Lessons

Lesson Info

Quick Menu: Noise, Image Size, Film Sim & Color

First up is noise reduction and this is basically high ISO noise reduction. As you shoot with higher ISOs, you're gonna get noise on your images, and if you want to control that you can control the level that the camera will fix, that setting. It's kind of set, right now, to do a little bit of fix setting at zero. I wanted to shoot a test photo at a variety of these settings in here. This first little slice that you see is from ISO 6400. You can see at minus one we're getting a fair bit of noise, and at minus four, it might be correcting too much for the noise. What happens is it starts to muddle the details and soften the image. It kinda becomes a little bit muddy, and it's doing a little too much correction, for many people in many cases. The best way to deal with shooting at ISO 400, in my opinion, is of course shooting with the RAW image and going in and adjusting that in post production, which is what I did over there on the right. It may not seem quite as contrasty in the colors ...

'cause I haven't got to changing that part yet, but you'll have even more control there. For those who wanna shoot JPEGs, you can really dial how much is, fixed or attempted to be fixed, by the camera. I wanted to try it at a more extreme level, so this is ISO 25600. Looking at these results closely, plus four is just a little too much correction. I could see leaving it at zero, maybe plus two, maybe you want it to do less and you wanna go in and control more of it yourself later on. You might have it even on the minus side on that. Once again, you're likely to get even better results with RAW if you're willing to go in and work with those images later on in post-production. Zero is not a bad place to leave it for now. Adjust it as you see fit. Next up, image size. For the JPEG shooters, what size of image are you recording. We have large, medium, and small, along with different aspect ratios. The large, medium, and small is how many megapixels, 24, 12, or six megapixels, and the aspect ratio of the sensor is 3:2, but if you wanna shoot the wide HD format, you can shoot 16:9, or you can shoot squares, 1:1. So, you would select that. Be very careful about selecting a square image in there. It's not something everybody wants to do on a regular basis. Next up, is image quality. This is where we get to choose RAW, or JPEG, or both. When it says fine and normal, what that really means is it's a JPEG of higher compression or lower compression. If you are shooting JPEGs, you would probably wanna shoot it in fine. With RAW, there are the options of shooting plain RAW, or RAW with a normal size or a fine size JPEG. A lot of people who use the Fujis wanna get the RAW information off of it, but the JPEGs do have something to them. A lot of people are shooting RAW and JPEG on this camera. I'm doing it for, kind of, a completely different reason. I'm doing it because, when you shoot a JPEG, you get a greater magnification in the playback mode. Let me go ahead and do a little demo here, for you, on that right now. It seems like a good place to do it. First thing I am going to do is, I am going to go into the Quick Menu, and we're gonna change this to a RAW image. First image here, let me get in closely. (camera beeping) what focusing system am I on? I'm gonna go back to single point here. I'm gonna focus on the clock, up there, the timer. I'm gonna shoot one image here, now I'm gonna go back in to the Quick Menu, and I am going to change it from RAW to a fine quality JPEG. Okay, and I'm gonna shoot a picture. Actually I shot a couple pictures there 'cause I had the continuous setting on. So lemme go back and I need to go back to the, lemme double check where's my status here. So I'm looking in the back here, I wanna get to the RAW image. This is the RAW image. You remember, if I wanna zoom in, how do I zoom in? I press this dial on the back. I zoom in, and that's as close as I can get. So are we filling the frame with the timer? Definitely not. Now I'm gonna press playback and I wanna get to my JPEG image, and I wanna make sure that I'm on JPEG. Here I am on the large, fine JPEG there. I'm gonna change the display back to fullscreen, and when I press in on this it's gonna zoom in on where the focus point was, it was on the timer. Look how much closer we are. This is much easier to judge focus. If we don't want this close, we can always back off. The RAW, if I recall, was somewhere around here. But now, we can get in much closer to check focus. For just this reason alone, I shoot RAW plus JPEG. I'm gonna go in and shoot, RAW, you can shoot even normal. I'm gonna go ahead and shoot it on fine. Now when I take a photo let's focus in on the fruit down here. (camera beeping) Take a look at this image. Zoom in, and we're in there nice and close so we can see if that's sharp or not. That's why I'm often shooting in RAW plus JPEG. Adjust that as your needs see fit, but if you do wanna get that close up view, you need to be shooting a JPEG. It can be either alone or with the RAW images. Next up is the film simulation. This is where the camera, in JPEG modes, can mimic different types of film. Let's go ahead and take a look at an example. Here's our standard shot from the camera. What we're gonna do is we're gonna take a portion of it, it doesn't need to be too small 'cause we're kinda just looking at the colors and the lightness and the darkness, of what it looks like with a Provia, which is a very standard process which is gonna look pretty close to the RAW. The RAW's a little bit on the flat side. The Velvia is gonna be high in contrast, very rich in saturation. Then we have a softer colors, which is better for portrait photography. If you're shooting portraits, don't use Velvia. It's not a good one for it. Much better would be Astia. There's a Classic Chrome which is a very soft color, they've kinda desaturated things. Then there's a PRO Neg. Hi res and Lo res. This was originally designed around film, designed for portrait photographers, often either working outside or in the studio. Kinda shot it in a, low saturation so they could add as much saturation as they need, later on. If you would like a visual of, where do all these films fit in comparison to each other. Here's a graph and we're gonna do low saturation on the left, and high saturation on the right. High contrast above and low contrast below. Provia is right there in the middle. Astia is that little bit softer one so it's good for portrait photography. If you wanted to look at the scale you could say, things higher up on the scale are good for landscapes, and the ones down below are better for people photography. Classic Chrome kinda has it's own unique look to it, and then those PRO Negs are on the lower side, very good for portrait photography, as well, where you might be adjusting those colors later on. Along with this, we have several Monochrome modes. One that will use yellow, red, and green filters. You might wanna play around to see which ones work best for the types of subjects that you're working with. Reds often work well for landscapes because they make the blue skies very dark. I didn't have a blue sky on this test. Greens can often work well for portraits. Then we have the Acros, which is a special black and white mode. It's a black and white, and it's very similar to the Monochrome. Its gonna have a little different contrast to it. One of the things that's unique about the Acros mode, is that it has, kind of, a built in film grain look to it. There's kind of a contrast that you're gonna see as it changes at different ISOs. I'll show you an example of that in an upcoming slide. We have standard Monochrome and Acros and, I've kinda gone back and forth as to which ones I like. We do, also, have a Sepia, which adds just kinda that, brown hue for that old-timey look in the photographs. I wanted to compare on the black and white, the Monochrome versus the Acros models. What I did is I shot one scene using both systems at different ISOs. I wanted to look at the contrast levels. One of the things you'll notice is that the Acros has a little bit more contrast, the blacks are a little bit deeper on them. Let me get those coming up here, there we go. One of the things that some people like, I at first didn't like, I'm warming up a little bit to, but I haven't totally warmed up yet, is that when you shoot the Acros at very high ISOs, it adds in a simulated film grain. I would say that Fuji does a better job than anybody else in this type of, kind of, digital film grain, if you will. I think I'm still kinda in preference to the standard Monochrome one. There's choices there because everyone has their own opinion. Test it out yourself, see what you like and make those choices yourself. Those are our film simulation modes and that's gonna be something that's applied to JPEG images. Something that we'll do a little bit later on, you can shoot a RAW image, this is really cool, you can shoot a RAW image, and then you can come back later on, and you can process the image in the camera to make any one of these JPEGs, that you want out of the camera. All of this information is coming from the RAW, so as long as you have the RAW, you can go back and make one of these, later on. Moving to our next line in the Quick Menu. We have our highlight tones, and this is, once again, for JPEG only shooters, and this is controlling the intensity of the highlights. If you want them even brighter, you would go to plus four. If you want them less bright, you would go to minus two. Kind of the exact opposite of that is the shadow tones for JPEG only. If you want the shadows more intense you would go to the plus side, and if you want them less intense you would go to the minus side. This deserves, of course, a little image sample. Here's our image, we have areas in the shadow, we have areas in the brightness. What we're gonna do is we're gonna make some adjustments. We're gonna go at minus two in the highlights. Notice in that red area what the highlights look like, and you'll notice in the plus four photo that they are blown out highlights. Doesn't really, particularly look good in this case, but it's showing you what it does. In the shadow areas, let's look at some shadow regions at minus two. We're brightening up the shadows. Then at plus four, we're making the shadows a little bit darker. One of the things that's a little confusing is if you are used to exposure compensation, you need to forget that when we get into the highlight shadows. Plus means more intense of that particular feature, minus means less intense of that particular feature. You can, of course, combine these. You can take them both to minus. It's trying to make the image a more flat image. If you really wanna see what's going on, you can see what's going on very clearly in the histogram. When you go to the plus on both sides, you are making a more contrasty image. For this particular image, I think looks terrible, but it's something you might wanna play around with if you shoot black and white photos in camera. You can get a little bit more contrasty look, straight in the camera and in the viewfinder, as you're composing. Normally I'd leave those set on zero but they are a good place to play around a little bit and have some fun. Next up is the color, and this is simply the saturation. How much saturation do you want? Let's do a quick little example. Here's our base image. We're gonna go in and look at the colors at these different settings. Minus reduces the intensity of the color. Zero is normal, and then we can have more intense colors. If you're shooting landscapes, you might wanna go a little bit to the plus side. If you're shooting people, you might wanna go a little bit to the minus side. That is, once again, only for JPEGs. Sharpness. JPEG only. How much sharpening do you want the camera to do, on a particular photo? Let's take a photo and let's go in real close and take a look at the sharpness, 'cause we wanna see what the camera is doing at these different sharpness levels. You can clearly see there is a sharpness difference between these images. It is fully possible to over sharpen an image. If you're new to Photoshop or, you haven't dealt with sharpening before, it seems like, well I want things as sharp as possible. When you start doing that there's artifacts and, kind of, a weird edge that happens on a lot of items in the photograph itself. You don't want to over sharpen an image, it's not a good thing to do. Leaving this on zero to start with is not a bad default system, but if you want to tweak it a little bit, there's definitely some room for tweaking in here.