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4a. Menu System part 2

Lesson 5 from: Canon Rebel T2i / 550D Fast Start

John Greengo

4a. Menu System part 2

Lesson 5 from: Canon Rebel T2i / 550D Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

5. 4a. Menu System part 2

Next Lesson: Camera Operation

Lesson Info

4a. Menu System part 2

all right, so I think we're ready to move on to the next little section. It is going to be the playback menu in the camera, and so in here you want to be into one of the manual modes, and there's gonna be two tabs on the first tab. You can protect images. If you have an image that you want to make sure that you don't accidentally delete, you can put a little lock on it if you want, and I just kind of mention is we're starting this out is we're gonna go in that going through the playback menu rather quickly. It's not something that a lot of people spend a lot of time in. You can rotate images in here if you want, so that when you play back a slide show, the images are properly displayed. You can erase images, but there's a garbage can button right on the outside of your camera. That's a lot quicker and easier to get to, Asai said. You can print directly from this camera, and you can set this all up through the print order. There's a lot in your instruction manual about that, as well as ...

setting up slide shows. If you are visiting your friends, you don't have a computer around and you just want to hook it up to their TV. You can create a slide show that has the images that show up for a particular length of time. The second tab on this is the hissed a gram tab, and we already looked at the History Ram. But what you can do here is you can change from a brightness one to an RGB one. Either setting is fine. They're both gonna show you good information, Whatever. When you prefer image jump when you play an image back if you press, if you turn the main dial, I should say turning the main dial will jump you through images, usually at a time. So if you have 100 images, it could take a long time to press that back button 100 times to go toe to go through all the images. If you wanted to scroll through them very quickly, you could scroll through 10 at a time or 100 at a time. You could also set it up to, uh, scroll through by date or by movies or still images so you can customize it as you want. And then you also have control over the HD my cable whether that output is turned on or off. And so then we're gonna get into the set up men, you. And this is where we start getting into the controls that customized the camera the way we want it to work the auto power off. How long do you want to have the camera stay on until it turns off 30 seconds. The default is a good standard. The rotate. This is something that I would recommend that you switch. The normal will say on it will show a camera. So it's switching it in camera, and it's switching it on the computer, and in this case, I would switch it. So it said on computer. And when you shoot verticals on this camera, it won't change them, Which is nice, because you will actually get the full frame. And so what happens if I shoot a vertical picture over here and actually have you taken in focus picture? Let me change the display. And so now it shows the full size on it. If I was to turn this feature off. This is what you don't want is your verticals turned in camera so that they are top to bottom here. Now we have all this black space, and it's better if they are displayed fully like this so that we can see him from top to bottom and their full screen. And so, in order to do that, we want to be on computer only. So our images when we load him into our computer were all be rotated properly, but they're not gonna change in here. The slight disadvantage is that when you're showing people in the back of your camera, you may have to turn your camera sideways. But that's pretty easy to dio. So okay, next up format. This is very important. When you are done taking pictures, you have downloaded all your pictures to your hard drive, and you have backed him up on your backup hard drive and you have burned your DVDs or whatever else you do to back up your images on your ready to go out for a new shoot and you want to have everything clean ready t go for a whole new shoot. You want to format your card. You don't want to just delete the data, you want to format it. And so this will ask you, Are you really sure you want to do this? And so you can get in here and form at the card? And when you do format the card, it's basically deleting the directory of where all the photos are. You could do what is also called a low level format. If you want to get rid of all the information on the card, it does take a little bit longer to do it on the card. Ah, but it is good to do for cleaning the card off of residual files and folders. And so it's something that I do before any time I go out on an important shoot is to format the card. Next up is the LCD auto off. We talked about this little sensor display on the back of the camera so that when you have the display come on and your put your eye up to it, it automatically turns off well. You can control that feature with the LCD auto off. There's that we're talking about. So file numbering the camera has a file number that it attributes to every single photograph that you take. The standard setting on this is continuous, that it continuously counts. Unfortunately, it only counts up to 10, and then it resets. It's the best of the three options. In my opinion, you can have an auto reset, which is very dangerous, because then you'll end up with a lot of pictures with picture number 0001 Ah, you could manually reset it if you want it manually, said it, But I would set it on continuous. And then when you get the images into your software program, is to re number them there so that you don't have ah filing numbering system of 100,000 images where tenement 10 images all have the same final number LCD Auto off. This is the display on the back of the camera that turns the LCD on and off, and it's normally in the auto mode, which I kind of like because when you put your eye up to the screen, it turns off the LCD. But if you want to manually control it, you can just have it. You can do it through that setting right there, the I fi settings or excuse me, the screen color jumping ahead. One. The screen color is something that you can go in and control if you want to change it from white to black to some colored settings, people like to change the little color something so you can change colors has no real effect on your pictures. I fi settings. If you're going to use that wireless remote card, you can change some of the settings turning that on and off. But you can only do that if there is a card installed in the camera. So next up, we are going to the second of the tool Wrench tabs, which is our set up menu, the brightness on the back of the screen in general, I would leave this right in the middle. If you get out on a bright, sunny day and you're trying to show people your pictures, you may need to bump this up to a brighter level, but in general I would leave this right in the middle. The second thing in there is the date and time so you can go in and set the date and time and that is important because you want to have the right date in time attributed to all your photographs. And this does not change wirelessly when the time zone, when you change from time zone to time zone or when you go from daylight savings time. Uh, moving around to daylight time for people with different languages, you can go in and just to the many different languages that are available as well as the video systems, depending on what video system here in North America, we use NTSC in Europe, they use PAL, and you'll have to check with what part of the country are. Part of the world you are in is to what system you are using sensor cleaning. This is for people who are very adventurous and want to clean the censor themselves. You can go in there and do this. I am not gonna get into that today. Live view function settings. When your cameras in the live view mode, you can customize a number of the options in there, you can turn off the live you. If you just don't use the live you, you can completely turn it off So that button when you press it doesn't do anything personally. The grid display. I like to have it on number one. Sometimes I tilt the camera and I get uneven horizons, and this just helps me see uneven horizons. It's also just kind of nice for framing. You can control how long the metering timer is on, and you can control the A F mode. We've talked quite a bit about this. The live mode, the facial recognition mode and the quick mode for general purpose. The life mode. I think it's fine. We're up to the third tab in the menu system. The last of these custom menus were getting closer to the end custom functions, and this actually opens the door to a whole new set off special modes that you can go in and customize. So if you press set, you will enter Anne, you can adjust 12 different modes. So let's talk about these 12 different modes here. The first set of them control the exposure exposure level indicators. You could do it half stops or third stops. I think the standard third stops is fine. I s O expansion. This is one that I would adjust in turn on you can push the camera up to 12,800 s. So if you want to, I highly recommend not shooting it if you could all get away with it. But if you need it for taking a picture and that's the only way to get it, it's nice to have available to you right away rather than going in here and turning on. Next up is flash sync speed in a V mode. We talked a little bit about the flash, has a maximum synchronization of 1 2/100 of a second. You can customize it here as it's automatic, or it's fixed between a certain number or 1 200 I think the standard setting here of auto is fine. It'll figure it out. Next up is items that relate to the image and we have two items here. Gonna kind of combine them together. One is long exposure, noise reduction and the other is high. I s O speed noise reduction, as we mentioned earlier on when we talked about I s So you want to keep the I s oas lowest possible. But sometimes you do have to shoot it high I assoc to get the picture. One of the options is to turn on noise reduction either for high I S O or for long exposures like a 12th exposure. It has a reduction system built into the camera, which helps reduce the noise, which is a good thing because you'll get end up with better picture quality. The downside is that it takes time to process that information, and it will slow up the shooting when you're out there taking pictures. So if you're taking pictures in a dark gymnasium of a sporting event, the camera's not conveyed to process those images, and you're gonna be able tow shoot pictures at a slower rate. And so it's a balance that you have to look at. If you're shooting pictures of landscapes and there's nothing moving and there's no Russian time, then you can turn that reduction on once again. This is something that you could do later in software. There are software systems that can handle noise reduction so you don't have to do it here. But the process built in here is fairly good, and you'll have to see whether it's something that you want to do for your type of photography. next item on the list is what? Highlight tone priority. Okay, so we got a little picture example here to explain this. All right, here's an image from Petra, Jordan and person standing in a very bright doorway and you'll notice that the doorway is blown out. Were not able to see the detail in the highlights there. All right, in the highlight tone priority, this is the D plus that we looked at that somebody potentially had on in their camera. If you turn this on, it will hold back some of the highlight information so that it can rescue it and still show it. And this is a little bit of a controversial thing as to whether you should have this turned on or off. One of the problems with turning this on is that you can't access I s 0 so everything you have to shoot is at 200 or above, and so I personally will not turn it on. I could for see some people in some situations liking this kind of safety bumpers so that they don't accidentally clipped there. Highlights. But I think for most people it's probably better to leave it off so that you have access to a I s 0 100 But it's a subjective call that you could make next up. We're gonna kind of switch to auto focus and drive operations the autofocus beam firing. And we talked about the focusing beam out in front. Basically, what it is is it's a little flashlight, and if you don't want a little flashlight to come on in low light conditions, you can turn it off. And so if you wanna be a paparazzi and you don't want people to see where you are, you can turn off this little light that comes on to help you focus in low light. If you do work in low light conditions a lot, it can help you focus. But you have to be pretty close to your subject for it to help out. Next up is mere lock up. If you are into nature or landscape photography, you're working on a tripod, Uh, and you want to get the sharpest picture possible. One of the problems is that when the mere comes up and out of the way, it sometimes causes a bounce vibration that lasts throughout the entire camera, and to avoid that, you can lock the mirror. It's a feature that I use on a regular basis, but there's another trick. Tamir lock up. It's called Live You because when the mirror is up, then the light can get back to the sensor and you can activate your live you. So a lot of times I'll just use live view as a mere lockup. They both work the same way. Ah, here's an example of just a little test subject I shot and on the left is no mere lock up on the right is mere lock up, and you can see there's a small but subtle difference in the detail in the sharpness, in the contrast of what you see. And so it can help a fair bit in some images. And then the final one I think we have here, see if this is correct. Actually, no. We have a couple more in here, I think, under operations and others controlling the shutter and a e button. We talked about this in the, uh, excuse me, the video mode, and this is where you can control how the focus button and the auto exposure button works on your camera. You'll want to experiment what you like here. But the options of turning autofocus from the front or from the back is your options and where the exposure is done. Personally, I have my camera set on number one because I like to have the autofocus done in the back of the camera assigning the set button the set button right here in the middle. We've been using it a lot to enter information, but when we're shooting pictures, it doesn't really do anything. And so you can go in and you can customize the set button. And what you could do there is You can have it changed the image quality. You can exchange flash exposure, compensation. You can turn the LCD on and off. You could turn your menus on, and you can adjust eso speed so you can customize that set button to whatever you want it to be. I have no real preference on that one LCD display. When power on on this one I would generally just leave it at the default setting out original decision data. Cannon has a software package that can verify that the picture that somebody is looking at was not tampered with in any way. And this is something used by law enforcement so that when they were photographing a crime scene, they can prove that it was the original data that was taken from the Cameron was not altered in any way. But you do need a software package from Canon to work with this. On the downside, I have heard that some Russian folks have been able to crack the code, and it's not the most secure thing in the world. So, uh, check that out before you enlisted in your local law enforcement division. And so, uh, we're still working on that final. Excuse me. We're still working on that final tab. Ah, we have copyright information. This is kind of cool because you can enter your name into your camera. So if somebody takes your camera, they say your name is not on it. Oh, yes, but it's inside it and you can show that your name is in the camera. You can also enter some copyright details like if you have a website that you want to refer people to. In that information is attributed to the data of every picture that has taken eso. You can have your name on every picture you take without doing anything. Just enter it right there in your camera. Nice little setting here. After we've done this class, I'm probably going to clear the settings. In fact, I'll do it right now all the settings that we've put in. You can clear all the camera settings. You can clear all the custom function settings, and if you've gone through and you've changed the way the camera works, you can very quickly change all that back to this factory defaults firmware. The camera comes from the manufacturer with a software that runs the menu systems that runs the operation of the camera, and from time to time they find that there's a problem. And they've made a mistake on Just like computers and other software programs that have updates. They have updates and rather than you sending your camera back to Japan to have them put in new software they just posted on their website and you can download it to a memory card, put it on the memory card, put it in here and you can update the software now. The current version as of the filming of this episode is 1.0 point nine, and that is what this camera is. Because I have a brand new camera, your camera may say something different. And so if you don't have this, you probably wanna upgrade the firm where it's very easy to do. You could just go to canon dot com canon usa dot com, and go to their drivers and downloads and just look for information about this camera. It will have full instructions on how to update it in the camera. Uh huh. All right, so the final tab in here is the green one, which is my menu, which is my favorite menu personally, because this is where you get to customize the menu with just the features you want. So if you press set and enter into that menu, you will get to a list of things called Register to my Menu, sort delete items display from my menu, and so far, and what you want to do here is you want to register to my menu. When you press set and go in there, you will have a long scrolling list of basically every feature in the camera. And when you find something that you like, let me see. What we find here is mere lock up. That's a good one. I will press set and I will register in my menu. Okay, I'm gonna press menu to get back to here. And then what you want to dio is you want to display from my menu, you want to have that enabled, so we're gonna go display from my menu, Enable. Now, what happens is that when you hit the menu button rather than going to the first red tab or the last place that you were at its going to display from my menu, which is just the items that you want to have in there And so, for instance, I have mere lockup in mind and what you could do is you can add in about five or six items that you regularly go to you need to get to on a regular basis, set him there, and when you have the set up like I do in my camera, you'll have all the all the things that are important and you'll rarely ever need to go to the rest of the menu. Now what you put in there is completely your choice. But things that I have in there that I like is I like near lock up. I like, Let's see, what else do I like? I like format the memory card cause I frequently changing the format on the memory card. And sometimes I will have the live view settings in there because sometimes I want to change how the live you focusing this work in that that's one of the quick ones, but it's totally personal. You can set it up however you want, but I would highly encourage you to add in 45 items that you want and then use the display from my menu so that whenever you turn the menu on, it's always going to the things that you use most frequently. So that takes us through the entire menu system of the camera. And so we're gonna take a little question, a few questions. I think that we're gonna take maybe a five minute break after the questions, and then we're going to dive into the final section that sound like a good plan for everyone. A few questions, a few questions. Oh, boy, All right. Start slinging on John. Do you have any questions in the audience right now? She just get started on Internet questions. All right. Um, quite a few people were asking, including Craig snaps about me during the mentoring timer. If you can talk a little bit about what that does metering, timer, very media in time were very simple. When you press down on the shutter release button right here, how long do you want the meter to stay active? The longer it is, it's kind of convenient. The shorter it is, the more it saves on battery life. It's a compromise that is totally up to you. Personal preference. The standard that it comes with the camera is pretty reasonable, in my opinion. Quick question from Patricia are how do I unregistered er an item in my menu. There is a delete option that they can go to let me go ahead and I will delete near. Lock up my menu settings. Delete item. I will go to that item. I will press set, delete from my menu. Okay. And so it's fairly intuitive. I think you just go to the item and her you go to the delete item or items in there. Question from pink. How many pictures can one expect to take on the camera before it will not take any more? In other words, the camera, you know, life expecting a life expectancy of the camera. And also Malley also asked as the number of pictures taken equate to the number of shudder actuacion. Thank Actuacion actuacion camera. The camera durability is frequently rated in shutter cycles. How many times can the shutter move? Because the shutter in the mere going up are the first things to wear out, and cameras like this are typically rated around 50,000. I haven't seen a true testing of it, but is expected to last around 50,000 cycles. For a heavy duty photographer that could happen in one or two years, for most of us were probably going to outgrow the camera before it dies on us in that regard, or will end up dropping it or having something else happened to. It s so it's probably something that could last a long time, but that certainly doesn't mean it's instantly going to fail on that 50,000 firing. It could go for 100,000. If you take care of it, you get a good model. I had a question from Craig Snaps. You mentioned that you always reformat your memory card and he is asking, Why not just delete all the pictures? Since multiple formats will lower the life of the card multiple lives, multiple formats will lower the I've never heard that before. I've actually heard the opposite. The problem with not deleting your images is that you end up with a kind of ghost files and folders of images and folders on your card, and it will cause a communication air. And I've had a number of cases where there has been a communication air between the card in the camera and once I formatted the card, everything worked. Fine. Um and so I have yet to wear out a memory card I haven't heard of. I don't know that I've ever heard of anyone wearing out of memory card. I've heard of people damaging them, losing them, destroying, corrupted, getting corrupted. Yeah, but just general, wearing out from formatting is not something that I have heard of. And so I would encourage formatting on a regular basis. We have a question in class. He's just saying, Thanks for the explanation is bad. No problem. Sorry. Hey, John, going back to the life of the camera there way you could read on the camera of the shutters how many times it's been how long it's been used. If you're going to buy a used camera on some cameras, and I haven't seen how to do it on this camera. There are software programs where you can download a shutter count. The repair technicians at Cannon can plug in some device and figure it out. There are some people on the If you look on the Internet, I found a software program that could do a shutter count on like a cannon five D or 70 and you could see how many Southern shutter cycles you have gone through. But I haven't seen that on this camera. Someone may crack the code and make that available to everyone. It is something that can and can. No, I don't know if you can turn it into canon and have them tell you, uh, it's not something that they offer up for free. The question, um, many would like to know what is the difference in the image files. When you choose small, medium and large and says they're two choices for each, let me go ahead and turn the camera around here so that we can see it coming in the screen up here. And so we're gonna look at image quality, which is in the first tab on the red at the very top, and we have a large, large, medium, medium, small, small. The large medium and small is pretty easy to figure out cause there's numbers right there explaining how many pixels you are going to be recording. And I haven't run across too many people who shoot in anything other than the large fine quality mode. If you were if you wanted to get more pictures on a card, and this was an issue when you had smaller cards and I have a smaller card in this camera where I could only get 108 pictures at what's left right now on the large fine quality and the large fine in the large, normal quality has to do with compression, how much is the data being compressed? And I always want to shoot in the highest quality possible, which is why I will shoot in raw. But if I was going to shoot in J. Peg and there are reasons to shooting J Peg, I would shoot it definitely in the largest quality unless there's some specific reason that you need smaller file sizes. You know, if you're stuck on a desert island and you want to take a lot more pictures, you should probably use the smaller file size it will download quicker. You'll get more images on a memory card, but they'll be of lower quality, and you can never go back and raise that quality in in class. Question. Question. Yeah, along those lines, can you shoot in raw with less than the full sensor or with, uh, and save less than 18 mega pixel? No, The raw on this is somewhat limited, and this is where higher end cameras give you more versatility. This has a full size raw that it records some cameras will allow you to record in a medium sized raw in a small raw. If you don't need the full 18 megapixels, you're fine with tan. This camera just simply records in the full 18 raw. So just one of the limitations. But with memory card prices and hard drive prices where they are today, memory is not a big issue for most people. So I encourage shooting in the highest quality mode that you can. John, Would you be willing Teoh, Go over again? The, um, can you use a lock and focus on the back of the camera? Have some number of questions about that again. OK, which button do we use for focus from the back of the camera? This is a little bit difficult to work with on this camera, because once again, at this level of camera, first off it's a smaller Cameron. That is not as much physical space on the higher end cameras. There is another button that they have for auto focus, and this camera doesn't have it, and it makes this choice a little bit more difficult cause it doesn't give you AZM any options. And so, for most people using the camera, I would recommend just the standard out of the box default set up. Um, as as a standard system, you can switch the focusing to the back, but then it throws ah whole Monkey Ridge into where all the other features air control and so you. I just want to spend too much time on it. So it's one of those things where the instruction manual will help you go through that. And you need to kind of really look at how you shoot pictures and how you want toe interact with the camera because it's a very personal set up in that regard question from A B. Um, he says, I have files that have been deleted. They see them on the screen of the camera, but not on the computer. Is there an explanation for that? They see them on the screen of the camera, but not on the computer. That would sound like they're using a computer program that is not up to date. It can't read the files from this camera. This camera is only about a year old, and so there are some software programs, maybe from two years ago, that this person may be using, and it doesn't understand it. So what they need to do is find out who makes that software. Maybe it's light room or amateur some other program, and they need to update the Kurt to the current firmware Where the current software That would be the main explanation. Um, I can't think of any other really good reason, but that would be the best reason. Okay, thank you. It's a few more questions, but we've gone past her your five minutes of questions. Not real strict on rules. Um, because the question was from Michael Sesay. He's saying I hear long exposure, noise reduction effects, only J. Peg and not raw. Is that true? I've done a little bit of testing, and I've seen some difference in the raw. And so it it is altering that raw file from what I have seen, Um, I believe a little wiggle room if somebody wants to correct for me, but I think I've seen the difference there. Um, it's questionable whether you want to use it or not. And that's something that you probably have to do a little testing on your own to see if that's really important. And question from Sue W. Was occasionally I will get a busy message when taking a photo. That's because what's happening is the camera is writing information to the memory card, and it's kind of busy writing that information Ah, potential culprit is if you have a memory card, that is not fast enough. If you shoot a lot of video or you shoot bursts of images of the memory card, can't read and write the information as fast as it should be. And so there are cards that are faster that can read that information. You can write it faster, and they cost a little bit more money. You might be using an older memory card. Most of the current ones are more than fast enough, and I will talk about that a little bit more when we talk about memory cards in particular. Uh, one more question. Another question from Michael. Actually, why would you want to turn the H M I output? Do you talk about? Uh, not really. I haven't really figured that out, But if you wanted to deactivate that output switch for some reason, you could, um, for instance, if this was plugged into a TV and you couldn't unplug it from the TV, but you wanted to turn it off from here, I don't know. I'm just wildly guessing on this one. It's just more control. Yeah, I'm not sure if you mentioned this, John, when you were talking about, we were talking about the number of frames that the camera can take. Is there Nick Vivian is asking where can you see how many frames you have taken when you play an image back? If you hit the display button, it will show you information. Right now on this camera, it is showing me I have taken 20 pictures and I am looking at the 20th of 20 pictures. And as I scroll through images, you can see that I've taken I'm looking at the 18th of 20 pictures and so just playing the image back and hitting the display button, you may have to hit the despite and button once or twice to pull up that information. But it's in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. Should we move on our one more question? Yeah, I have one more question for our raw files. Bigger when using Adobe are rough. I was bigger than using adobe. When using adobe versus maybe asked versus srg Are they bigger than what? And maybe when you're not using adobe color Spencer, you using RG rgb rgb? I don't even know on that were to go on. Now I Well, you said the color. The color. That's a wider color. Gamut, color, gamut without use up. More proof. I don't know. It's good theoretical questions. Google it. I'll go home and test it. All right. Give me a call at my home tomorrow. Just kidding. Did I say that both people in the chat room were saying there should be no difference? Raw is always the same, but no, not all Ross files are exactly the same size they do. Adjust. Don't ask me why, but they do adjust. I mean, there gonna be about 18 megabytes in size, but they could be 18.18 point 18.2. And it depends on the type of subject. If you photograph Ah, very simple subject, like a white wall. It's gonna be relatively small. And if you photograph a very complex subject that's got a lot of different detail in color to it, it's gonna be a larger raw file. Eso It's not strictly exactly the same size, which is interesting. And there's mathematicians who can get into that. But it really doesn't matter when it comes down to picture quality

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

CanonT2i_Handout.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

lblack
 

This is a great class. I bought a Canon T2i (used but in great condition) for my wife (I have a Canon 60D), and this class has been good for both of us. It served as a great learning class for my wife to move from a small point-and-shoot to her T2i DSLR, and for me -- well, what can I say. I thought I knew all about my camera, but this class proved I do not! I learned a great deal here beyond just the T2i specifics. I like the clear concise delivery of the subject material. Everything is organized in such a way to be able to digest each section before moving to the next.

a Creativelive Student
 

I really enjoyed this class. I've had my T2i for a while now, but I've only used it sporadically because I didn't understand many of the functions. The few times I referenced the manual was like listening Charlie Brown's teacher....LOL. John is really great at explaining things simply. I watched his Fundamentals class live and it was awesome. I'm hoping to add that to my collection one day.

user-eb008e
 

This was the best tool for me, as I am new to the world of semi professional photography. This is a great starting point before moving on to greater concepts. Understanding your camera is a must, and the switch to Manual shooting now is not as intimidating after this viewing this tutorial. I will definitely pursue his other classes.

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