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Highlight Alert, White Balance, and Bracketing

Lesson 2 from: SLR Lounge Live Q and A and Image Critique

Pye Jirsa

Highlight Alert, White Balance, and Bracketing

Lesson 2 from: SLR Lounge Live Q and A and Image Critique

Pye Jirsa

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Lesson Info

2. Highlight Alert, White Balance, and Bracketing

Lesson Info

Highlight Alert, White Balance, and Bracketing

Let's get started. No, I have here the canon five D mark three. And, uh, again, it doesn't really matter which cameras you guys going to be using for this. I I don't have a rebel anymore. We sold it after we did the class. So we're just gonna use this, But you can use any camera that you want. I'm going to show you just some quick tips in terms of how I like to set up our gear. So when you first get it, the kind of options that I like to put into my menu. Okay, So when you get your camera, what I want you guys to do first is slip into em. Okay, so that's gonna give you your manual mode. And the reason why is because your menu that you see on the back of this camp when you bring up the menu, it actually gets limited if you're in other modes. So, for example, if you're if you've got your camera and it's in that a that auto mode right there, when you jump in your menu, it gives you a very simplified version of your options. Basically. Okay, so the first thing you do is flip that back to M...

. Make sure I'm actually on it. Go in your men. You can see how it opens up all the other tabs. So I have done this. I have set up my menu, and I'm gonna show you guys basically the items that I like in my menu. And they were gonna kind of walk through what each of those things are and how we use it while we shoot. The first item of top is my highlight alert. Okay, this is And by the way, let me to show you all how you register menu setting. So if you go it down to this option right here, when you first see this menu, it's cleared out. So what you do is you go down into my menu, my menu settings, press set, you press register to my menu, and then it gives you a whole list of different options you to scroll through to register. Okay. So we can choose any of these options to register up there we go back. We can also sort them so I can sort them. And I can move one thing down if I want to put highlight alert down. I can press the set button and click and drag it down. All right. So the reason why I like my highlight lor up top is because it's the thing that I'm probably using the most when I am shooting right before I show somebody an image. So, for example, I'm gonna pick a target. We're gonna take a not so good photo, So I'm gonna pick my I like it. Steve moves away. Don't move away, Steve. Come to the bad photo. All right, So I know this is gonna be blown out. I'm gonna go ahead and take a picture of Simon here. Actually, we're really getting all three of you gentlemen. And how is like 1/5 of a second F two and I saw 100. So we end up with this guy. Okay, So you see how bright it is. We didn't do it. Yeah, this is how awesome I am. No. So if you look at this and we've turned the highlight alert, you see that it blinks like this. Okay, now, when I'm shooting things like a bride or a groom and he has a white shirt on or the bride has their white dress on, and there's highlights hitting that white dress. There might be little tiny bits of that that are blinking. It's my heiler. Tell me that they're there possibly blown right. I don't want them to see that now I'm shooting that way because I know that if I'm shooting raw, those little blinky areas, if it's just a little bit, I can recover that in. That's no problem. That's where I want my exposure to be. My clients don't know that. So when I go on go Oh, my gosh, look at that image. Isn't it beautiful? And then they go, What do think? The first thing, that question they go like, yeah, are those black things actually in the photo? I'm like, Oh, no, no, no, that's not in the photo. So why is that up top? Because watch, when I'm about to show a client, it's as easy as pressing menu. I click the set and flip it, and then right when I'm bringing around the camera and I press play, then we're back to just a rate that would be funny if it is still blinking. Wouldn't it was like that didn't work. So it's kind of muscle memory. So as you go toe menu, press it and then and then you just display it. Your bling keys are all gone. I don't like technical terms. Is that okay? Highlight alert. Blink, ease. I think blinky sent. We all agree that blink ease Sounds better than highlight Alert cannon? No, for the future, it's title it. Blink, ease. We all understand what it does better. I'm just getting We probably wouldn't Okay, so highly alert. We always keep it enabled when they're shooting and we disable whenever we want to show a client something. One important thing to understand about this is that this displayed image this heiler that is showing you is based off of the J peg preview in camera. Okay, What that means is, if we're shooting Ron, we'll talk a little about Robertson j pay. But if we're shooting raw, we actually have mawr information there than what's being presented here. Okay, this is processing in camera and it's showing you the J peg version of this in camera because that's all it can do the raw information when you get your computer. So that means that if you have a little bit of blink ease, it's okay. Cool. All right, let's keep moving. Next thing is white balance. So the next item on my menu white balance. Why? Because it's probably the second thing that I use the most. As we go from scene to scene, I want everybody to dial in your white balances manually. So if you're at home were train you photo one on one is all about getting you off of every automated mode possible. We want to use manual modes only for most situations. I'll explain maybe a couple that you'd use an automated situation. But white balance is left me Teoh, shift my white balance anywhere between auto. But usually we just stick it right on Kelvin, and we're gonna dial the white balance up and down as we go. I'll explain Why balance a little more too, as we continue. Okay, The next option White balance shift bracket. This is I don't really use the bracketing feature of this. The bracketing feature of that. What it does is I have an awesome monolith white board here. Thank you, Adam. Okay. What is bracketing? So what bracketing means and bracketing is used more often than not when we talk about exposure, right when you do exposure bracketing. What's happening is your camera takes one shot right here at the zero exposure. The next shot is gonna be right here, and sometimes the order might be different, and then the next shot is to above. So basically, it's giving you some room, so don't act like you haven't done this. But when you first got your camera and you didn't know anything and you're like, hey, Aiken bracket stuff and you're like now I don't need to understand exposure at all and you turn it on and you're like, I'm going to plus two minus two in every single situation you're going like, bang off three shots every time you want one. Come on. Do you dare to raise your hand to say that? You know, they're like, No. All right, I'll raise my hand. I did that a little bit. The problem is, obviously you get three times the number of shots, and you still probably end up screwing up your exposures and whatnot. So it's not good as a tool to rely on in terms of getting the right exposure. What it is great for is HDR. If you need to do hdr, we're gonna talk about when you actually need to do HDR. It's great for when you want to do like a flash exposure and you want a more dramatic shot and a brighter shots, we could blend between them. I mean, it really is gonna deal with dynamic range, basically, when you're doing that, but you'll notice that this says white balance bracketing and you can actually do the same thing with white balance where it's going to go down and then up on each shot is gonna give you a variance in your white pounds. Now, again, I wouldn't do that. But the other tool inside this menu is pretty fantastic. And that's the shift. Do you like how I explained like, five minutes worth of stuff to tell you. Don't do it like my favorite part of these glasses. OK, you guys see these windows on the walls. Now, these air probably these kind of windows air like these kind of textured art windows which probably don't have the tint on them, because the text Oring themselves is designed to limit the amount of light coming in. Okay, So the texture itself is what is limiting light. Now, when you go to a hotel, they generally don't have that right. You can see out the windows of a hotel. So what they do is to prevent a lot of electricity bills and a C bills on what not They put a green tent over the window. It limits the amount of light coming in, and you can. You'll start noticing this. Every single place you go, you walk into a room, look at the window and if you look at the edges of that window, you'll see a green tent over it. It darkens down the light by several stops by several times. Now for the building that reduces electricity, constant reduces all the environmental effects that they have for photography. It makes all your photographs green. Have you noticed when you go into a hotel and you take a shot, your white balance is a little bit weird, right? Like you see a lot of green hues in it. That's the tinting on the windows. So do you love how this is photo one? A. One step with this is I don't know, If this is really it is kind of this. Of course it is. Okay, So what we can do, though, is we do white balance shifting. So if we noticed that we have a lot of greens coming into the scene, all we do is we shift towards the reds and magenta. Okay, So again, dial in your white balance and your white balance shift with every single scene, and what you'll notice is if you've got it about right on, you can flip in the live you and not blow out your entire scene. Okay? And once you're in live, you now have a very neutral tone. And then you can just adjust your white balance accordingly. Okay, so all you do is go back to a white balance shift and move this around to the reds and magenta as now. The big thing here is that once you leave the scene, make sure you set it back because a lot of times you'll forget. You'll leave the scene and your be outdoors and everything outdoors is neutral. And now you're adding reds and magenta is to everything that you're shooting cool. But that's the next thing that we use a lot

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Pye is an awesome instructor! He explains everything in a way that you understand it. He is a wealth of information. Love all of his classes!! I love Creativelive and SLR Lounge! Continue doing the great work that you do!!

fbuser a48cf323
 

Pye is an amazing teacher! I've learned so much from him over the years - both in person and through his tutorials. What's even more amazing is that he is able to do it LIVE! He is able to clearly explain complicated concepts through easy to understand lessons. I highly recommend his courses to learn everything from the basics to advanced topics!

user-592217
 

Wow! Pye is an awesome instructor! I've learned SO many things - nuggets of gold!

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