So I have a 30D with picture styles, in which you can change the sharpness, saturation, contrast, etc.
The histogram that shows up on the screen is based on the results of postprocessing the image from the sensor using the current picture style settings. Which means the picture style settings will affect the accuracy of the histogram relative to raw image.
If you shoot raw, you don't really care whether the highlights are blown in the JPEG. You care a lot about whether they're blown in the raw image, though.
So the question is: what picture style settings should you use to get the RGB histogram to match, as closely as possible, the actual raw data? Put another way, what picture style settings result in basically no postprocessing changes to the raw image?
I suppose even the sharpening setting can have a subtle effect on the distribution of pixel values within the shot, but I suspect that's minor enough that it can be ignored (but if I'm wrong about that, please say so!).
Even the basic style (portrait, landscape, neutral, faithful, standard) from which the custom style is derived will have an effect on this, so the answer will hopefully include that as well...
