Lessons
Class Introduction
05:58 2Welcome to Leica
15:54 3Shutter Speeds
12:38 4Apertures & ISO
06:30 5Accessory Shoe
06:46 6Back Side Controls
25:30 7Bottom Controls
06:24 8Front Controls
04:56Lesson Info
Image Menu Functions
We're on the second page of the menu, items dealing with the image. So we have a sharpness option, and this is going to be only for jpeg images, as you see our little warning sign here. If you wanna shoot jpeg images, you can go in, and you can take the sharpness up and take the sharpness down. Most people want as sharp of photos as possible, but if you set this too high, it may oversharpen and give you some artifacts that are unpleasant to look at. It will give you a little bit stronger contrast between the light and the dark areas. Normally I would keep most of these types of settings on Standard. With saturation, it's obviously gonna go in and give you a little bit greater or lesser saturation on your colors. It's a way of kind of mimicking different film looks, by going through a lot of these standards. Contrast, gonna give you a little bit of greater difference between the light and darks. When you're working with black and white images, I typically like to have them a little bit ...
more contrasty. This is something that I will usually add in post-production to a raw file that I have shot. But if I wanna shoot jpegs and I don't like the way they look in camera, this is where you can come in and make those adjustments. They do have a couple of film modes in here. Let's take a look at examples from these. They do have a vivid color mode, smooth color mode, and then, of course, a black-and-white mode. These are all for the jpeg shooting. Inside the black-and-white mode, there is going to be a sub-menu where you can select to shoot black and whites. Then you can choose to use different contrast filters. This is very similar to the old days of mounting an orange or a red filter on the front of your lens. If you do want to explore the world of black-and-white photography, this is definitely an area to play around with and doing your own tests. What it typically does is it's going to lighten the selected color. Whatever color that you have in there is typically gonna come out a little bit lighter than normal, and it's gonna darken the opposite colors. It's gonna have a different effect on blue skies and green shrubbery and other dominant colors in a photograph. You can also go in and control the tone. You can take a black-and-white image and give it just a little hint of color in one color or another. You can give it a little bit of that brown sepia, vintage look or give it a little bit of a blue, cool tone, if you want, right onto your jpeg straight outta the camera. This is a type of thing that most people would use in the DNG raw format, take it into post-production and really fine-tune it, but if you like to shoot it in-camera, it can be kinda nice. Using a camera like this, shooting it in raw plus jpeg, take your jpegs, turn 'em black-and-white, and then you can see in the back of the camera a very close representation of what you're going to be getting on the raw images. The color space is adjusting the range of colors that you can record. Now when you shoot with raw, the DNG format, you are getting Adobe RGB. With jpegs, you are getting SRGB at standard, but you can select to shoot them in the Adobe RGB. If you wanna edit or work with your photos later on for printing purposes, you'll probably wanna set this to Adobe RGB. DNG compression. So for the raw-only format, you can control whether you're collecting it uncompressed or compressed raw. There are two ways of dealing with the raw. Now when it comes to image quality, I'm generally one that always wants and takes the largest, best quality file that I can ever get. But I'm also a pretty practical person. If I don't see a difference between two things and one costs me twice as much space, I'm not gonna choose it. So I do my own tests on compressed RAW, and I've done this on a number of cameras, and very rarely do I see any difference at all. That is the case here. The difference between an uncompressed image at 46 megabytes versus a compressed one at 26, that's a lot of data that you're gonna be recording that really doesn't have a lot of use in my mind. I have tried shooting both of these, I've adjusted 'em, overexposed, underexposed, I've looked at colors, and I just haven't seen much of a difference on this. For speeding up the processing of the images and conserving data space, I'm gonna say that using the compressed option here seems to be smart because the uncompressed option is forcing you to spend twice as much money on hard drives and memory cards, and it's not really giving you anything tangible back with that. If you don't trust me on this, I highly encourage you to go out and do your own tests. I think it's really important for you to test your own camera and know the parameters, the settings that fit what your needs are. You may find that you have a different shooting need than I do and you actually need that extra little data that happens to be there. But in most uses I have found that that data is just not practical in most anything that I can find.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
nancy mercury
This class was very helpful as a new owner of the Monochrome 246, even though there are some parts not applicable, most of the basic "get around" the menu and set up was extremely helpful. Very complete overview.
user-def74a
Very thorough and easy to follow! I have a Leica Monochrom M246, and this helped tremendously. I've taken other classes from John Greengo, and have always learned so much from him. Highly recommend!
a Creativelive Student
call a really good class. I just bought a Leica M Typ-240 and it is my first time ever using a Leica. I have learned a great deal about how to use the camera. I do want to note an error though. In the Back Side Controls lesson at 21:52 he states to scroll through images in the magnified mode to press the menu button and the trackpad. On the M240 it is the Play button and the trackpad. I found it by trial and error after trying the menu button as instructed.
Student Work
Related Classes
Camera Guides