the hue from the tungsten lights. However, it is the custom white balance settings that naturally produced the most precise results.
There are two user-defined custom settings in the G3, which is useful if you regularly use a particular studio lighting set. Images taken with a custom white balance look devoid of any colour from ambient lighting, making it only really suitable for studio photography.
As for the newly renamed Photo Styles, there are the usual standard, vivid, natural, monochrome, portrait and scenery settings. Of these, standard is the one that will see the most use. It has a good level of contrast and is suitable for everyday use, although I found that the best results were achieved in this setting by increasing the sharpness and saturation to +1.
Conversely, those who require really punchy images should choose the vivid option, although for my taste it has a little too much contrast and saturation so I would turn each of these setting to -1. Once you have edited these Photo Styles, there is the option to save one of them as a Custom Setting so that you have easy access to it whenever it is needed.
In bright sunshine the auto white balance setting works rather too well, removing natural colour from a scene
