Lessons
Class Overview
13:49 2Photo Basics
03:58 3Top Deck: Basic Controls
03:35 4Top Deck: Mode Dial and Exposure Compensation
24:50 5Custom Key Settings
08:43 6Focus Area
08:22 7Multi Interface Shoe, Audio, Focal Plane
02:15 8Back Side Controls: Focus Mode
06:14Back Side Controls: Viewfinder
08:27 10Additional Back Side Controls
07:55 11Back Side Controls: Function Button
19:31 12Back Side Controls: Control Wheel, Display, ISO, Drive Mode
03:22 13Back Side Controls: Playback Mode
04:54 14Left Side Controls
03:02 15Right Side Controls
05:15 16Bottom Controls
03:20 17Front Controls
03:12 18Sony Lenses
11:43 19Menu Functions: Camera Settings 1
31:10 20Menu Functions: Camera Settings 1 Continued
33:15 21Menu Functions: Camera Settings 2 - Video
27:43 22Menu Functions: Network
13:10 23Menu Functions: Playback
06:42 24Menu Functions: Set Up
26:04 25My Menu
11:55 26Camera Operation
10:16Lesson Info
Menu Functions: Playback
Let's take a look at the playback menu. There's not a lot in here that's important for image quality, but it's just convenience in playing back your images. If you want, you can protect images, which means it prevents them from being deleted in the camera. You can still reformat the card, so you still need to be careful about what you do. Rotating will allow you to rotate the images. If you're gonna be using a TV, for instance, to do a slide show, you might need to rotate your vertical images depending on how other features are set in the camera. Generally it's not recommended to delete in camera. Anytime you do that, you're kind of messing with the communication with the camera and deleting a file may not be the best choice. I've not really had a problem with it. But you can come in here and delete. There is a delete button on the back of the camera. That's far easier to use than coming in here. But this is better if you need to delete a lot of individual photos, because rather than g...
oing delete and then hitting confirm yes, yes, that's what I want, and doing that over and over again, what you do is you basically just look at a list of the images and you hit check boxes by all the ones you want to delete once, and then at the end you hit one delete for everything. So it's a lot less button presses, for anyone who does wanna delete a good number of images. You can now add ratings to your images, and so if you wanna add a one to five-star rating, this'll carry forward to programs like Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. You can, in fact, in the next item here, rating set, you can set a custom key on your camera, so if you wanna have a key for one star and a key for two stars and one for three stars, you can set your camera up so that you can rate images very well. I don't know that this is the best use of customization of your buttons, but if you were trapped on a long airplane flight and you were trying to edit your images, it might make working with them a little bit easier. And so it just depends on what you're doing as to what is gonna be useful for you. You can hook your camera up to a printer. Not the best way to print, but it is a way to do it without the computer. And you can specify various printing options when you get into this a little bit more closely. Page two in playback, you can copy images from one memory card to the other, and so if you're shooting photos and your friend wants a copy of your photo, you can put the memory card into the second slot of your camera and copy over that one individual image or a group of 'em if you want. Photo capture I mentioned briefly before. When you shoot video, when you play back that video, you can pull a still frame from that video, and so that might be a good reason for shooting 4k video is that you get a higher quality still image from that situation. Enlarging the image just is simply a, allows you to zoom in. And there is already a zoom in button on the back of the camera. That's the AF on button when you're in the playback mode. But if you wanna assign a different button, you can do that by assigning the enlarge image option to it. Enlarge initial magnification. How much magnification do you wanna go into, the standard magnification or the previous, what the previous image that you were looking at. And so it depends a little bit on how you're looking at images, but standard mag would work for most people. Enlarge the initial position. Now, usually when you zoom in, it's gonna zoom in to the middle of the frame. In this case it'll zoom in to the focused position, and that's often a little bit different, and that's a good place where you wanna zoom in to see where your images are the sharpest. You can hook this camera up to various monitors to do slide shows, and you can come into here to set up that slide show about repeating and how long the interval is between the images. Playback menu three, you can select which one of the memory cards you want to access for playing back images. You might be actively using slot one, but you might have images stored in slot two that you wanna access and look at for a particular situation. You can view images in different ways by grouping 'em by movies, by stills, by date, and looking just at those images. So if you were trying to do a slide show of a particular subject or a group or a folder that you had, you can select that right here. When you zoom back on the camera, you'll get nine images, but if you would prefer to get 25, you can get 25 images by selecting that option here. Display continuous shooting group. So normally when you shoot a whole group of images that are happening really quick and then you stop to look at what you just shot, you see the last image in the group, and then you can go back to the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one. And what this does is it kinda groups 'em all together so that as you're scrolling through your images, any large group of images that you shot together were, are just in one bunch, and you can go through 'em if you want or you can kinda pass through them and go on to the next one. It could be very handy for sports photographers. Display rotation. In manual, which is best for TV playback, will always keep them set for viewing on a horizontal screen. Off will get you the largest size image at any of the time, which normally I would recommend and is quite good, but they have a fairly new one called auto, which will automatically rotate the image according to how you're holding the camera, which is really nice, so that it always looks good no matter how you happen to be holding the camera. Image jump setting goes into a little bit of a sub-menu in here. And so this is where you can select a dial to jump ahead a little bit further. And so normally you're gonna use the dial on the back of the camera to go one forward or one back, but you can use these dials to jump further if you want. And so the jump method allows you to jump by different sets of data, and so one of the things that I've done in the past, and this is a little trick that'll make you look like a great photographer, is go star rate all of your good images two stars or higher, and then put your playback mode into only going to two star or higher rated images. And then when you hand your camera over to your friend to say take a look at the photos I shot, they're only going to see your highest rated images. So it's a good way to just, you know, simply peruse the best of the best at that point, and so it's a good system for using it.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Angela Sanchez
Super great clearly explained guide for the Sony a7r III. John is always a fantastic knowledgeable instructor who knows how to teach all about cameras in a super clear organized way. I love John Geengo classes!
Craig Markham
As always, John shines as a teacher extraordinaire! His visuals, pacing of presentation, clarity, and and adherence to the class objectives are all spot-on. As a devoted A7r II user for the past 2 years, this was a great review of the shared features, and gave me the best information for evaluating the cost/benefit of an upgrade to the A7r III now.
ufmystic
John Greengo is the man. I've been watching CreativeLive classes for years and there is no better instructor than him. I recently upgraded from the A7r II to the III and had been waiting for this course to be offered. John is incredibly knowledgeable and, with great dedication, provides all pertinent information related to operating and knowing your new camera. If it weren't for John, I wouldn't know the ins and outs of my new camera and would struggle with optimal settings which would decrease the best output possible. You rock, John. Thanks again!
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