Lessons

Lesson Info

My Menu & Playback Menu

Alright, now we have My Menu, which is, of course, everyone's favorite menu, and this is where you get to choose what's in the menu system and where it's located. And so let's do a quick little look in the camera and do a little customizing in here. We're gonna go in and hit the menu button. Let's get over to My Menu, and we're gonna Add My Menu tab. And so we're gonna add a tab, which is gonna be a group of features. And so this one, we're gonna go ahead and hit Set up now. And we're gonna Select items, and so what sorta things in here. And so I'm gonna put in things that deal with image quality: so Recording Mode, Image quality. (humming) Let's see what else do we have. I'm just gonna add in a couple of others just to showcase some things in here, AF operation. And then when I'm set, okay that's good enough for now. I'm gonna hit MENU, and I am going to sort these items. So here's what my first tab of the menu system looks like. And maybe I want Image quality first on the list, so I ...

will hit SET, and I will go up and move it up to top of the list. And maybe I want AF operation number two on the list, and I'll hit SET right there. Now I'm done with that. I'm gonna hit MENU to back outta this, and I'm gonna rename this tab. And so if I wanted to name this as my page one, or I wanted to have this as my movie settings, or my landscape settings, I could rename this. I'm not gonna bother going in and renaming it, but you can use the touch pad or you can use this to go ahead and rename it. And so then what we could do now is we'll hit MENU to back outta this. And so now we have two tabs. We have the first one, which is just My Menu page one. And we could add another menu tab here. And we'd go through the same process again. And we would set this up, Select items. I'm just gonna select a bunch of random items in here, and there we go. I'm gonna press MENU. I could sort these. I'm not gonna bother with that, but I'm gonna go ahead and back outta this. And now I have page one and page two. And then this page, the last page is always kind of your organization page. Now, the beauty of this system is that when I turn the camera off, (click) I turn the camera on, (click) and I wanna go to the MENU. Where does it go first? It goes to My Menu, because we've activated this. And so now we only have to go through these two pages to find my favorite features. And so you can populate this with, I believe, five pages of information. And so you wanna stick in the most important information, perhaps, into the M function button, into the dial functions, into the quick menu, and then, finally, into the menu system, because you're not always able to get access to all of the features on all those other buttons and dials on the camera. And so this is a good way for you to never have to go back into the menu system if you're willing to take the time and set it up right the first time around, which I encourage you to do! Another five or 10 minutes of your time and you can get the menu set up perfectly for you. Alright, if you recall, to get to the Playback Menu, you gotta hit playback and then MENU. Then you can get in and control a number of features that deal with specifically playback options. For many of the users out there, I'm gonna guess that there's not a lot of options in here that are really important, because once you shoot the photo, you're gonna be dealing with it in your computer, in your software, later on. The Protect, first up, allows you to indicate certain images and prevent them from being deleted with the garbage can button on the back of the camera. The card can still be reformated, the images can still be deleted on the memory card when the card is out of the camera, so it's a very low level of protection. You could Rotate your images if you're gonna be putting on a slideshow, and you've taken some vertical images, and you wanna make sure that they're gonna appear correctly on the tv or on the back of the camera. If you're gonna erase a lot of images, it's faster to come here to Erase so that you Select individual images just one at a time, and then you select Erase for all of them rather than selecting images, erasing, selecting, and erasing, selecting, and erasing. You save that erase step 'til the very end. If you wanna rate your images, you can give 'em up to five stars. And this is transferred to the metadata, which does transfer it forward to other photo programs. And so it's a way for you to get a jump on the editing process of your images. You can put on a little slideshow. And so hooking up your camera to a tv, you can select which images and a few little parameters for doing a slideshow. Page 2 Playback Menu: those hybrid auto modes where it shoots video and photos at the same time. What this will do is it will go through, and it will collect up all of those videos, put 'em together in one consecutive video, and play that video like I showed you in the first part of the class. And so it'll show you the videos and the still images all kind of combined together. You can do an Image Search on this; you could look for images under a different date or some other different parameters, like star ratings. And so if you're looking for images on the card and there's a lot of images, you can narrow it down a little bit more easily. You can add filters after the fact. If you remember, early on in the class I talked about some of the filters that you could use in the Creative modes on the camera. Well, you can just shoot standard photos and add those later as you want. And so you don't have to shoot it at the time. You can do it after the fact by going into the creative filters. You can Resize your images, which really means downsize, make 'em smaller in size. You could crop an image if you want in-camera. It doesn't crop the original image. What it does is it crops, and it saves it as a new image. And so you're never harming an image by doing something like resizing or cropping. It's creating a duplicate copy. You can go in in post-production here and you can fix Red-Eye Correction. It doesn't always work, but it's there for cases that it may work. Really nice to have in a camera is that if you are shooting RAW and you need a JPEG but you don't have your computer out, you can take a RAW image, and you can turn it into a JPEG right in the camera so that you don't need any external device in which to do that with. And you can also make changes to that image when you are doing that conversion down to a JPEG. If you wanna print directly from the camera, you can do that. There's gonna be a whole set of parameters about what you choose, and what type of prints, and how many prints, and so forth. I'd recommend going through a computer so that you have better color control, but it's possible directly through the camera. Photobook Set-up is simply a collection of images. And so if you wanted to group up a collection of images, perhaps for a slideshow, perhaps for printing, you could do that process in the camera. It's limited to really working in the camera, so it's not gonna do you much good outside. But if you wanted to, say, have some highlight photos from your travels. Rather than showing all of your photos, you could have a photobook set up of your favorite shots that you could go in and select and playback. There's some other kinda goofy things in here. The Transitional Effect: there's this little fade in and out between photos that frankly is a little irritating once you have played with it very much. So when you play back images, you'll notice as you go from one image to the next, the screen goes black for a quarter of a second. If you wanna turn that Off and just go from one image to the next, I'd recommend that, just turn it Off. Index Effect. And so as you go through large groups of images, they kinda get slanted back, like you're zooming back and forth across the top of all of these images. It's just kinda goofy stuff that you can leave it turned On or Off, it really doesn't have much effect at all. The Scroll is kind of nice on the back of the camera. And let me show you on the back of my camera real quickly. I'm gonna put this in the playback mode. And so as I scroll through my images, you'll see how they become very small in size. I can see it large, I can go from image to image. But as I go faster, they become small. And then, if I go up and down, I can change by date. And so you can see different dates that I shot these images on. And so it's a good way of kinda scrolling through your different images in there. And so I kinda like that system. That system, I think, works out pretty good. (clicking) Highlight alert will blink over exposed pixels at you, and it's a good alert to let you know that your exposure has gone a little wrong and that you might wanna take another photo. It's not something I like to have turned on all the time, but from time to time it's some useful information. AF point display will show you where your camera was focusing when you took the photo, and this is helpful for people learning their camera. But once you get used to it, it's kind of a clunky overlay that you won't wanna have turned on. If you wanna have a a grid, just kind of for judging, for compositional reasons, you can have that on playback. We saw this before, but that was while you were shooting. So there's two separate ones. Auto Rotate will automatically rotate your images so that you can see 'em the maximum size, so leave that turned On. That's a good thing. Final page in the Playback Menu: Resume. As far as when you're playing back images, this will go back to the Last seen shot, as opposed to the Last shot. Depends on how you're viewing your images, but usually the last one you looked at is a good one to go back to. I mentioned on the top of the camera that front dial can be used for jumping forward 10 photos, or back. You could change it to a hundred, or by date, or by rating. You can use the star and focus button on the side of the camera in the playback mode to zoom in and zoom out, and this is a nice feature. It's on a lot of other Canon cameras as well. And so it's just another way of zooming in and zooming out beyond the other controls that you already have there. Playback information just allows you to choose how much information you see when you play back an image. It's nice to have a variety of information, depending on what you're looking for. When you zoom in to check sharpness, I recommend Actual size. This gets you into the pixel level, so that you are looking pixel for pixel at sharpness, and it's the best way for seeing if your images are actually sharp.