Lessons

Lesson Info

Camera Settings 1: Pages 10-14

Next up we got some items dealing with the flash, just a few items in here. So we have our Flash mode, we did see this before. It was in the Function Menu, so you can change how your camera fires the flash and the shutter speed that it would use in this. Flash compensation is something that we also saw before. And as I mentioned before if you do a lot of people photography you're just trying to add a little catch light to the eyes that would be a good case of using minus one on the exposure compensation. Alright so, when you are doing exposure compensation there's a couple different ways that you can do it. You can do exposure compensation and separately flash exposure compensation or you can say hey lets just do both of them together. And so for somebody that might not be real familiar with the balance between ambient and flash light, you can set ambient and flash all together and when you're using flash you just use one exposure compensation dial to make it brighter and darker. The m...

ore advanced users know there's a big difference between exposure, the ambient exposure and the flash exposure and they're gonna wanna go in and individually control those two. So it depends on how you work and how much manual manipulation you wanna have first on the control of those particular features To reduce red eye the camera fires a disco strobe of flashes at your eyes to help constrict the pupil and make it smaller so less light gets into the retina and bounces back out. It is effective which is good but the bad thing is it's really annoying and distracting. And red eye can be fixed very easily in post production so I like leaving this turned off so I'm not disturbing my subjects when I'm shooting them any more than I have to. Alright, next page of information on here deals with color, white balance, image processing. First up is white balance. Once again we had a button on the back of the camera. Excuse me we had a button on the top of the camera. It was also on the Function Menu but it's buried in here in case those get reassigned. Now one of the cool things that you can do in here and we did a example of this little demo earlier on, I'm not gonna do it here but the idea in the custom set up is you need to find something that does not have color, it's gray or white preferably. You're gonna select the custom set up. You'll press the control wheel when you're pointed at a white object. You can then set that to be custom one two or three. Then you press the center button and it corrects for that color. So it's a great way to get correct color in tricky lighting situations. One of the options for white balance is tungsten lighting. And tungsten is a very orange warm lighting. It's a comfortable type of lighting and when the camera corrects for it it kind of corrects too much for it for some people and so you can tell it how much to correct for it. You can have it pure white, you know, if you're trying to get colors exactly right under tungsten lights you'd put this at white. If you wanna leave it at standard or ambient it can still keep some of that warm light, that it originally has. When you have tungsten lights, for instance, photographing people or in your living room or something there's a nice warm feeling to it and maybe you want to continue to have that warm feeling in your final photographs and not perfectly correct for it. So you're basically telling the camera how much to correct for that particular lighting situation Next up is DRO/Auto HDR and so this is the dynamic range auto. We talked briefly about this before. This is where the camera shoots multiple photographs, in some cases, to get a better exposure. In some cases it's using a single photograph. So lets look at an example here. So DRO Dynamic Range Optimizer shoots a single JPEG image. It then processes that image to protect for the highlights and raise the shadow levels so you can see into the shadows more easily. So the difference between these images, between Level 1 and Level 5 if you look at the ceiling, look how much brighter the ceiling is in photograph number five, that's because the camera is lightening the shadows which is something that a lot of people like to do in a lot of photographs. And in this case it is just doing it on its own and so if you wanted to do it with a single shot JPEG you could do that. The other option is High Dynamic Range and this is where the camera shoots multiple photographs which means you can not be shooting moving subjects and you need to be shooting from a tripod. It will then do an even better job at collecting this information. So the difference between these different photographs here if you look at HDR six EV you can see much more detail in the clouds and in the underside of that bridge. So it's getting more of that information in the shadows, more of that information in the highlights, combining those multiple images into a single shot. So must be working from a tripod with stationary subjects in this case here. And this is once again in JPEGs. I also recorded the histograms for these so you can see what the histogram looks like. It's not a huge change but you'll notice as you go up in intensity level on the HDR, it is kinda pushing the sides of the histogram towards the middle. It's bringing them closer making sure that they are within the exposure range of that particular sensor. So under a very tricky lighting situation where you wanted to shoot JPEG this is a way to get it in there without having to deal with Photoshop or any other post production software out there. Normally this is going to be left off and then you have the option of turning one or the other one on depending on if your subject is moving and you're trying to capture it in a single shot or if multiple shots. Don't really need it in raw. You can adjust it yourself there quite easily. Next up is Creative Style. We saw this before in the camera and this is where the camera will shoot with slightly different contrasts and sharpness and vividness to the images and you can adjust and have a different look in here. Just as a standard the standard is fine. Neutral's not bad either if you don't mind doing a little bit of work later to correct for this. The Picture Effect is a little bit stronger than Creative Style, you might see it as an extension of it. This is where the camera will go in and create a JPEG image. And lets go head and take a look at some of the options that we can do in here. So there's our standard image and then we can play around with a Toy camera look and our Pop color and so there's gonna be a lot of saturation, contrast, sharpening and then there's just gonna be just some really strong filter modes. So if you're into Instagram filters or you like playing around in Photoshop, you can do it straight in camera here. Now remember anytime you see an arrow to the right that means you can go in and you can further customize and usually there's often times a low, a medium and a high setting for any particular mode you have. And so there's some really funky stuff. This is not where you're normally going to be keeping your camera but if you wanna try something fun, something different. I really do like the look of that Illustration. I think it worked really well on that tree and so you never know when one of these might be kind of just the right scenario for giving a different look to a type of image but clearly this is not something you want to leave your camera turned to all the time, at least for most users. But you know playing around having some fun is what this one's all about. So normally leave that guy turned off. Okay slowly making our way to the next setting Picture Profile. Okay this is one area I'm gonna profess to you right now I do not know everything about everything in this particular mode. This is for people who shoot video and they want to get a flat image profile from their video so they can color grade and adjust the contrast and sharpness later on. So this is a way to get the most dumb down simple basic flat image out of the camera. It's still high quality. It's very good sharpness but you can go in here and you can adjust all the different levels here. Now apparently very popular is the S-Log2 gamma curve. Lets take a look at some of the options that you have when you get in here. There's all sorts of tweaks and adjustments that you can have controlling the highlights and the shadows and the blacks. And there we go. And so all of these are different levels that you can get into. And this is something that I have not gotten into in depth because I don't shoot that much video. I shoot a little bit of video here and there. But you can really get this customized. So like if you had a professional editor that wanted to work with a certain look to images or you were trying to get the footage of this camera to match another professional video camera you're likely to be able to go in here and start adjusting those sorts of settings. And so it can increase the Dynamic Range up to 1300% of what you'd get from a standard JPEG. And so it's gonna look frankly, it's gonna look ugly when you're shooting it because it's just gonna be flat and muddy and not have any contrast not have very much color but it's something you can work with much much later on. Alright continuing along the way, page 12 Soft Skin Effect. So if you're shooting JPEGs it will, what's it gonna do here, it's gonna lower the mid tone contrast and give you a little less texture in the skin make it look a little bit smoother. If you're shooting portraits, an option, normally I would leave that turned off. Next up Focusing Assist Mode. So the Focusing Magnifier on here is it's kind of useless having it buried this far into menu system. The idea here is that you'd assign that to a custom key button so that when you want to magnify in your image to focusing you would press that one button and then it would magnify that image. And so there's many different ways that you can set up the focusing and that's just one of the ways of getting in there so that you can focus and see that more clearly. Now when you do have it magnified how long do you want it there? Do you want it there for a particular amount of time two five seconds or No Limit so you have as much time as possible. I find that two and five seconds just isn't enough time for my focusing. I wanna leave it on No Limit. When it is magnified in do you wanna be able to focus automatically while you're there? And I do find that very convenient, at least, for the way that I work and so it seems to work quite well but if you don't want it to be able to focus while it's magnified in it's just for viewing and judging focus you can have that as an option if you wanted to turn that off. Alright so Magno Focus Assist what that'll if you turn that on the camera will go and turn on the magnifier so that when you do put it in manual focus it automatically turns on and enlarges the image. And so let me go ahead and do a little demo here on the camera to show you that. So lets see what page are we on. We're on page 13 to 14. Gotta keep that note of where we are. So I'm gonna turn on manual focus assist and make sure that is on. And so now if I go into manual focus, I'll just do the C2 button up here and go into manual focus right now. So anytime I grab the focusing ring and start to turn it's gonna jump in. I think I can just move the focusing point around here a little bit. And lets see if I can get in any closer. Nope that's just moving up and down. And so its got one magnified point and then I can see if I'm in focus or not and then I can come back. I think if I have it in No Limit right now, it stays there as long as I want and then when I press down on the shutter release it kicks back to the normal angle of view. If I wanna adjust focus then it automatically goes in right there. And so in this case it's just automatically doing it for me. The item that we were just talking about, Focus Magnifier up here that's the idea for it being there is so that you set it to a custom button, like the C3 button so you'd press that button to go in and press that button to come back out from that enlarged image. Peaking Level alright so another way we can work with manual focusing is by turning the peaking on or off. I'll do a little demo here in just a moment. We wanna look at the next feature as well with this. So there's a low medium and high setting on this. And then we can choose a color. And so we have different colors in here. So let me go ahead and dive into the menu system and show you on this one. And so I'm already in the right area. So Peaking Level lets get this turned on. Lets turn em on medium right now. High is really quite high on this one. And Peaking Color lets go for Red. And I'm gonna adjust where this camera is just a little bit cause I wanna focus on something close and far away. And so lets get this turned on. And so where's our close subject here? So everything that's shimmering in red is in focus. And so now this is where the magnifying is not helping me out too much. So I'm gonna dive into the menu and turn off the manual focus assist which is the Magnifying Assist cause I wanna keep it on the full screen here. And as I focus you can see the foreground subject is in focus so it's shimmering in red when it's in focus. Focus all the way in the background then it's in red. And if I don't like my particular settings, I can come down here, I can change the color a lot of people have it on white and lets just set it on low just to see how low this is. And so you can see a little bit of shimmering in the background. Lets focus on the foreground and see our subject in the foreground. Very little shimmer there so we can see that we're focusing on that cameras dial cause there's just a little bit of that shimmering going on right in there. And my hand is not shimmering. There it's in focus cause it's in the plane of focus right there. So if you like to manually focus that's a good option for you to turn that on. I find it kind of irritating so I don't like to leave it turned on all the time. Of course it's something that you can of course reprogram to one of the custom buttons if it's something you use on a very regular basis Alright final page of the first tab. Slowly making our way through this. Alright so this is kind of a weird one. So this is a Smile and Face Detection. And I think we actually turned this on and off before. And I think Drew we're gonna need you for a little practice here. So we can do a Smile and Face Detection on this and so lets get this camera set up first. Make sure we're in the right modes. First off we need to be on a manual focus. So lets get ourselves into single focus that should be just fine. As far as focusing area I'm just gonna go down and choose a large box area and we need to go in and turn this particular mode on. Smile and Face Detection we can turn it on for registered faces. Normal we'll do this in a moment here. So we're just gonna turn it on normal here. And so there we go. It's locked on the face. And if you just wanna take a step forward, a step to your left, move back up. And we can see it tracking that and I can shoot a photo at anytime and it's gonna be tracking that facial detection even up close like that. Okay go head stand back just a moment and I'm gonna dive to the next one here. I'm gonna show you this. I think we've got time. Facial Recognition alright and so what registration excuse me. We're gonna do a new registration and so what we can do is if you have like kids or people in your family. Do you have people in your family, Drew? Okay so I'm gonna take one photo and you can see he's right there. And I'm gonna register his face. And I'm gonna enter that in here. And so now it is registered. Okay so lets go back to the Menu. Registered I've got to hit the Okay button. Okay New Registration so you can do order exchanging. You can have up to eight people in your family, you can not have more than eight people in your family so that is the rule folks according to Sony. You can order these. This would be fun. You've got kids? Who's the most important kid? Who's your favorite kid you want to prioritize? And then what you can do is that you can when you are doing the facial detection Where is this? Right here no no no no no. I thought it was right up here. Or you could chose it on Registered Faces. It will go after face number one before number two and to number two before number three. Oh wow. So it prioritizes the faces. So if you could imagine your child, your one and only child is of course number one in there and they're up on a stage with 20 other kids in the school play it's gonna only focus on your kid. Wow. Which I think is really cool. That's pretty cool. Now another feature in here is a Smile Detection Shutter which will automatically shoot a picture when somebody smiles. And so Drew do not smile right now. I'm gonna try not to. I'll try real hard. Try not to smile. Don't laugh or anything like that. Now we do have the option big smile, slight smile and normal smile. So we're gonna go for a slight smile. And I think this is turned on. So give us a slow smile into a big smile. And you can see it. Okay there it registered. Go back to frowny face. Now watch the indicator at home folks, on the left. Now go from frowny face to smile. Meter's goin up and there we go. Lets change it to a big smile. Actually where is it? It's in the Menu. Okay we're gonna go down here to face. We're gonna go down to Normal Big Smile. So we're gonna go from frowny face where we're really low and so we've gotta more smile more more more. There we go! We got a big smile on that one. Lets try lets do the small just to see how slight of smile it will read. So we're gonna go down to Smile. Big Slight Smile so frowny face and give us a slow smile. More there we go. And so okay thank you very much. Go ahead and have a seat. So here's an example of a slight smile and a big smile and then a medium smile. So medium, big and slight. And so it actually did a pretty good job at that. It's kinda a goofy way of doing a self timer shot. So like if you were trying to shoot your own head shot for like business cards or something like that stand in front of that it's gonna focus on you and it's just gonna shoot when you smile. Now if you don't want to be smiling in your photograph you're gonna have to figure out something else but for smiling it's gonna work just fine. So kinda a fun, interesting feature not not a feature on a lot of cameras. Alright so that was the Smile and Face Detection and we actually just did the demo on the Facial Registration so you could have up to eight faces registered in there so it recognizes them and prioritizes focusing on them versus other people. You can exchange the order. One kid's bad they can go down to the bottom of the list. Auto Object Framing Alright I hate to say this but this is the worst feature in this camera. I would never ever use it. If you would like to play a practical joke on me and you meet me at some national park or I'm we happen to meet in some country tell me you have a Sony camera and that you use Auto Object Framing and you love it and it's how you do all of your photography. What the camera does here is the camera will crop and reframe your photos after you've taken them. Why would it do that? Cause it thinks it knows better composition than you do. I think that's one of the joys of using a camera is being able to compose the photograph yourself. So using facial detection subject tracking also works in Macro modes. What the camera does is it tries to fix your stuff. And what I have found and I try to use this as much as I can it's sporadic when it turns on, what it does is completely unpredictable, you get different things all the time. So if you wanna goof around and play around with this mode feel free to do it. I just can't imagine a scenario that anyone would ever want to use this mode. And so yeah it should be something that should just be deleted from the menu system completely. Do not use this.