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Shooting Menu Options

Lesson 15 from: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Fast Start

John Greengo

Shooting Menu Options

Lesson 15 from: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

15. Shooting Menu Options

Did you know you can fix a lens vignette on every JPEG photo taken with that lens by just adjusting one setting? Walk through the full shooting menu controls to find the hidden gems alongside tools you'll recall often.

Lesson Info

Shooting Menu Options

Image review, do you want to see your image after you shoot a picture? A lot of times I like to see that. Two seconds is fine, you can adjust it for longer or shorter according to your needs with battery life and so forth. The beep. The beep happens when you focus your camera and it locks in on focus, and this is a little irritating to your subjects and other people around you. I like to be discreet, so let's turn the beep off. If you do want confirmation that your camera focused, well A, you should see it in the viewfinder, but two, there is a green light that comes on at the bottom of your viewfinder to let you know that focus has been achieved, and it's properly confirmed there, and so that's an additional resource for confirming, yes you got it focused properly. So I talked about accidentally firing the shutter when there's no memory cards in the camera, and so if you set this to disable, the shutter will not be able to fire unless there are memory cards in the camera, so it's a ni...

ce safety position to make sure that you have remembered to put your memory cards back into your camera. Lens aberration correction. Okay so this is the first of many submenus we're gonna get into, and so there's a lot of different and new items in particular in here, and so this will first read which lens is on your camera. The first option is Peripheral illumination. Now I guess before I go any further in this, let me explain. This only applies to JPEG images. If you shoot with RAW, it will make these adjustments, show them to you on the back of the camera, but your final RAW image is your original RAW image with none of this done. And so if you only shoot RAW, that's all you're ever going to do, this entire section you can just skip past, you don't need. But I have a feeling that everyone is gonna shoot JPEGs from time to time, and you're probably gonna want to get this set right, because these are one of these things that you're just not gonna come back to and reset in the future. Peripheral illumination has to do with a darkening of the corners. So, using a wide angle lens, that's currently disabled. Let me go back and forth between these two, and you'll notice how the peripheral edges are darker when this is disabled, and so when we enable it, what the camera does is it knows how much vignetting a particular lens has, and it goes in there and it basically boosts the ISO and it raises the brightness of those pixels, so it is altering your image, and you could get more noise in some cases doing it. But, it is sometimes helpful depending on the types of photographs. Generally we like to have things evenly illuminated from left to right, but there's a lot of photographers, and especially when I shoot portraits I am often adding a vignette. There's kind of a look that looks nice. It draws your eye to the center, because your eyes tend to go where it's brightest and they stay away from the dark areas, so you're drawing the eyes to the center of the photograph. And to be honest with you, I am adding vignettes to more of my photographs than reducing it. But it has to do with personal style, and what you're shooting. For people photography, I like it a lot. For landscape photography, I want even skies from edge to edge, so it really depends on what you're doing. And so, I leave this turned on for anytime that I may be shooting JPEGs, but I can perfectly see turning this off if you are shooting with RAWs. Distortion correction. So, despite the fact that Canon charges lots of money for their lenses and they talk about them being really, really awesome, as do all the manufacturers, the fact of the matter is that lenses sometimes have a little bit of barrel distortion. Let me go back and forth between these two images, and you can see what barrel distortion looks like. And we're not gonna get into the whole Flat Earth Theory here folks, but it's supposed to be straight here, okay? And we like to have that straight horizon, and so this is something that generally looks pretty good, and we don't generally want barrel distortion unless we're shooting a fisheye lens. And so, this would make sense to leave it turned on. There are some people that are very picky because when you throw this on, what you see through the viewfinder is slightly different as far as angle of view and composition, because it starts cropping a little bit off the edges there, on those final JPEGs that you're shooting. New in the Mark IV camera is something called the Digital Lens Optimizer. And what this is gonna do is it's gonna go in and fix a host of problems all at the same time. And this is kind of new, because what it's doing is it's looking at lens corrections, diffractions, and it's also sharpening for the low pass filter that this camera has. And it's gonna go in there and just try to give you the sharpest picture possible, once again on JPEGs, not on RAWs. However, there is a downside on this, is that there is no continuous shooting. There is no dual pixel RAW, and there's a number of other things that don't work or don't work as fully as compatible as other things. And so what's happening here is that you shoot a picture, and then the camera's processing system goes in and starts fussing and trying to fix up the image, and correct all these little problems. And now those resources are very taxing on the camera. In almost every case that I can imagine I would recommend turning this off. Yes, it can improve your images a little bit, in sharpness and overall clarity. But you can actually do some of that with the following two settings, and so this one, you may want to do some of your testing on your own, but I'm thinking turning it off for everybody. We do have a chromatic aberration, which you can individually turn on. Now this is part of that Digital Lens Optimizer as well, and what's happening here is that when you have a solid object that has a bright background, there is often a ghosting of color, depending on the shape of it, it will be either this kind of reddish or blueish green color. And nobody likes chromatic aberration. I haven't met any photographers, and you can be the first, that embraces it and shoots for it. But most people don't like it, and so it's nice just to get rid of that. So, in many cases there, leave that turned on. It's fine, it's not taking up the resources of being able to shoot in the camera. Once again, only on JPEGs. Final item in here is diffraction correction. When you stop your lens down to f/16 or 22 or if it has it, your lenses tend to be a little bit less sharp, and Canon knows how much less sharp they are, and it can go in and adjust this to improve the sharpness. And so here's a case where I'm shooting at f/ and I want to go in and I want to look at the details. And, I left it off for one, and I turned it on for the other, and there is a notable difference. It's not huge, but there is a notable difference in sharpness there. Once again, this is only getting applied to the JPEGs. Not getting applied to the RAWs, and it doesn't slow down the shooting at all, and I think it helps out, and it's not taxing the camera in any way. And so the main one is I think leaving that Digital Lens Optimizer off unless you have a very specific need for turning that on. Next up is External Speedlite control, and this will have a lot more significance when you have a flash attached onto the camera. So this is a rabbit hole that has many different layers in it, so let's dive in. First up, do you want to be able to fire the flash? Probably so, this just gives you an electronic way of turning the camera off in the menu system. E-TTL metering, this is the type of metering system that it uses. The Evaluative is using a little bit smarter more sophisticated system. You could change it if necessary, but pretty much everyone leaves it at Evaluative. The sync speed mode. When you are in aperture priority, or aperture value, and the camera is in control of shutter speeds, what range or shutter speeds do you want the camera to use when the flash is firing? I like it in Auto because I'm willing to use the camera as slow a shutter speed as possible, and I'm pretty aware if it's a one second shutter, how steady I need to be when holding the camera. For most people handholding, 1/200 to 1/60 of a second would be a safer bet. That is always keeping the camera in a relatively safe place for handholding when it comes to shutter speed, or you can just fix it at the maximum shutter speed if you wanted to. And so if you're confident about handholding the camera yourself, set it to Auto. If you don't want it to go too low, then you might want to set it to 1/200 to 1/60. Flash functions, and so there are a number of features that you would normally press the buttons on the back of the camera to go in and change, and this just gives you a different graphic interface to use the back of the camera. That way you don't have to hold on to the flash. You can just make all the changes from the dials and controls on your camera, so let's quickly go through what some of the options are. So you can operate your camera in a ETTL which is a fully automatic mode. Full manual mode, if you want to control power, like 100% power, 50% power. There's also a multi strobe mode where it fires multiple times in one frame, and there are some very creative kind of fun things that you can do with that system. The wireless function allows you to get the flash off the camera. You can use multiple flashes, and there is a whole host of classes that you can take on lighting and improving the quality of your lighting, but the first big key is getting the flash off the camera, and this allows you to do it with sophisticated TTL through the lens metering system, so you can do it relatively simply and quickly. Zoom AUTO will match the zoom coverage of your lens, and you can adjust it as necessary. And so some people want a different look, and so they might be shooting with a 50 millimeter lens, but they can go in and manually set their flash to so that only the center portion is illuminated. Normally you would leave it in Auto, and as you zoom back and forth, the flash will zoom and change coverage appropriately for the lens that you have. Shutter synchronization allows you to synchronize the flash either with the first curtain or the second curtain. And for subjects that are moving, that second curtain sync can look quite interesting and it's very good for a particular type of camera blur. This is a duplicate feature, we've already talked about this. This is flash exposure compensation. As I said, in many cases with portrait photography, with an on camera flash, you need to power it down in order to get a more pleasing, less harsh of a look. You can also do flash exposure bracketing where it will shoot a series of photos at different powers, and then you can judge which one you like later if you need to shoot it quickly, and figure it all out later. So all of that is in the Flash functions sub-setting. Depending on the flash, many flashes, the higher end flashes will have custom functions that you can go into. We're not gonna get into this, because this depends on which flash you have attached to your camera. But, they will have a number of features that you can go in and slightly tweak the custom functions on. So that is your External Speedlite control. When you have a flash attached it makes it a whole lot easier to go through and make those changes. All right, we're onto the second page. First up here is exposure compensation or auto exposure bracketing. And so, let's go ahead and show you what this is doing here, and so this is like exposure compensation, but this is where the camera does it for you, automatically changing very quickly between a series of different exposures. And so, the idea here is if you are in a situation that has a wide exposure latitude, dark darks and bright brights, you can shoot a series of photos, and you might either choose one of those photos, or a group of those photos to work in an HDR program or blend or combine in Photoshop or some sort of program. Basic parameters on this. You can shoot anywhere between two and seven frames, and that can be adjusted when we get into the custom function setting as to how many frames you shoot. You can do adjustments from 1/ to three stop increments. I tend to do things in one stop increments. 1/3 is just a very, very too slight of margin. You can usually make that adjustment in any photo program afterwards. And then you can also use this with exposure compensation on top of it if you want to. And then finally you can change the bracketing sequence when we get into the custom functions of the camera, so I wanted to show you real quickly on my camera how this works. And so, you can shoot with this in any of the modes that you want. I'm gonna shoot with it in the mode that I use most commonly, which is aperture priority. So let's go, see you can see I'm in aperture priority here, and let's just dial in an aperture. Let's go with f/8, and the camera is normally gonna shoot its normal exposure, but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go in to page two, and now I can adjust, and currently I have my camera set to three exposures which is why there's three lines. If I had it on five, you would see five lines as it was changing around. And so I can shoot. In this case, let's see let's go, 1/3, 2/3, one stop. I'm gonna make it really clear. One and 1/3, one and 2/3, two stops, so this is a two stop bracket of three images. And, what I am gonna do is I am gonna make one additional change, a little secret here, is I'm gonna put in the self timer mode. Because I don't want to be touching the camera when I'm shooting it and it's on a tripod. And, if I remember correctly, it is gonna fire through all three shots without me pressing the button each time. So this is a two second time delay, and then it's gonna take three pictures very quickly. One. Oh, it didn't do it. Let me try this. And, well I guess it's just. Didn't push OK in the menu. Did I not press OK? Okay, so let's try this again. Now I've already shot the first one. Maybe if it does it right I will only shoot the next two. Nope. And, are we getting the different, oh you know what I didn't do? This is a common mistake. I went in and I adjusted the feature but I forgot to really implement it and turn it on, and so exposure compensation. I need to make my adjustments, and so I go 1/3, 2/3, full, three, and so here I need to set okay, so now you can see it's activated there. I do have the self-timer, so this, please work. Okay, there it went through all three shots, and so let's take a look at the shots. One, two, three, so this is the normal and you can see right here where my finger is, that's the minus two, and that's the plus two. And so, it is still in the bracketing mode, and if I wanted to I could put this in the drive mode, and now I can just fire it with my fingers. Or, I can put it in the single shot mode, and I can fire, one shot. And it goes through the same series. And so now I'm just gonna go ahead and turn it off because I know it'll, as I say, the exposure compensation can be added on top of that whole thing. And so very good when you are unsure of the right exposure. And you want to take a series of photos to make sure that you walk away with the correct exposure. ISO speed settings, so on the top of your camera you have an ISO button for changing your ISO speeds. You can also do it in here, but you do have much more fine tuned control. So, first off you can just change your ISO speed settings between all the normal standard settings that you have in here. You can choose the range for stills. Now one of the things is is that this camera comes with a governor on it. A little limitation, you can't get up to the high settings until you come in here and turn it on. And this frustrates me to no end. Not that I use those high settings very often, or if ever, I just don't like the camera limiting what I can select when I want to go choose something. So I would say, if you know you're in full control and you want the full range of options out there, set it to the Low setting as well as the high two. You can set the ISOs wherever you need to. If you really want to limit yourself or you want to limit somebody else who's using your camera, you can draw a maximum and say, hey I don't want it to go over 6,400, or allow for that selection. You can limit that. The Auto range, and this is where things get very interesting. When you are in Auto ISO, you can select the range that the camera will choose, and we've been able to do this for a number of years with cameras, and you could kind of draw a ceiling, saying, you know what? I just don't like the quality that I get when I get to 12,800, or beyond 12,800, so let's put a limit right at 12,800. And that's been very good, but we're able to get in and adjust this a little bit further with the minimum shutter speed. And so, one of the options in here is you can choose a particular shutter speed, and your camera will not go below that shutter speed, and it will then switch over to changing your ISO. But where it gets really interesting is you can let the camera automatically figure out what the correct shutter speed is. So let me explain a little bit more about how this works. Imagine you're in Aperture Priority, and you're gonna set an aperture of 5.6. In Aperture Priority, that means the camera is taking care of the shutter speed, but we're also putting our camera in Auto ISO, so it's also taking care of the ISO. So how does it balance shutter speeds and ISOs? Well, let's take an average amount of light. The camera will figure out an appropriate shutter speed. If it gets brighter, it's gonna use faster shutter speeds to compensate for that brighter light. There isn't any lower ISOs in this case, and as the light gets darker, it's gonna reduce those shutter speeds. But this is the important point. There's gonna be a change where it starts going from shutter speed change to an ISO change as it gets darker. And the question is is what is that last slowest shutter speed that you want the camera to use? So as it gets brighter it'll take the camera back to ISO 100, then when there is no further to go with ISO, it'll continue to make those changes using the shutter speed. And so, where is that breakpoint on shutter speeds that you do not want the camera to drop below? And this is where Auto ISO comes in, because that bottom line shutter speed is going to depend on the lens you're using. The slowest shutter speed that I will handhold a 28 millimeter lens at is very different than a 400 millimeter lens. And so this camera can look at what lens you have, and with the Auto setting, we'll say a 28 millimeter lens, it's gonna recommend an Auto setting of 1/30 of a second, and you won't go below it. But if you are really good at handholding your camera steady you can choose to set it a stop slower. 1/15 or 1/8, or 1/4 of a second. Depending on how good you are. Now maybe you have a slight tremor to your hands, and you have a hard time holding your camera steady. Or maybe you have a big lens that doesn't have stabilization, or you just want a little bit faster shutter speed. Well you can kind of bump it up to the faster side by one, two, or three stops. So you can really dial it in appropriately no matter which lens you put on your camera, or where you zoom your lens. And so for an average user, just set this at Auto. It's probably fine. If you have very steady hands, you could set it somewhere in the slower category if you're willing to handhold that camera at slower shutter speeds. So that is your ISO speed settings. Auto Lightning Optimizer. So this is one of our image manipulation modes. We actually talked about this before in the quick menu. This is where the camera goes in and it lightens up the shadows, and it protects the highlights in JPEG images. It's pretty good for general people photography, and so if you were just gonna be shooting photos say at your home, at a family gathering, this would be pretty good. Not a terribly bad thing to have on. When you go out and shoot landscapes, I probably wouldn't want to have it turned on. I want to shoot a little bit more of the natural light that I'm getting. And so most of the time you're gonna want to leave it turned off. There are some cases though where it can be very useful. All right we're gonna be getting some deja vu here folks. We're gonna be seeing things that we've seen before. White balance we've already talked about it. Auto white balance is gonna be good for most people. If you shoot RAW you can correct for it later, but if you are getting funky colors, you can get in and change it. Custom white balance, and so I had mentioned this when we talked about light balance. If you are in an unusual lighting situation, you don't know the color temperature off the top of your head, you can use your camera to figure it out. Photograph a white piece of paper, which is what I did here. It doesn't look white because it's a tungsten light, and so everything is very, very orange. And then what you would do is you come in here to the custom white balance settings, you select that image, the camera will analyze that image, and give you the correct white balance for it if you set the white balance then to Custom and subsequent photos will then be corrected for that light source. So if you were gonna go in, let's say you had to shoot pictures in your office, and your office has some funky lighting that's a mixture of daylight, and fluorescent and tungsten, and you needed to get really true proper colors. Go shoot a white piece of paper where your subject is going to be, and you can get it calibrated using that system. This is one feature that I hope nobody has to use. If you want to you can go in and you can take all of your white balances and you can start tweaking them. You can make them warmer or cooler, more green, more magenta. Very few people get in here and adjust this, but if you do need to adjust the colors coming out of your camera, it can be done, and this is where you would do it. The color space is the range of colors that you record. When you shoot RAW, you inherently get Adobe RGB, which is a fairly large gamut of colors. When you shoot JPEG, the camera is set to sRGB which is fine for posting pictures on the internet and for basic use. If you plan to have more professional destinations for your images, if you want to be printing your images, you probably want to have a larger color space. And so Adobe RGB is what I would recommend for most people. I like collecting as many colors as possible. We may need those in the future depending on what we're doing with our images in some cases. Page three in the shooting menu, picture styles. So when you shoot with a JPEG image, the camera goes through and it adjusts the color and the contrast, and the tone of your images, and if you don't like the look of your images, you can go in and adjust them. There was recently a very popular video on the internet recently where some people went in and they were judging cameras based off of their standard JPEG images they get out of their camera. And it was a noble experiment, and they did a good job with it, but it is somewhat akin to rating cars and testing them on the temperature inside the car. This car was a little bit cold. This one was hot, I think I was sweating in here, I don't like this car. This is something that you can easily adjust. And I see this as a critique on certain cameras. Well I really don't like the look of the JPEGs. Adjust them. Pretty much all cameras have it, and this camera has more control than most cameras. If you'll notice, down at the bottom info detail set. You can get in and you can really tweak with your images down here. So anyone who is used to Photoshop and sharpening, there is the sharpness. You can get into the strength. That is equal to the amount in Photoshop, if you're used to sharpening an image. What's the amount you're gonna do? There is a fineness option which is the same as radius when it comes to Photoshop. And then threshold is the same as threshold, and this is the way that it looks at information. For instance in Threshold, if you crank that up really high, it's gonna take a really fine line and make that much more bold because it's looking for really fine lines. And the fineness is gonna determine how much of a sharpening that it's gonna make on that particular pixel. And so these are ways that you can really tweak the sharpness along with that, with all the other color. So let me, let me dive in here. Let me show you on the back of my camera real quickly. And once again this is only for JPEGs. This is not for RAWs, and so if you only shoot RAWs it's not really that big a deal. And so, within anyone of these there is a Standard setting. Then Auto will adjust for you. I prefer Standard so it's pretty consistent, but we have all these different options down here. User one, two, and three are ones that you can create as your own. If you want to start with one of the formulas, let's say you want to go with the portrait formula, we can select that. But if we go in here at Info Detail set, we can use the touchscreen, we can use the Set button, and we can go through and say, you know what? The strength of that sharpening, I want it a little bit sharper. Now this is a portrait so usually people dial it down, but maybe I want to dial this one up a little bit. And you can go through and say saturation, let's bring that down a little bit. You can adjust the color tone. You can reset it back to its default settings, and if I want to hit the menu I hit this back and you can see up here in blue I've made some changes. And so there's a lot of items in blue as we go through the menu system that'll indicate changes as we go forward. But, this is really handy for anyone who needs to shoot JPEGs, or who finds it very useful to shoot JPEGs, and the people who are getting the JPEGs say, ah you know your JPEGs, they're a little over-sharpened, can you change that? Yep, I certainly can. Could they be a little bit sharper? Can we change this, can we change that? And so this is for people who really need to get very specific types of JPEGs out of their camera. Very useful tool. It's not something a lot of people are gonna get into but there's a lot of control for perfecting your image. Long exposure noise reduction. So if you were to shoot a 30 second exposure it would take 30 seconds, and then it would take another 30 seconds while it processes that image, because sometimes there's a little bit of noise that happens because of a long exposure. Now, I don't know what this does in all cases, but I wanted to test it out at least in the Standard simple little setup test. And so I shot a 30 second exposure, and I shot it two different ways. One with noise reduction turned off, and I thought to myself even before I did anything else, I'm not seeing a lot of noise here. And so that's with it turned off, and then I turned it on, and I could maybe point out a difference, but there is virtually no difference at all. And the difference to me is that after you shoot a 30 second exposure you're forced to stand around and wait for another 30 seconds before you shoot your next shot. And so I just don't see a benefit to this. I would encourage you that if you do long exposures, do a test, see if it works for you and the type of work that you do. But offhand, I think you can leave it turned off. It's just not a big problem. It might be a bigger issue if you are shooting a much longer exposure. Next up, high ISO noise reduction. So we have two different noise reductions, and once again, I sound like a broken record. Applies to JPEGs, does not apply to RAWs, all right? So now this is a little bit different. We have Disable, Low, Standard, a High setting. We also have a Multi Shot Noise Reduction where it shoots multiple images and then tries to combine all of them to get the lowest noise reduction possible. And so I'm gonna shoot an image, I'm gonna have it turned off to start with. This is at ISO 25,000, so we're pretty high, and you can see as we get in deeper and deeper into these noise reductions, it does reduce the noise. It does however kind of mar the details and the sharpness of the image. And so there is going to be a compromise or a balance where you want some noise reduction but too much is a little too much. The note on the multi shot is you need to have the camera stationary to shoot that, which means tripod shooting only. And so leaves blowing in the wind are not gonna work good on that. Now I went ahead and tried it out at 100,000 which is the highest setting on here, and you can see that it does reduce the noise levels quite a bit, but you're gonna have to kind of draw that compromise of where you think is acceptable and best for your type of photography. And so for something like this, a little bit of noise reduction I think is fine. Low or Standard. But I think some people if you are shooting the RAWs, you can always take, even if you're shooting JPEGs, you can totally disable this. Take those images into common photographic programs like Adobe Lightroom, and you can do exactly the same thing and probably if you're halfway talented, do better than the camera did. Because you can look at it on a large monitor and you're gonna have more controls and you can really fine tune it quite a bit. And so there is no reason this has to be done here other than for speed and convenience. Highlight tone priority, I had mentioned this previously. This is where the little D plus shows up in the viewfinder, and this is where the camera is trying to hold back the highlights so that you don't overexpose an area. And I saw this and I'm like, yeah, sign me up. Don't overexpose those highlights, and then I found out that you can't shoot at ISO 100 anymore. And so what's happening is basically the camera is underexposing everything, and then boosting it up in post production, and so you're protecting one area but everything else is just a little bit worse than it would normally be. And so, it's something that is only gonna be really important if you're shooting JPEGs. Does not impact RAW images once again, and so if you were shooting JPEGs, you didn't have time to fix it on your own, you didn't have time to make adjustments out in the field, that would be a reason for using it, but I think a lot of people will be leaving this turned off. Dust Delete Data, and so the camera has this automatic sensor cleaning. There is a way to manually clean it. I've got a slide for that coming up in a bit, but if you were on safari in Africa and your photos looked like this, you've got a serious dust problem and you don't have any camera shops around to fix it. And so what you do is you shoot a white piece of paper so that the camera can analyze where all the dust is and how bad it is. And then you can have the camera's software fix that up so that you get nice clean images. Now in order to do this, you do need, yes thank you, your Canon software to do that, and so this is something that you're only gonna get with the software that came with the camera, which to be honest with you a lot of people are not using. But it is possible and so it's one of these things in theory you can do, but a lot of people will just go in and clean it out, but if it gets really bad, it is a solution. Multiple exposures. I always thought this was kind of goofy. We have layers in Photoshop. What do we need multiple exposures in cameras? And if you are into this, it actually does make sense, and there are a number of different features in here. The first one, you're probably gonna leave it disabled for most of your photography, but if you want to shoot and check each image, which is the way most people shoot a multiple exposure, you would turn on function control. In some cases you just want to shoot a whole series of multiple exposures very quickly without stopping to check. That would be the continuous shooting option. And so the idea here is that you can see in the back of the camera how images are lining up, and so I could have guessed four individual images, but being able to see it live on screen I was able to produce my multiple exposure out in the field and end up with a finished product right then and there, which is a certain convenience factor that I do like. So normally you're gonna leave it disabled except when you're feeling very artistic. Now we do have some controls in here, and this has been very interesting, so I wanted to check in this additive, average, bright, and dark, and this is the way that it's mixing two images together. Now in order to do this test, little background on the test, is I have a light colored background, and then I have a number of objects in front that are either dark or light. And then I'll put the objects on the left and right and then I'm gonna do the same thing with a dark background, because each of these is gonna play with these images in a little different manner. So the Additive just adds one image on top of the other, which is why you can barely see those subjects, because we have two images that are both of equal importance you might say. And so your exposures just keep getting brighter and brighter, and brighter, because everything just keeps adding and you keep on adding light to the sensor. You can let the camera average it out, and what it's doing is it's just going in and it's electronically darkening each of your photos no matter what shutter speed or aperture you've used, so it'll be a little bit better average. It might be kind of good for somebody who's new to shooting multiple exposures. And then there is one where it emphasizes bright objects, or it emphasizes dark objects, and so you can see on the bottom left that image looks horrible, but the one on the bottom right has done a very good job. The lens has been duplicated on either side very well, but the white mug in the bottom right you can see through because those black lines. The dark objects have priority with the Dark emphasis. Now you'll see this very differently when we look at the dark background, and you can see the bright mug on the bottom left looks very clear, because bright objects have priority. So if you want to play around with multiple exposures, I like to play with, I like to do additive just so I can be in very specific control about the exposure of each image, but the bright or dark option is an interesting choice when you have the right type of background, and so some examples from these results here, you can see one setting doesn't always give you the best results. It depends on your subject, it depends on your background. Another example of average versus additive, and you could just keep shooting additive, but it just keeps getting brighter and brighter, and brighter, and too bright, unless you have manually compensated by choosing shutter speeds and apertures yourself very carefully. And so that's what these are, and so average for the average photographer, but the more advanced might like the Additive. You can also choose how many exposures you want, so you can select between two and nine exposures for your multiple exposures. When you shoot two exposures, and you get one, you can keep the original images if you want to work with them later. If the camera didn't quite get the mix right, you can choose this. Now it's gonna obviously cause you to fill up memory cards a little bit more quickly, but it gives you all that source information that you can go back to if you want to get to it. If you just want to end up with one final image, you could put in the results only here. Now a lot of times when people shoot multiple exposures they have an idea they're gonna use it for one little creative shot, and then they're done with it. But if you are shooting it on a regular full time basis, you would set this into Continuous then, so one shot basically kicks you out of the multiple exposure mode once you are done with your multiple exposure. And then we get into the HDR Mode, so the camera has a built in HDR Mode, which of course stands for high dynamic range, so let's go into the submenu here. You could adjust the range at which your camera shoots photos, and so in one, two, and three, it's gonna shoot three photos, either one, two, or three stops apart. In the Auto it will choose itself what it thinks it needs according to the dynamic range that it's sensing. Normally you would obviously leave this on Disabled. Most people don't shoot in HDR most of the time. And so an example. This is your standard JPEG image and what you want to pay attention to is between the spokes on the wheel. How bright is that background? Because that's inside and we're looking outside. It's very, very bright back there. One stop exposure we're starting to see a little bit of detail. Two stops we see a little bit of a tree back there. Three stops we see a little bit more. This is a very, very high dynamic range, and so depending on the range, you would set it up. Now, with what I've played around, it seems most of the time you're gonna want to be at plus two or plus three if you're into this HDR. The plus one is not too dramatic of a change. We have different effects, and this isn't Photoshop in the camera. This is like Instagram in the camera, where you can have a lot of different looks to your image. So our standard JPEG, and then we have our three EV natural, and then we have some art standard where we start to get a little bit more boastful with our colors and our saturation, making them very vivid or very, very bold. Or doing an embossed look to them. And so there's a bunch of different looks that you can get from your HDR, and when HDR was first introduced, like pretty much all pieces of technology, they got overused a little bit. And then people would dial back and get them a little bit more natural, but if you want to play around in camera, there is a number of ways to do that here in the HDR mode. For the most part I think you probably want to leave it on natural. Continuous HDR is, you're just doing one setup of HDR shots or are you gonna be doing this on a regular continual basis, so you don't have to come back in here and turn it on again, and again, and again, and so if you are in that HDR shooting mode, then you would turn it on every shot. Auto align images. So this was something that was kind of erking me before I really figured out what was going on, is it was cropping in on my images. And so it's designed for handheld photography. So if you are handheld, you're shooting HDR, you're shooting three photos that have to be exactly the same, and in order to do that it crops in on all three of them so you lose a little bit of your wide angle capability so it has the data to match all those up to make one finished image. If you are shooting from a tripod, you would want to disable this so that your lenses show you exactly what you're finally gonna get. If you're gonna be handheld then you would leave this on Enable. And as we saw in a previous mode, you can keep the source images. And so this is basically another bracketing mode where it combines them for you as well. Not as many options as bracketing, but different, but similar in some ways. And so, do you want to be able to keep all the original images, or do you just want one final finished image? So a lot of things to explore and have fun with in the HDR Mode menu.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Canon 5D Mark IV Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

r_peddle
 

John is such a fabulous educator. Well spoken, knowledgeable and he presents with such clarity and easy, it makes listening that much more enjoyable. I would highly recommend taking this class and any of his classes dealing with photography. HE simplifies the menu system and buttons on the camera in this course that would be painstakingly long if you tried it on your own. I have watched this video 2-3 times know and each time I go back, I learn a little more. Being able to drop into any of the main topics with easy, not having to watch and search for your desired info is so convenient. I will never buy another camera without checking to see if John has completed a review on it........I trust his opinion. Thanks John......I am a fan.

joanne duncan
 

brilliant, John makes it all so easy to understand. This is the 3rd camera quickstart I have purchased, and they are invaluable. I really do feel i know my new camera now, and i love that the menu system for the class is so involved, makes it easy to come back to things. thanks John, another brilliant course!!

Ralph Somma
 

I was reluctant to purchase this course because I already have the Instruction Manual that came with the 5D Mark IV and am committed to reading it in it's entirely. Nevertheless, after watching a preview of the course, I decide to buy it so I could view it at my leisure, pause and rewind it as needed. I am so glad I did. John Greengo's teaching method is clear and concise. He presents the material in a way that makes it interesting and enjoyable to learn. His effective use of visuals and demonstrations makes understanding every important function of the 5D Mark IV a breeze. I look forward to implementing what I've learned, his recommendations and tweaking the camera's settings to suit my own needs and preferences. Now as I trudge through all 600+ pages of the manual, I'm confident I will more easily grasp the camera's 100+ settings and can always refer back to the course if necessary.

Student Work

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