Originally posted by SpecialK All picture modes set the color to "Bright" which in some cases make certain colors glow. Although there are minor conveniences (I guess) of picture modes (such as simultaneously changing the AF to continuous and bumping the shutter speed a little), I haven't used them since the first week I had the camera.
Thanks. What prompted me was that I have been reading through some magazines I bought years ago for my Canon EOS1000FN and there was a lot of difference between the modes. I have done some simple tests with my K100D, comparing the EXIF and didn't find too many differences:
Sports (Kids and Pets) uses AF.C, Macro, Landscape, Portrait, No Flash, Night Portrait use AF.S; the more 'manual' modes (P, M, Tv, Av, B) can be set to either. Sports sets a high shutter speed, Landscape sets a high f-number. I would have expected Sports, and perhaps Portrait, to be set to continuous shooting (my old Canon does this) but none of the modes affect this value. Similarly the auto focus setting and the meter settin: none of the picture modes change these (I would have expected the Landscape to be multi-segment metering - to evaluate over all of the scene, Sports and Portrait to be centre weighted and Macro to be spot metered).
I would expect Portrait to set a low f-number, but it doesn't; I would also expect it to set the flash to one of the red-eye settings, but all of the modes leave the flash alone. I am not sure what Portrait or Macro do.
It seems to me that you have to change more settings on the camera to make the 'green' modes useful, in which case you may as well use one of the other modes anyway.
FYI, this is what the Canon EOS1000FN uses (auto focus is one-shot, equivalent to AF.S and AI servo, equivalent to AF.C):
Mode: exposure, auto focusing, film advance, metering, flash
Portrait: wide aperture, one-shot, continuous, evaluative, auto flash
Landscape: small aperture, one-shot, single shot, evaluative, no flash
Sports: fast shutter, AI Servo, continuous, evaluative, off
Macro: small aperture, one-shot, single shot, partial metering, auto flash
(Other than auto flash on the Macro, which seems to make no sense with the camera flash, these settings seem reasonable to me.)