CaptureOne and Custom Picture Styles(on 7D)

I use and love CaptureOne for all my image processing. Although I own photoshop, I feel its a bit overkill for my basic image processing needs.

But I just purhchased the 7D and feel I may need to spend more time in post, especially if I start using custom picture styles to extract the most quality out of my RAW files.
Has anyone use CaptureOne when importing images using custom picture styles?
What is your preferred workflow?

As far as I know, nothing but DPP can read picture styles.

C1, along with any other raw processor (except DPP obviously) will not support the Canon picture styles.
Lightroom & ACR have 'camera profiles' that sort of mimic them, but you have to select them yourself.

ok, thanks. Can someone clarify for me exactly what IS saved with your RAW image data? I've been told that if you alter your in-camera picture style(color balance, contrast, sharpness, saturation) that information IS NOT included to your RAW images, but ONLY to jpegs if you have that as an option.

But, what about light temperature data? When I open my RAW files in Capture1 they obviously have the light temperature data associated with them. And isn't color temperature information similar to color balance?
Find this a bt confusing....

With raw, nothing is applied to the image but all camera settings are written into metadata which Canon DPP can read and apply to the image in the same way the camera would have. Nothing but Canon software can read and use the metadata. Temperature or white balance is totally changeable with raw and most converters use an auto WB method to pick a start point for you.

Picture styles are useful for a couple of things...

First of all, it's obvious that RAW has far more latitude than jpegs, as well as a color space much wider than adobe RGB... however, the image preview on the back of your camera and the histogram it displays is based off of a jpeg preview filed saved along-side the raw file.

What this means is that when shooting RAW, even when I set the camera to use adobe RGB and set the picture style to "faithful", it still doesn't preview the full dynamic range of the camera. If my whites are just barely clipping, I know that I still have about a stop of highlight headroom, so it's a good idea not to use any noise reduction, tone enhancement, contrast-boosting options in the camera as it won't be a good indicator of what you'll see on the computer.

Another use is for video recording. Since video on the 5D2 is recorded as 4:2:0 mpeg2, the image quality is equivalent to a small compressed jpeg, so it's important to get the "look" of the footage right inside the camera.

WB is the one exception to the rule. All third party converters will read the camera's calculated WB numbers and can apply them as an "As Shot" option. However, because this adjustment comes on top of a camera profile that is unique to the converter, the implementation of the "As Shot" setting will also differ from converter to converter.

Thanks for all the clarification. I will now think of RAW images as ONLY containing light information captured by a particular lens and sensor combination, and everything else(color temperature, contrast, saturation, noise reduction) as metadata associated with the RAW image data or used to create JPEGS in camera.

Still, it seems to make more sense if the camera were to use the current WB/color temperature setting to actually alter the color sensitivity of the sensor.

Looks like I may need to integrate DPP into my workflow...hope its improved over the last few years.

DPP is definitely a good too to have onboard. It reads all the camera settings and applies them to the preview of your Raw file to give you a "starting point" for processing.

As Elie pointed out, White Balance gets applied "somewhat" -- evidently Canon stores that metadata in a more "comprehensive" way. But still with Raw files WB is wide open to interpretation.

That might be an idea for an aspiring inventor, but in the current state of the art the sensor's characteristics are firmly fixed. Even though we talk about changing the ISO setting on a camera as if it were changing "sensitivity", the sensor itself doesn't change. It doesn't become more sensitive to lower intensities of light. That remains fixed and what does change is the amount that signal is amplified downstream. To alter the sensor's chromatic response curve, which is determined in part by the chemical nature of the silicon wafer and in part by the transmission band widths of the micro-filters above it, would be a far from simple operation.

And to add to tzalman's last post, there is a point after which the signal gets amplified digitally, so a 5D2 has for example, a cmos sensor that is factory set to read 30 frames per second at ISO100 (native ISO), then comes an analog to digital converter which can boost the signal up to ISO3200 (Gain), and finally the camera can take the ISO3200 reading and digitally boost it up to any setting thereafter (Digital Gain), the same you could do in any RAW converter; this is why the camera's dynamic range plummets after 3200+
The extent of where digital gain kicks in is largely unknown, but it tends to be lower on older cameras.