Lessons

Lesson Info

Picture Style & Sound Menus

Next up, on to page six in the shooting menu is white balance. We saw this before and this is controlling the color of our images. I think a good strategy here is auto white balance most of the time and then changing it when you see a problem. Custom white balance allows you to photograph a white sheet of paper and then you would go in to custom white balance and you would select the photo of that white sheet of paper and then you would set that to custom. You set the white balance to custom and then the camera would be set for the type of light that you are working in and so if you have unusual lighting you might want to give this a try. And you're trying to get it set right, but the fluorescent isn't right, the tungsten isn't right, daylight isn't right, photograph that white sheet of paper, go in and select it as your custom white balance and then set your camera to the custom setting and that'll really give you the correct light for the particular light source that you are under. I...

hope you never have to use this. My guess is that you will not, but if you wanted to go in and just tweak with the color, you could tweak with the white balance of all the different settings that you're using. If you wanted to warm everything up or cool it down, you could adjust it. Once again, this is gonna adjust JPEGs and not the raw settings. And so if you're not happy with the colors that you're getting from your JPEG images, this is one way of dealing with it. Picture styles is something we talked about before. This was in the quick menu. This controls the contrast, the color, the saturation, the color tone of your images. It's kinda like the film look. And so if you are shooting JPEGs and you don't like the way your images look, they're too contrasty, or they don't have enough contrast, this is where you can go in and choose from some of the automated options that they have available for you, or going into user defined one, two, and three and creating your own custom profiles by simply going down the list of contrast, and do you want more or less of it. And making all those adjustments in there so that you're getting the JPEGs look exactly the way that you want them. If you shoot raw, it's not gonna do anything with the raws. Long exposure noise reduction. So noise can be a major problem on a lot of different types of photographs and sometimes happens with long exposures. And so when you shoot a 30 second exposure, it's gonna process that image for 30 minutes to try to fix it. And I'm always been curious as to how much good does this do? Because when I'm shooting a 30 second exposure, and I get done with it, I generally look at the photo and I wanna shoot another one. And I gotta wait 30 seconds for the processing, and so is the processing worth the time that it takes when you're doing these exposures? And so using just a single bulb, I wanted to do a test shot at 30 seconds and this is with the noise reduction turned off. And then I turned the noise reduction on and I examined and blew up the results of the photograph, and I just could not for the life of me notice any real significant difference. I can see just little bits of difference, I can tell they're two different photographs, but it just doesn't seem to do a lot of good. And so if you do a lot of long exposure work, you might wanna test this out yourself, but my feeling is that it's not really worth the effort of keeping this turned on and so I would, I would leave this turned off. High ISO, well, is gonna result in noise problems most definitely. And so here the camera, when shooting JPEG images will go in and try to correct and clean up some of that noise. And so at ISO 25,000, we're gonna get a lot of noise. And so this is what is considered a noisy photo. It is not clean in it's detail. And so the camera will go in, low, standard, high and set different adjustments where it's trying to slightly blur the image to kinda blur the noise, but you also start losing some of the detail in the camera and the images. And so I would be wary of setting your camera to high for reducing too much of it. It's gonna be something that you would like to probably wanna vary a little bit from shot to shot. Now another option is just to shoot it with it off in the JPEG mode and fix it in post production in lightroom, Photoshop, or some other program. Now another option, if you're shooting from a tripod and shooting a static subject, is to shoot a multi-shot JPEG and this is where it uses multiple images, uses the combined information to reduce the noise. And so in those types of perhaps product photography, or architectural photography situations that might be a way of reducing the noise. But, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. If you're shooting from a tripod and shooting multiple shots, just use a longer shutter speed and a lower ISO and you get less noise. So it doesn't make a lot of sense in most situations. But it's there if you need it. And so I'd probably either leave that on standard or leave it turned off. So on to page seven, the drive mode. We have the options of single, continuous high and continuous low. Most people will be happy leaving it in the single mode until they get into an action situation. Self-timer, remote control. We saw this, this was in the quick menu as well. And normally you're gonna leave this turned off. The two second self-timer is really good when you're on a tripod and you just wanna let the vibrations settle out while you've pressed, after you've pressed the shutter release. And we did see earlier in the class, the very good option of using the customize timer so that it can shoot a continuous number of photos. So if you wanna take a group photo, you can take several photos after a period of time that you select. And we also have the remote control so if you do have the Canon remote you can fire the camera as you want from from the front of the camera. Gives you about 20, 30 feet in when in front of the camera in which that'll work. On to page eight, movie recording size. And so for those of you who wanna record video through the camera, this is an important setting here. And so you'll be able to choose the different pixel dimensions that you want here. FHD stands for full high definition, which is by 1080. 30 frames per second is the normal video. You can shoot it at 60, but you're not gonna see much of a difference in most video, but it does give you the option of slowing it down. But FHD at 30 frames per second is kinda the standard in the industry. At least here in the United States. Sound recording, so this leads into another sub-menu within the camera. Lot's of different options for the sound recording. First off, you could have it set to auto, where it's automatically adjusting the level of the mics according to the sound that it hears. You can manually control it if you want to get in and control it yourself, or you can completely turn it off so that you can record silent movies. Or if you're recording with an external device you could use that as well. You can adjust the recording level if you have chosen to record it manually. It's a very simplistic scale, but it allows you to control it in some manner. There is a wind filter as well, and attenuator as, along with that. And so in here, so under windy conditions, it's gonna get really bad sound on the camera and so this gets a little bit of a filter on it and reduces that. So under windy outdoor conditions you may need to leave this in the auto mode. If you know that you don't need it, like you're inside and you're inside of a room or your home or something like that, you could turn it off and potentially be picking up a little bit more range in your sounds. The attenuator deals with loud, sudden noises. So for instance, if you were shooting fireworks, that loud noise would kinda peak out the microphones on this and would not sound very good at all, and so leaving this on auto might not be the worst thing in the world. It's something that you may wanna turn on in specific situations. Movie servo AF, and so this depends on what sort of movie person you are. If you are in the simplistic, I just wanna camcorder that's easy to use and shoots some video, you probably wanna turn this on. And this is where you put it in the movie mode and the lens is gonna focus back and forth according to whatever it sees. If you are more into creating your own movies and you have a very specific look and you want it to work in a particular way, you may want to turn this off so that the camera will only focus when you press half way down on the shutter release. And so it's following your direction on where you want to focus. Or perhaps where you touch on the screen, it'll focus on that area and then it will focus on another area. Do you wanna be able to focus with the shutter release? Some people don't even wanna be able to do that, 'cause they only wanna do it manually, or they just like turning that off. And so it's just a small customize control for turning that off. Auto slow shutter. So if the camera in the movie mode, gets into a very dark situation, do you want the camera just to continue to shoot dark video? Some of you might say yeah, I'm trying to shoot, you know a piece that requires really dark video there. If you leave this turned on, it's gonna automatically correct for that brightness change by using slower shutter speeds. Now somebody who's into cinematography and making their own movies and really setting, I want this aperture, I want this shutter speed and I want the light to look like this, does not like the camera going in and making those changes. But you know, mom or pop who's just filming the kid, that just wants to get some basic video and have the camera take care of all the complicated stuff, that's when you might wanna leave it on. And so it really depends on what you're trying to do and your goals and how much control you want over the specific settings of the camera. Alright, so if you go into the movie mode and then press the menu button, you're gonna get kind of a special video menu here on this first page. And so in the recording mode, you can choose to do auto exposure, or manual exposure if you wanna set shutter speeds and apertures yourself. And you can also get into the time lapse mode. Now we did see this earlier in the class as well when we were in the movie mode. But it can also be accessed here and so be aware if you do wanna make time lapse movies, that is the secret way to get in there and do it. And so most people are gonna wanna probably leave it on auto exposure. If you're more specific about what you're shooting in your movies, you can set that to manual.