cinebooster picture style pf2 or pf3
Well I tested both in TV mode, shutter=1/50, EV=0. I tried then in low light and bright light. I adjust Sharp&Contrast all way down, and sat -2 (this is the video flat settings). I leave hue to whatever the preset is.
What I found was that when the AF subject was in bright light, the background shadow area falls apart (noise and banding).
I also noticed that Simlaar's flaat_11 and flaat_10, which retains higher DR, seems also to have banding in shadow with such high contrast shots.
The Marvels 3.3 and 3.4 worked beautifully. They did not have the highest EV/peak retention, what they tended to due with shadow was underexpose, which was more cinematic than banding/noise.
When the AF subject was in low light, the fore/backround in bright light, I observed for the flaat_11/10 in its attempt to remove shadow it brought in detail with noise/banding, but the Marvels held their own
AF subject had negligible noise.
Annother one I liked, from Cineplus was CINEMA.pf2. When adjusted to video flat settings, I was amazed that at sat=-2 the colour was too strong! Its preset was sat=0 which looks best.
Now it is generally darker then either of the Marvels, but where it shined was when your AF subject is in low light, and there is bright light in the fore/background. Its general darker
picture clamps down on the highlights adding detail (acting like an ND filter). In high contrast settings you have to choose between overexposure and under exposure, your camera cant handle both,
and so generally you expose based your AF subject light, so that means with fore/background you get one or the other? Overexposure is worse because a subject framed by white without detail looks very cheap, underexposure
looks more cinematic because it frames your lit subject in blackness. When you use the CINEMA profile it rescues the overexposure detail as much as possible, so its a special purpose picture style. You could use
it to shoot very bright AF subjects as well since it lets you open the aperture more for blurs backgrounds acting like an ND filter. The colours for all three of these pic styles were very nice on skin tones,
as they all have been crafted and tested for this (assuming your white balance and exposure are good).
I did this all on the 70D but its only slightly better than the 600D/T3i, and I think the same will be true for canon aps-c.
I shoot flat, but even if you shoot with the default preset settings of each pic style, the above is still true for HDR settings in terms of banding and noise.
For general shooting, its safer to go with picture styles that handle challenging HDR environments as they are the most versatile.
