Lessons
Class Introduction
05:13 2Basic Camera Controls
03:14 3Exposure Controls
19:53 4Drive Dial
18:53 5Top & Back of Camera
04:10 6Viewfinder Display
07:34 7Playback Menu
04:47 8Back Of Camera Buttons
06:31Quick Menu
21:40 10Selector & Function Buttons
03:26 11Left Side & Bottom Of Camera
05:44 12Lenses & Front Of Camera
05:34 13Menu Overview & Image Quality Menu
10:04 14Autofocus & Manual Focus Menu
13:17 15Shooting Settings Menu
14:56 16Flash Settings Menu
05:39 17Movie Settings Menu
03:33 18Set Up Menu
14:38 19My Menu & Play Back Menu
03:17 20Camera Operations
08:47Lesson Info
Menu Overview & Image Quality Menu
All right. Diving into the menu system. Hit the menu button and they're going to be several tabs. Fuji's gone through a lot of reorganization of their menu over the last couple years when they first came out with their cameras. And so, they are getting real well organized you might say so. Things are going to be pretty logically put into these different categories that we're going to go through. There is kind of a secret menu. You got to hit the playback menu and...playback and then menu in order to get into the playback menu. And so we'll be doing that in this section as well. To navigate, you're going to use the control pad on the back as well as the display back out button whenever you kind of go in and you want to check something out and you just simply want to back out. So these are your major controls in the menu setting. And of course anytime you want to get back to shooting photos, you can simply press on the shutter release halfway and that's going to return you back to the st...
arting point. All right. Starting on the top. Image quality. Image size. We talked about this before. This is for JPEG images. Largest three by two aspect ratio, makes sense in most situations. Change it as needed for other situations. Image quality. That was the JPEG and RAW that we talked about in here. And so, want to get the most full information you're going to want to be shooting the RAW. There is a Fine and a Normal JPEG and I wanted to do a quick test between those. And so shooting Fine and J... Fine and Normal results in different file sizes and I have found very little difference in image quality. So if you do want to save some file size, you can shoot the normal JPEGs and not lose any significant quality. If you want to get more using the RAW, of course, and adjusting it will give you more versatility, especially when it comes to the brightness and tonality and colors of your image. And so under image quality, a lot of people are shooting RAW plus the larger... RAW plus a JPEG, because they want to get that greater magnification that I talked about. And so try shooting an image with RAW and try shooting an image with JPEG and how close you can zoom in on it, you'll see that when you add a JPEG to that RAW you can zoom in quite a bit closer for examining images out in the field. As we go through this you'll see my recommendations in gray for general use and for the more advanced users in red. That'll also be the case on the PDF and so that's why you might want to print it out in color so that you can see who those recommendations are for. RAW recording. The RAW image can be recorded as an uncompressed or a lossless compressed image. And I have been very intrigued about this to see how much difference there is in these two different RAW formats because we just looked at the difference kind of in the JPEG version of this. And so shooting a number of different comparisons and comparing them in many, many different ways I have gone through, and I have found that the uncompressed 50-megabyte file, is not significantly better than the lossless compressed. And they do call it lossless compressed for a reason, they're not losing image quality. So if you want to get the absolute full everything, you can use the uncompressed. But I'm shooting personally lossless compressed because there's no visible difference. I have heard from one person that they had a software program that couldn't read the lossless compressed file format. I think he had an iPad of some sort, that wasn't unable to read that particular RAW, that version of the RAW format. So check to make sure that it works with your software. But I'm thinking that the lossless compressed makes a lot more sense than saving half the file size with no visible loss in quality. The Film Simulation Modes. We've talked about before but we can, of course, set it in here so that this can become a function shortcut to one of the other buttons on the camera. We talked about Grain Effect before. We saw this before in the quick menu, it's several different places in here. I don't know that we saw the example. So let's take a look at an example of the regular Grain Effect. And so when you're shooting black and white it becomes very clear, it's popular for use there, and you can see a pretty big difference between the weak and the strong. And so, this is something that you might want to add in selectively on some photographs just to give it a different look. Normally you're going to want to leave that one off. The Dynamic Range is something that we talked about before. That was in the quick menu and this is where, in shooting JPEGs, the camera tries to save any sort of data from going too bright, and so it's always protecting the highlights. And so, it protect the highlights in JPEGs, but it does force you to shoot at higher ISO. And so it's not something I recommend for most situations. We talked about White Balance before. And so you can go in here in white...with White Balance as well. And one thing I want to show you real quickly is how to do a custom White Balance on this. And so let's go ahead and take a look at the back of the camera. And let's get this...we kind of have some funky lighting going on in here. And so if I want a White Balance the light in here, I'm going to go down to White Balance, and I'm going to go to the right so that I can enter in here. And I'm going to go down to one of these custom modes. Let's just go ahead and do custom number one. And there's an arrow to the right or I can press Okay. And the idea is, is that I get a white piece of paper. This'll work. And I am going to hit the shutter button to get a new White Balance reading off of this. You can see it's kind of blue right now. So the camera checks it out. It corrected for that White Balance and now I'm going to hit Okay. And so now, my color is correct and my white sheet of paper is white. And so it's a very simple easy process to do, and anytime you need to correct for something, just have a white or a gray sheet of paper that doesn't have any color on it and you can do a custom calibration to one, two, and three and leave those as presets in there for unusual lighting situations. And so process is pretty simple. You select one, two, or three. You'll select Okay, so that you go in there and then you photograph that white object. And then just simply say Okay, and set it up as your preset White Balance and it fixes those color problems. Some more features that we've talked about, and I know we've talked about a lot of things twice and that's just where they are in the camera. So the Highlight Tones will enable you to either decrease the brightness of the highlights or increase the highlights of the brightness by playing with that. And sometimes when I'm shooting black and whites I want to have more contrast, I'll do a plus two when it comes to the highlights. On the opposite end is the Shadow Tones. How bright or how dark do you want the Shadow Tones? For a lot of general color photography, a lot of people might have it at plus two to help brighten up the shadows. If you want a little bit more distinctive blacks when you're shooting black and white, you might set it to minus two. We talked about the color intensity and this is where you can increase the saturation or decrease the saturation depending on your needs. The sharpness we talked about. Once again, this was in the quick menu if you want a reminder of where we saw it before. And so I wouldn't add too much sharpness. A zero to a plus two is probably the range that I would keep in. Noise reduction on high ISO. Normally leave this on zero. Maybe one, two. I wouldn't go too strong on it. This is something that you can, of course, work with in post-production software as well. Long Exposure Noise Reduction does not do much good in my opinion. You shoot a thirty-second exposure, what's going to happen is the camera's going to do thirty-seconds of processing and the question is, is that processing going to reduce the noise by much? And so doing my own little test, I ran a thirty-second exposure, and I looked at it, and one of the things I first noticed is there's really not much noise to be reduced. And so there's very little difference between these and so I don't leave this turned on at all. It just seems to waste thirty seconds of time every time I shoot a thirty-second exposure. Do your own test, but from what I've seen it does not have a very good...very big impact for any type of long exposure noise that I've seen. Lens Modulation Optimizer. Now, we haven't talked about this one yet. And so this is where Fuji knows where there are slight imperfections in the lens, and they will go ahead and just kind of tweak with the software to fix those up later on. And what Fuji says is that they're going to improve the definition by adjusting for diffraction and the slight loss of focus at the periphery of the lens. So some lenses are not as sharp on the side and they're going to add a little bit of sharpness there. Now, this is only done in JPEGs. It has a very, very minor in fact, affect on the final images. In fact, it's so minor I wasn't even able to take an example to show you the difference between before and after, so it's very, very subtle. So I think it's probably fine leaving that turned on. Color Space. The two different options is SRGB, which is where most of the Internet is these days. And if you want to do printing or you want to edit and work on your images in post-production, you want to have the largest color gamut possible. And so I would recommend changing that over to Adobe RGB for the more serious users out there. Pixel Mapping will do a scan of the sensor in the camera and look for hot pixels and then it will address them I think, basically by cloning them out in images that you take. So it's just looking for errors in the sensor itself, not dust or anything like that.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
James Beaumont
Excellent class, well structured and easy to follow. Although following this class to get to grips with my Fujifilm X-T30, the functions and menus are near identical, so this class is perfect. As a relative newcomer to photography, the explanations are incredibly helpful and helped me to gain confidence in operating my camera. I am also following John Greengo's Fundamentals class and couldn't recommend him highly enough.
Jenny Mummert
This was just what I needed to become more familiar with my xT30...cousin to xT20. Fast start is right. My mind is spinning with information, but that's OK. Very useful information here and valuable handout. Instructor is so knowledgeable and explains things well. I enjoyed his photography 101 course as well. Would also love to have a fast start guide for the Ricoh III. PRETTY PLEASE.
Paul Reid
Excellent classes. Well structured. Easy to follow. Great explanations and practical tips. I've learned so much about my Fuji X-T20 since watching!
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