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Front Side: Creative Dial

Lesson 14 from: Olympus PEN-F Fast Start

John Greengo

Front Side: Creative Dial

Lesson 14 from: Olympus PEN-F Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

14. Front Side: Creative Dial

Lesson Info

Front Side: Creative Dial

all right, Working around to the front of the camera. Probably the most distinctive feature of this camera is the dial in the front of the camera, and this is probably gonna make some people happy. And some people not so happy. This is the creative dial. So let's talk about the creative things that you can do with the style. So this is gonna work in the more basic shooting modes. Kind of your standard shooting modes, not working in the video, not working in the eye auto mode. And just real quickly. We have a color profile control. We have our black and white option. We have some art filters, and then we have a color creator mode. And so let's go through each one of these and take a look at what they're doing. So the color profile control controls individual colors. And so what will be able to do is we're gonna be able to control the color with the front dial and the vividness with the back dial, and so we will have a color wheel and will be able to move around the color wheel, select t...

he color and whether we want more or less color from it. Now, if we want, we can lock all the colors and weaken ad saturation or make it de saturated all at the same time. And so I wanted to take this out, actually, and you can also add highlight and shadow information with the lever. And so I'll do a little demo on this is after I show you some examples. And so I went out. I wanted to shoot some photos, and so on the left, we have maximum saturation, and then on the next one, we've de saturated a little bit, and you can see the different levels of color that we're getting in each of these scenes and notice. All the colors are either more vivid or all of the colors are more subdued. And so you can also go in and you can pick a particular color so I can take Red and Aiken de saturate it where I can increase the saturation. I can take the color green de saturated or increase the saturation so individually controlling the colors on the camera. And so let's do a little demo here in class because I got the Rubik's Cube right here in front of me, and that's got some nice colors on it. So let's go ahead, and I'm just gonna put this into the program mode. And first thing I need to do is go into the front of the camera and turn it into the color mode. And so now you can see the color wheel over here on the side, And so, by turning the front dial, I can take a particular color. And so let's see. I'm looking at Let's go with yellow And so I got yellow activated here. And can I d saturate the yellow or increase the saturation? And so you can see the yellow clearly changing on that. Let's try the blue setting. And so let's go around to blue and I could make the blue less or more saturated, and I can choose several settings so I could choose. Let's choose blue. We've increased the blue, get that over there, and then I could go around and I can choose yellow and I can increase the yellow or decrease the yellow. And so the other option, if I recall correctly, is let's see skits. Let's get this back to standard and if I hit the info. All colors hit the info button. Sonnen hit info, and I could make all colors more saturated or de saturated at the same time. I don't have more equal right now, but I get info again and I'm gonna go back and I can adjust individual ones. And so obviously, this is not for serious photography. This is for having fun. And so if you just wanna have fun and it's essentially like photo shop in the camera, and so if you want to play with your images, that's one of the ways to get in and control individual colors. Is with that color option on the front dial. Now there is some color profiles that you can get Teoh by hitting the okay button. And so I'll give you a demo on that here in just a moment. And then you also have the lever on the top of the camera. And so let's go back to the camera now. And so one of the things when I first got to this motor is a little frustrating. Is that when I switch it to it, I get the color Creator up here and I can start dialing around and playing around. But after a while it disappears and is like I would have to turn it off, turn it back on again, and the way that you can get it back up is by pressing the little lever up here. And there's actually two positions. You can either go with our highlight shadow information, which we've already talked about, so you can add that on top of this color information. Or you could just basically hit this to go back and forth between the color lips I got in front of the sensor there, the color or the highlight shadow information. So that's how that gets that activated back again. Now we can also dive into our super control panel, and we have our color profile. And so there is a preset profile of 12 and three that you can have in here. And so if you would prefer just to use one of these, you can go in and get that and that if I turn the front dial is now not there. And so I get this back onto the color on the front and now have access to this color profile. 12 and three. And so these air some preset settings that you may like, but you're probably gonna want to create your own. And so a lot of different fun options in there once again, not for your most serious photography, but first having a little bit of fun. All right, next up is the black and white or the monochrome profile mode. And so this is where you're gonna be able to shoot black and white, and you're gonna have color control like you were using colored filters. And so we're going to see our color, uh, a range of colors again, our color wheel, and we're gonna be able to go around. And it's as if we're using a red or orange or blue or green filter by turning the front dial of the camera. Now, if we turn the back dial, the camera will choose the level of intensity of this. And then on top of that will also have different controls. Um, for black and white with the menu system. And so let's take a look at my examples on this one, and so we can use yellow, and these pictures may look kind of similar at first. But if you start looking at the sky and different tones within it, you'll notice that each of these is gonna have their own distinct look to him because it's either increasing or decreasing the brightness of that particular color spectrum in the camera. And so it's a fun little option to use for black and white work. And once again you'll be able to use the lever to go in and change the highlight shadow and one other feature. So let's go ahead to the look at the camera and we'll do kind of the same thing here. And so now what we're gonna do is I'm gonna change this to the model mode, and you can see that we're in black and white right now. And so, by turning the dial, you can see our Rubiks Cube is clearly changing in the brightness that these colors air being read. And so if I turn the back dial, I can change it to minimum to maximum, and so I can choose any one of these that I want. And so a lot of people like shooting with a red filter cause that often there's a lot of very briber, vibrant red things and so we can adjust it here. Now, if I want to add on to this, I can go up to my lever on the top and I can do a few different things here I can add on. You can see it's it's already added a s curve. We already have an s curve in there now, so I can straighten this out if I want to want to get a standard tonal range. Usually when I shoot black and white, I like to have a little bit more contrast. And so I'm gonna add a little bit of an s curve into this right here. You know, I can come back and control the different colors right here, and we have a new control over here, which is a vignette control and so I can make the edges of the frame lighter, or I can make the edges of the frame darker. And so there's a lot of older style cameras that have lenses that have a natural vignette to them. And so, if you want that old style look to your black and white photographs, this is a great way of controlling it. So I've added on a little bit of a dark thing. Yet I've added in a little bit of a more contrast, he curve, and then I can just come in and I can simply choose different types of filters that I'm using in the front of my camera to achieve just a multitude of effects. When using this. Now, one of the things that we can also dio is hit the okay button, and we now have monochrome profiles. And so if we go in here, we have monogram 12 and three. And so these are some preset options and we'll take a look. Let's go to number three and just see where the tone curve is on this. So this is a very straight one. Let's go back in and choose number two and we can look at the tone curve on this one. Come on, bring us up the tone curve. This one has a very steep contrast curve on this, and so if you like to shoot black and white and I like to shoot black and white from time to time, what I will often do is I'll put my camera in a J Peg and raw mode. That way I could get the original information everything so I can work with it later. But black and white. So I could get it looking right. And I can see the world in black and white, and I can start getting a preview of what the final image maybe like And then I'll have a JPEG image, which is pretty close to what I want. I'll take the raw image and will often match it manually to what the J. Peg looks like. And then we'll end up throwing away the J. Pink. And so that's just one of the many different ways that you can work in this. And so if you like to shoot black and white, this probably has more options than any other camera I've seen and let me see. I think there's one other little thing in here. I'm 11 other thing. Let's go to the back of the camera again, and I want to show you this camera, and I'm gonna leave it here where it's kind of fairly contrast. He has something new that kind of popped in here, and it's the film Green Effect and so I can go in here and I can shoot without film grain or with it low, medium and high. And so I think we're doing pretty good on time. So let's do a little example. So we're gonna shoot four different photos, and so this 1st 1 has no film grain, and you know what I noticed? And I don't know this affect anything, but I'm gonna take it out of the silent shutter so we just take a blank shot first so that we know what the first of the Siri's is. Okay, so here's our first shot. Then I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna add a little bit of film grain. So this is low, and then we're gonna go in and change it up to change the front dial medium super control. Change it up too high. So now we're gonna go back, and we're gonna play with something we learned a little while ago. So in the playback mode, we're gonna go back, and we're going to use the light box to compare these images. So the last picture was picture 102 Let's get this straightened up so you guys can see this properly. So let's go back to picture one. So we knew That's the first of the series. So this is the one as our key image right here. And we want to compare this against picture 100. We're gonna want to zoom in and we want to zoom in on both of them. And so let's see, Can we get in riel close? And what we're gonna look for is green. Yeah, we're gonna go right up here. We should be able to see a little bit, agree as we dial over to our next photo and so you can definitely see the lips, Lissie. So this is the one on the right hand side that has high grain, medium grain, low grain, and the one on the left should have no green. It also there's not that much between low and no, but there's definitely, ah, lot more grain there. And as we look at different portions, let's look at a lighter portion. There's a big difference there in the lighter portion, and so grain option is something that you can add. There are many extra programs after for post production that you can use that gets green as well. But you can add it in camera if you want to get that look straight in the camera. So I want you guys to see how to do that. All right, so that is the black and white with color filters. So we're gonna turn it back over to the other side and on the dial, I kind of think about turning the dial towards the lens or on the outside. So we're going to the inside towards the lens now, and this is the art filters. And so these air kind of instagram filters, if you will. If you want to make your JPEG image, have a particular type of look toe once again, this is not something that I would use for serious photography. But if you want to take a couple of shots and have it have a very a unique look to it, pop art as a lot of saturation, we get a little bit of blurriness in the soft focus. One, we get some change in the color tone with the pale light and color and the light tone. We have another kind of preset mode. For grainy film, you can create that on your own if you want as you can, probably with most of these pinhole look, which adds a lot of getting to it. The diagram A, which is used for miniature models, doesn't work too well in this particular vertical photograph. What it's doing is it's blurring the left and the right side works much better with horizontal subjects. Makes Ah large scale subjects look like a miniature cross process, and we're not gonna get into discussing that one. But it's got a funky look to it, and then we have gentle C p A, which is a black and white, which adds that little bit of reddish tone to it. Dramatic tone ads a lot to the contrast and key line, which is looking like a very heavy heavy filter on that one as faras. It's manipulation, and we have more watercolor, vintage and partial color, which is almost black and white, with just a little bit of color seeping through. And so the art filters will definitely make things look a little unusual. Now there's another mode called an art bracketing mode, and we're gonna talk about bracketing when we get into the menu setting and in this mode, it's kind of unusual, because when you shoot one photo, what it will do is it will take 14 photos. It'll process it 14 different ways. So when you shoot one photo, it goes through a little bit of processing because it takes a little bit of time to process 14 different photos. So you take one photo and it will save it as 14 different versions. So if you can't pick one filter, you could have all 14 for every picture you take. You gotta be careful about leaving that one turned on. You use up a lot of space when you do that. Now, when you get into this, you're going to be able to change the effects of these art modes in the camera itself. So there's lots of little tweaks. There's not just a mode various subsections of each of these modes, And so when you choose one of the modes, look in because you're gonna be able to tweak with several of the different functions in there. So let's go to the back of the camera and let me show you a few of these different options in here. So first up Let's get this camera fired up. Let's get it out of the mono mode and over to the art bracket mode. And so you can immediately cease that there are some funky colors. This is called Key Line one. And so in general you're gonna go left and right through the camera so that you can see what your pointed out here and one of things you want to pay attention to. Is this other information on the side? And so in this particular mode, you can go up and you can now choose between C pia blue, purple or a little bit green cast to your monochrome image. And so let's ah, get this back up, see, so heart mode 10. And so there's all these different art modes. But be aware that as you go through them, there's gonna there's gonna be a bunch of different options in there, and so let's get these back up. And so, like in this particular one, if you go down, you can either. Let's see, you can either go have have that framing effect or not. We're not gonna go through all of them, but you could spend a fair bit of time exploring all the different options in here. And so once again, it's not serious. But, you know, sometimes you gotta have fun and you want an image that just looks a little bit different. This camera is definitely capable of it. Next up is the C R T mode. And if you remember CRT that cathode ray tube and so we're still gonna be playing with colors, and it's a different version of the color mode that we saw before. So what we're gonna be able to do is we're gonna be able to add an overall color cast to the entire image were not just tweaking with one color we're gonna add or subtract an entire color by changing the color filter with the front dial and changing the vividness of the back down. So let's go ahead and take a look at some examples. Start off with a normal photograph, and then what we can do is we can say ADM or Magenta or have take away most all the colors, but just have a little bit of magenta going on in there, and then we'll do the same with the green, and we'll do the same with the blue. And so let's do a little, ah, little bit right here in class. Let's try. We'll clearly be able to see this because we have a white background here, a little heavy on the art mode. Right now. Let's turn off the art mode here, and so I can choose a different color. And we have. We have a white seamless here in the background, but I can choose to make that a green background. I can choose it to be very black and white. I can choose to be any color that I wanted to be by simply choosing the color and then the intensity of the color, choosing the front dial and the back dial. And if I don't want anything, I could just put it right up there in the middle. And so that's the C R T mode and very similar to the other color mode, but slightly different. So that is your creative Niall. Lots of different options on their continuing our tour. On the front of the camera, we have our self timer and a F illuminator. If you don't like this turning on because you find it distracting you can go in and you can go into the custom menu, and you can turn that off if you want the lens release we saw about how taking taking the lens on and off. Just press that button, turn the dial. I'd be careful about leaving the camera around without a lens, cover or lens on it because the sensor is exposed and can collect dust in there. So it's something that you generally want to keep covered. And you don't want to be changing lenses in really bad environments that there is a lot of debris in the air like you're in a workshop with a lot of sawdust. That would be a terrible place to be changing lenses. You might want to leave the room, change the lens and come back in. But under normal situations, don't be afraid about taking that lens off and change it to something else. This is a 20 megapixel sensor, as I mentioned before, it's kind of on the new high end as faras resolution when it comes to the fore third systems and it is a sea moss sensor, very good sensor on the camera. The contacts communicate with lens as I mentioned before. You can use Olympus and Panasonic lenses. They were perfectly the aperture, the focusing system. All the communication is fully carried forth back and forth with all of those lenses because they used the same system. Each of the lenses will have a little attachment. Mark let you know how to align it when you're mounting your lens on there.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Olympus PEN-F Recommended Settings
Olympus PEN-F Keynote

Ratings and Reviews

Jay Linsenbigler
 

Awesome course and thorough description of the PEN-F capabilities and functions. HOWEVER, John's "big boy camera" bias comes through when he describes some of the creative functions as "just fun". I highly disagree- because like other tools and features- it depends on HOW the photographer uses the tool or feature. Like HDR, the creative features can be used tastefully or look "overcooked". Film photographers who use a variety of different films in film cameras- is this "just fun", or do they offer creative options? I encourage John and any listeners to look up the Olympus Visionaries and many other professionals using Olympus cameras in their daily work to see the amazing results they create with them. Instead of the same old Nikon and Canon "muscle-flexing" biases- lets look at what the pros produce with the camera tools. All modern cameras are superb and capable of great results. And this PEN-F camera offers groundbreaking control over the image making IN CAMERA at the time of exposure- which can be used to adjust an accompanying RAW file if needed. Not everyone wants to sit in front of a computer for hours doing post processing.

Jay Linsenbigler
 

Awesome course and thorough description of the PEN-F capabilities and functions. HOWEVER, John's "big boy camera" bias comes through when he describes some of the creative functions as "just fun". I highly disagree- because like other tools and features- it depends on HOW the photographer uses the tool or feature. Like HDR, the creative features can be used tastefully or look "overcooked". Film photographers who use a variety of different films in film cameras- is this "just fun", or do they offer creative options? I encourage John and any listeners to look up the Olympus Visionaries and many other professionals using Olympus cameras in their daily work to see the amazing results they create with them. Instead of the same old Nikon and Canon "muscle-flexing" biases- lets look at what the pros produce with the camera tools. All modern cameras are superb and capable of great results. And this PEN-F camera offers groundbreaking control over the image making IN CAMERA at the time of exposure- which can be used to adjust an accompanying RAW file if needed. Not everyone wants to sit in front of a computer for hours doing post processing.

Kate Mooney
 

The Pen 5 is an amazing camera - however it is capable of so much that getting to know it can be somewhat overwhelming at first. John systematically and logically works through every part of the camera in really clear and easy to understand steps, quickly converting my initial apprehension into confidence and excitement for the endless possibilities of this camera.

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