New Picture Style from Technicolor

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Today, Technicolor publicly released their much anticipated "CineStyle" for canon cameras. This new style supposedly replaces the inefficient rec. 790 capture with a more efficient LogC pattern. To see the difference check out this video or read up on rec. 790 here.

Although this is optimized for the 5D and many other bloggers will probably do the same thing, I decided to see how it performed on the T2i. I usually use the Superflat picture style on my T2i and since I have gotten the best results with that I decided to compare to Superflat instead of any of the ones built into the T2i.

For my tests I set up two scenes. The first one consisted of random things on my desk: A CD, a stuffed cat that my amazing girlfriend got for me, a ceramic dragon, a dollar bill, and whatever else happened to already be there.

The second scene was out my window which was a view of my car.

It was all shot using a 50mm f/1.8 and exposure was kept the same for each shot. Color correction was my generic settings, tweaked very slightly to accommodate for differences in dynamic range.

All of this consisted of video, which still frames were pulled out of.

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First up is the CD:

Technicolor Cinestyle:

Superflat:

The stuffed animal:

Technicolor Cinestyle:

Superflat:

The dragon and dollar:

Technicolor Cinestyle:

Superflat:

And my car:

TechnicolorCinestyle:

Superflat:

As you can see there is little to no difference between the two, except a little extra "punchyness" in the dollar bill and the car with Cinestyle and Superflat produced a softer image, although all the settings were

identical. So I decided to push the picture profile to its limits, the curse of any HDSLR... Over exposure and under exposure.

First under exposure. For this I ran the images through my standard color correction settings as before, but due to the added contrast just making everything too dark to see anything, I cut out half of the frame to be un-color-corrected. Then I tweaked curves to get the best possible image with proper exposure. Since they were generally all the same, I've only included the CD, which was most telling.

The CD:

Technicolor Cinestyle:

Superflat:

The CD corrected:

Technicolor Cinestyle:

Superflat:

We can see that the Technicolor Cinestyle has more detail in the shadows on the unprocessed image. Also looking at the corrected images, the Cinestyle held its color better and has less noise (look at the black bar on the very left of the frame.)

Finally I shot video of my car overexposed and corrected exposure using curves.

My car overexposed:

Technicolor Cinestyle:

Superflat:

And my car corrected:

Technicolor Cinestyle:

Superflat:

This test is most telling. When overexposed, the Superflat lost all sharpness, but the Technicolor Cinestyle not only kept all sharpness, it kept all its color as well and actually produced a usable image.