Lessons

Lesson Info

Menu Functions Overview

All right so let's get started on this big old menu because we've got a lot of stuff to talk about in here. So, obviously this is gonna get activated when you press the Menu button on the camera, and the menu is pretty well organized I'll have to admit, into different tabs or groupings of information. And so we're gonna go through each one of these, and go through all the items in them. One thing I do want to note right here is that the Live View Movie menu is somewhat hidden. You have to be in the movie mode in order to get in to see those particular features. I'll talk more about that as we get to that particular section in the menu, but just realize that there is not gonna be a symbol for that. It's only going to appear when you get to the special place. On the mode dial there are some basic settings, and there are more advanced settings, and depending on where you are is gonna determine how many different items within the menu system that you can get to. And so for this portion of ...

the class you definitely want to be in one of the more manual settings so that you can have access to the full menu. You'll notice that if you do have the camera in the scene intelligent mode, the A plus mode, the CA or the scene mode, that there is gonna be a lot of grayed out items that you don't have access to. And so you want to definitely have full access, so put your camera in manual or program, something like that for the rest of this section of the class. We're gonna start on the left and at the top and work our way through the menu system. But one of the things to note is that occasionally there is gonna be an item that is grayed out, which means you are not able to set it. If you would like to know, why can't I set this particular feature? What you want to do is press the Set button and that'll give you a little bit of information about why you can't set that particular feature. In general it's because something else on the camera is set in a way that conflicts with the item that you're trying to change, and you'd have to go change that other one before you could change this one here. And so, you'll notice that as you go through the menu on your own. We're gonna start in the Shooting Menu, which is the camera menu on page one, top item, and then we're gonna just work our way down the list and through all the different options available. First up is image quality, raw and JPEG. We talked about this earlier in more detail when we were in the quick menu. If you want to get the best information off the sensor, you want raw. If you want something simple and good, large JPEG is good, and then there's a variety of smaller sizes depending on your specific needs. And you can also shoot raw plus JPEG if you have the need for that. As we go forward here on the keynote on screen you're gonna see gray recommendations over on the right-hand side as to what I think would be a good place to start. And then I have a more advanced recommendation for people who I think are a little bit more advanced users. Now my general recommendation doesn't mean it's the best place for that to be for everyone. It's just a good starting point for generally having the camera. You'll want to of course tailor the camera to your own needs. These will also match what I have in the PDF handout that comes with the class called Recommended Settings, and so you can see this later on print here, and print it out yourself, or you'll see it on screen right here in front of you. All right let's move forward. Image review. When you take a picture, do you want to see an image on the back of the camera that shows you what you just shot? In many cases it's very helpful so that we can see the digital version of what we just shot. Two seconds is fine for most people. You can make it longer or less if you want. If you do not have a memory card in your camera, do you want to be able to fire the shutter? Well you can't store a picture that way. The only thing that that's good for is if you're trying to show somebody what the shutter sound sounds like. And so for most of us we're gonna want to disable this so that it lets us know that we have forgotten to put a memory card in our camera. Lens aberration correction. All right this is one of many items that we will talk about that is only affecting JPEG images. If you shoot raw, any sort of image manipulation option that the camera has is not going to affect the raw image. This is only gonna affect a JPEG image, so let's look at what we're talking about here. So peripheral illumination correction. That is a darkening of the corners, and fast lenses like a 50 millimeter 1. or an 85 1.8 is gonna probably be a little bit darker around the corners than in the middle, and so the camera knows how much these lenses are off or vignetting images and can automatically fix them in camera. For basic pictures it might be nice to fix them but I know a lot of more serious photographers, they want the exact look that that lens has to it. Also with the raw it's not gonna really do much of anything, and so it depends a little bit on what's important to you and what you're doing with your lenses. Chromatic aberration correction. So when you shoot a subject that has a very bright light behind it, there is something that happens called chromatic aberration. It's a color ghosting where all the light waves are not landing exactly where they're supposed to, and you get this kind of highlight color of magenta, cyan edging around your subject, and nobody really likes this, and so this is the type of feature that most people would leave turned on. Even though it doesn't do anything in raw, if you do shoot a JPEG, it will fix that problem which is good to have. Distortion correction. This one let me give you a little bigger example on this one. You'll notice in this one the horizon is a little bit curved, and let me jump forward and backward, and you can see the difference between correcting for the horizon and its uncorrected format. A lot of wide angle lenses will have just a little bit of bending to them and the software within the camera can automatically go in and fix that. Most people don't like distortion in most lenses. They do have the exception of fisheye lenses. That's a different subject. Most people want to get it corrected in camera, and so you can do that here. Once again, doesn't do it with raw but it does do it with JPEGs. Diffraction correction. When you stop the aperture down to f/16, f/22 for instance, all that light going through that small opening just diffracts a little bit, changes direction, and some of those light waves are not landing in quite the right spot, and what it shows itself as as just a slight loss of sharpness when you get into the nitty gritty details. By turning diffraction correction on, it'll make your images a little bit sharper. It will correct for some of that diffraction problem. And so we generally want our pictures to look nice and sharp, and so this is something that's probably fine to leave turned on for most of the time. Once again all of these are for JPEG only, not for raw images. Lens electronic manual focus. There are a few lenses, not very many lenses, from Canon, notably all of the STM lenses are in this category, and then there's a few oddballs like the 51. and some of the 400 millimeter 2.8, 500 millimeter f/4 lenses, have electronic drive lens. Which means when you focus, you're not actually turning the lens itself. You're turning an electronic ring which tells the motor to turn the lens, and you get to decide here whether you want that to work or not in the camera after you use one shot auto focus. For some people, they don't want to accidentally touch the focus on their ring and move it in some ways. More serious photographers might want to touch up the focus and make a small adjustment after the camera has already had its say in focusing. They, the photographer, get to have the final say then. And so it depends on which lenses you have. For most Canon users, this is gonna be a nonissue because most of their USM lenses are kind of a direct drive is what you would call it on the focusing, and this is not even gonna be in effect. External Speedlite control goes into a larger submenu, so let's dive into this. First off, camera doesn't have a flash but if you do have one hooked up you can disable it via the menu system. You could also just turn it off on the flash, but if you need to do in the menu system, there is an option. You can choose the metering system that the flash uses. Evaluative or Average. Most people are fine with Evaluative. There are chances that it may not work depending on the type of lighting situation that you're in. The sync speed mode, when you're in aperture value, when you're in the aperture value and the camera is choosing the shutter speed, what shutter speed do you want it to choose when it's using flash? And you could have it automatically choose anywhere between 30 seconds and 1/180th of a second which is the fastest sync that this will do with flash. You could choose specifically to keep it between 1/60th and 1/180th which is a nice handheld range for handholding the camera, or you could choose just 1/180th of a second just at the fastest shutter speed possible. So it depends a little what you're doing with the flash and how you're using it, and what you want the background lights to look like. Flash function settings allow you to go in and change the functions of the flash using the LCD on the back of the camera. And so, since this camera doesn't have a flash, we're not gonna spend a lot of time in this section, but let's just go through some of the basic things that you're gonna be able to change. You're gonna be able to change the basic operation of the flash. The ETTL flash is the normal automated flash, but you also have something called a MULTI Strobe effect where it will fire the strobe multiple times during a single exposure. We also have a manual option in there as well. You can hook the camera up wirelessly to multiple flashes, and that way you can get better lighting on your subject, and so that's gonna be a good option for people doing portrait photography for instance. The camera will normally adjust the zoom of the flash to match the zoom of the lens. If you wanted to go in and do something different and manually set it yourself, you could do that in here as well. The synchronization of the flash can either be synchronized with the opening shutter curtain, the first one, or the second closing shutter curtain, and that's gonna have an effect on the way subjects who move within the frame look during an exposure. And so second curtain sync can look really good for subjects moving. But it depends on what you're doing and what you want from your camera and your images. We talked a little bit about this before but flash exposure compensation will allow you to power down the flash for a more natural look on your images. I recommend something around minus one for most general purpose situations. Flash exposure bracketing allows you to shoot a series of photos with the flash varying its power. If you're not sure what the correct power is, you could use this as a technique to determine the different look, or if you're going to shoot one image, you only had one shot at it, but you could take three quick photos, this is a way to shoot a bracketed series, having that flash change power. The flashes also have a lot of custom functions. These will vary according to the flash you have. You can go into the custom functions and adjust them as necessary. We're not gonna get into it here because it depends on which flash that you actually own. Onto page two of the Shooting Menu. We'll start off with exposure compensation, auto exposure bracketing. We were actually looking at this a little bit more closely in the quick menu. We see this item there as well as here. Operates the same way. We can adjust the exposure, brighter or darker. We can also set our bracketing series, and so if we want to shoot a series of photos at different exposures, we can do that here. There will be some further controls on exposure bracketing that we'll talk about when we get into the custom setting. The ISO speed settings are gonna control the speed of the ISO and a little bit more. So first up is the ISO speed. Now this is done more easily with the ISO button on the top of the camera. There's one quick button that's very easy to get to these features, this feature, but we can do it here as well, and it's wherever we set it last depending on, doesn't matter which one we used, they both do the same thing. But we do have some further control of the ISO in here. We get to control the range that we get to choose from, and so in this case, I say give me the full options and I'll decide at the time what's appropriate. And so I say set this to 100 on the minimum and maximum H2 which is 102,000. Now I don't recommend using H2, ever if possible, but it's nice to have it available if you want to set it manually. The next is the auto range. When you have the camera set to auto ISO, what's the range that you want it to stay within? And this one might be a little bit more critical for you to think about that top end. What is the highest ISO that you're willing to let the camera automatically choose before you make some other choices in other settings on the camera? And so 12,800, at least according to my standards, you're still getting pretty decent results from the camera, and I could see using 12, in a pretty dark situation, and so that's where I think it might be good to set the maximum number. You might have a higher number, you might have a lower one. The minimum shutter speed, now this one is very important when you are using the auto ISO. Because what happens in auto ISO is it's gonna kick up to a higher ISO when it needs more light. Question is, what shutter speed does it trigger that action into happening? You could manually choose a specific number, so for instance 1/125th of a second. Don't ever go below 1/125th of a second. If so, start bumping up the ISO. A very new kind of interesting feature that just kind of came around in the last few years is that you can now have this set to automatic, which means it looks at the lens, it determines what focal length you're at, determine what would be an appropriate shutter speed for that focal length, and then uses that as a basis for determining what that shutter speed is. And so let me give you an example. Let's say you're in aperture priority. You have an aperture set of 5.6. Now the camera is in control of the shutter speeds and the apertures. All right so let's get our shutter speeds and our apertures up here. Now under bright lighting conditions, camera's gonna let's say have a 1/60th of a second, okay, and as light gets brighter, camera is in control of shutter speeds, it's gonna set faster and faster shutter speeds to balance the brighter light out. Now as the light gets dimmer, the camera is gonna use slower and slower shutter speeds, up to a point, and this is the key thing. At what point does it stop changing shutter speeds, and start changing the ISO to compensate for the lower light levels? And in this case we have it set to either a 1/60th of a second. And so once it gets back down to ISO and it continues to get brighter, then it's gonna start using those shutter speeds. And so, where is that cutoff point that you want to have? and so the auto is a pretty good section to have, because what it will do, and let's take the example of a 28 millimeter lens, so a 28 millimeter lens under normal circumstances could be handheld pretty easily at 1/30th of a second. It's the one over the reciprocal rule. One over the focal length of the lens is the slowest shutter speed that you want to have, so 1/128th of a second, 1/30th rounds it out pretty closely. If you want, you can tweak this a little bit. You can say, you know what? I'm better than the average person at handholding the camera, so I can have it at a little bit slower scale, and so it will have one, two, or three stops difference if you want on the lower side, or you could say I'm focusing on action that's happening a little bit faster, and have it a little bit faster shutter speed. And so, this is a great way for anyone who is using auto ISO to control where that kick over is going from shutter speeds to ISO. So give it a chance to work for you. If you're shooting handheld and you're not shooting action, I would set it to Auto, to maybe auto slower, maybe minus one, maybe minus two. If you're photographing action that needs a particular shutter speed, that's when you input that particular specific shutter speed. Next up, Auto Lighting Optimizer. We talked about this before, this was in the quick menu. This is where the camera will go into JPEG images and it will lighten up the shadows, and it will prevent those highlights from becoming too bright. And so it's a way of just doing a slight little manipulation so it's a little bit easier to see most JPEGs in most cases. Has no impact on the raw image. We saw white balance a couple of times before. There's a control in the back of the camera on the quick menu for doing this. We can also jump in here and do it as well. We also have a Custom White Balance option, so I'm gonna do a little demo here in just a moment. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna photograph a white sheet of paper under the lighting that we are currently under. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to Set Custom White Balance, and we're gonna select that image as an image where the camera can read the light to figure out what color light it is, and then we would go to the White Balance and set it to Custom. So, if you were in an unusual lighting situation, and here in the studios we could say this is unusual lighting. These are not natural lights. They have a particular color temperature to them, and so if I wanted to photograph somebody or something and I wanted to have just true correct even colored light, what I would want to do is I would want to shoot a test photo of a white sheet of paper. And so what I'm gonna do right now, and you can watch me over my shoulder on the back of the camera while I do this. I've got my camera setup on the scene here, but I'm gonna take a picture of a white piece of paper. I know this isn't too exciting, and I'm gonna throw my camera into manual focus so that I don't have to worry about things. I'm gonna pretty much fill the frame here, and I'm just gonna take a basic photo right there. So not exactly the most exciting photo right here, but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna dive into the menu system, and I'm gonna get over to the page that we are on, which I think is page two, under Custom White Balance, and it's pulled up this photo here and I'm gonna say, Yes I want to use this photo as an example. Okay, so now it is set to that color, which is good, but now what I need to do is I need to go up to White Balance and I need to select this custom color right here. So now if I set this, it's set to this memorized color setting. And so now if I was to zoom in on my flowers and little prop project, we have nice clean colors that are accurate. Those fruits are very much that color. Those flowers are that color. If we were to just go through the White Balance system and choose something else that we though was pretty close. Let me jump out of live view real quick, and go into White Balance and check out something. So I think these lights are technically fluorescent lights here, and when I pull that up on White Balance, it's definitely not quite right. That background now looks blue, doesn't look right. If I point it at the piece of paper, yep that definitely looks too blue and so I have color corrected the light for the light that we are currently in right here, and I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna set that to my K setting because now I know it's perfect for the CreativeLIVE studios and so if you want to do that under any sort of unusual lighting situation, maybe you're photographing your kid's basketball game, and the lights in the gymnasium are just kind of funky, or you're taking pictures in your office and you have a mix of daylight and fluorescent lighting in there that just doesn't match one of the current settings in the camera, you can create your own using that exact same system. White balance shift and bracketing, we saw this in the quick menu. I hope you don't need this. If you do need to tweak the white balance even further than the standard settings, or the kelvin settings, you can do so in here. You can also do a bracketing system, which will give you a series of photos at different color tones. Color space is the range of colors that you are recording light. When you are shooting raw images, you get something called Adobe RGB color space which is a fairly large color space. When you shoot JPEGs, you can choose the smaller or the larger color space, and so it's probably better to shoot the larger color space if you want to print, or edit, or work with your images. It'll give you a little bit better of a color gamut to work with.