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Shooting, Playback, and Custom Menus

Lesson 8 from: Canon Rebel T4i / 650D/T5i Addendum Fast Start

John Greengo

Shooting, Playback, and Custom Menus

Lesson 8 from: Canon Rebel T4i / 650D/T5i Addendum Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

8. Shooting, Playback, and Custom Menus

Next Lesson: Camera Operation

Lesson Info

Shooting, Playback, and Custom Menus

And so now we're going to do that it's a slightly tedious little area, but we're just going to kind of work our way through the menu line item by line item and get the camera set up the way you want it set up. So I'll give you some recommendations as we go along the way here, so let's, go ahead and get started in here. All right? So to get into the menu system, you first need to press the menu button, and then you were going to get this long listing it's actually not that long, but there are several different tabs of listing, and they are little icons in there, so we have our camera for our shooting modes those things related to shooting will be in here, and there are a few tabs all in red. There was some special new ones in the teeth for eye that you may not have if you have an earlier camera that are specifically for live view shooting, and there are additional features that are also in my clicker stopped on me again, but it's now working in the movie mode. So what you have to do her...

e is you have to have your camera in the movie mode and then press the menu button to get into these, and we will do that in just a minute. We have playback for all those features dealing with playback and then we have a set up section just kind of getting the general things set on your camera and then my favorite menu is my menu where you get to choose what's in that menu system so as we're going through the menu system, you might want to keep track of a few things that you think are relevant to your photography that you're going to come back to on a regular basis most of the time you shouldn't need to dive into the menu system we call that diving into the menu system to go find some particular feature when you're out shooting, so keep track of those few favorite once I think you get a store about five or six of them and put him in your in my menu will do that at the very end. Now first off remember when we're talking about the child safety modes with it, the safety locks and all the features if you are in the little icon scene modes, you're only going to have access to a portion of the menu system. So for this portion of the class and for your general photography, I would highly recommend using the p t v a v and m modes the more manual votes that way you can get into the full menu system and make any change that you want to make so uh get your cameras out press the menu button and we're going to just start on the left the camera shooting section the shooting menu and started the top first off we have image quality and when you go into this well we kind of already saw this in the quick menu because you're going to get this secondary screen and you can go in and select j peg or raw I would choose large j peg if you are going to shoot j peg but I would encourage you to kind of work your way towards shooting raw that way you can get the full true image that you are getting out of the camera and you can work with it later and so I highly recommend that for some people the raw plus j big might fill a short term need for doing something but in general I'm going to recommend raw for most people and a cz you see on screen I have two recommendations the recommendation in gray's for the average user the one in red is for the more advanced user so keep track of that as we go through because occasionally I will have differing suggestions on how to set the camera next up the beep I said I don't like being a really noisy hound and making a lot of noise and fuss when I'm shooting so I like to disable this and I think it be good for many people to disable it on the camera a cz aziz long as you are comfortable with knowing when the camera is in focus, we do have the in folk in the viewfinder displays as well. Now you could also one of the options in here is you can turn off the sounds when you're using the touch screen, because normally the touch screen activates a bp noise as well, which can be further irritating release shutter without card is a very complicated way of turning the camera on or off when there is no memory card installed in camera. Typically, if you don't have a memory card in the camera, you don't want the shutter to fire, because if you do that, you think you're taking pictures, but you really aren't because there's no memory in the camera. And so by turning this off it's kind of a safety precaution, you forget to put a memory card in there. You're not going to start taking pictures thinking that they're stored to a memory card so I would turn that offer disable it. Next up is image review. This is a bit of a personal preference here. How long do you want your image displayed on the rear lcd after you take a picture? There are some cases where I don't want it displayed it all if I'm trying to conserve on battery power but nor most of the time I think four seconds is a good amount of time but there are some other options in there okay we're gonna get to a little bit more complicated one here lin's aberration correction all right so the aberration is a little bit of a problem and there are some two different things that are going on the first thing is called peripheral illumination correction which we also know as vignette many lenses especially fast lenses that let in a lot of light have a darkening in the corners when you shoot him wide open and the camera which knows the lenses if you use a cannon lands it can communicate this information it can fix this it knows how dark they are and how far off to the edge it goes and it can lighten those up lighten up those pixels to make it a very even sky in this case which seems like a really good idea to start with but once again like we've seen on other settings that alter the image it's not always the setting we want done on every picture whenever I should people pictures I'm often adding in a vignette to make the corners less bright to keep the eyes mohr in the center of the frame and so I can't say that I wholeheartedly endorse it using this for your settings now also in there is something that is called peripheral excuse me kind of his last one this one's called chromatic aberration this often happens when you have bright backgrounds and something kind of it's coming past of being in this building if you look very closely there's kind of a teal blue colored line on the lower side in kind of an orange reddish line on the topside and this is chromatic aberration the light isn't hitting the pixels quite right and this is a fix that could be done in software and so right in camera you can have this fixed for you and when I first saw this I thought this was fantastic because before this I had to go into light room and I had to play around with some sliders to fix it well having turned this on in the camera I realize the shot rate the burst rate slows down quite a bit and so if you are a sports shooter you do not want to have this turned on because you're five frames a second get slowed down to three frames a second and you're six shot burst in raw get slowed down to about three shots if you're shooting j peg you could shoot five frames per second all day long but if you have this turned on it's really going to slow you up and so my recommendations for peripheral illumination for a very basic user would be to go ahead and leave it enabled in the same thing with chromatic aberration those air fixes that you won't need to make later on in software but for the more advanced user I would recommend disabling both of these because it's going to affect the straight out performance of the camera now if you shoot raw this once again is not going to have any effect on your images so it doesn't matter what you have said in raw it's just going to matter if you turn j peg on as to where this is set next up is red eye reduction now red eye reduction is that little flash that comes on ahead of the picture and so I like to leave this disabled because timing my picture and capturing the right moment is more important than dealing with red eye later on you can make your choice next up is flash control okay so we're just walking along going through the menu system and all of a sudden we're going down the allison wonder haul alice in wonderland rabbit hole okay so when you will go into a flash control it opens up toe a whole plethora of options so let's take a look at some of the major options in here flash firing you can disable the flash from firing ever so if you worked in a stolen art museum and you knew the fly the camera should never have the flash fire you could turn it off. Most people are going to do that. The media ring system that the flash uses is normally what's called an e t l two metering it's a very good system. Just leave it on evaluative the sink speed when you are in the aperture value mode can be adjusted for basic user. I think the one, two hundred to one sixteenth of a second is going to be fine because it keeps you at a pretty normal shutter speed when you're holding the camera. But the more advanced user is probably pretty good at hand holding their camera at a really slow shutter speed like an eighth of a second. And so if you don't mind having an eighth of a second or a quarter of a second in a dark situation with the flash firing, you could turn that toe auto built in flash settings. Okay, this is where we go down even further into the rabbit hole and there are more things going on in here, and so what we have is the built in flash has specific settings about how it fires and normally it's going to be in what's called normal firing an option is to go into the wireless mode and unfortunately, in this class it's kind of beyond the scope of this class setting this camera to do wireless flash photography but you can do it and if you wanted to you would set it either it easy wireless or you do it at custom wireless if you do go into the custom wireless mode it's going to give you a whole bunch of options about how the power is set between the in camera flash versus the external flashes what channel they're on so that you can have different groups of flashes and so you can set a ratio between the on camera or the external flash and really get in and control the way your flashes work which is a great thing for anyone who wants to do remote flash photography it's just not what a lot of people do with this camera but if you want to get into it get yourself a nice medium to high end cannon flash sit down with the instruction manual for a couple of hours and you go through these few little settings here and do a lot of practicing well because you got to figure out all these little things in there but sorry I'm not going by it a little bit more quickly but it's just not how the typical user of this camera works with it all right next up if you do add on one of the additional flash units you can control that flash unit by what's going on or by the buttons in your camera so you don't have to go up and hold the flash. You could do all those controls right from the from the back of the camera and that's kind of a nice feature to be able to have those controls handed off like that. And the same thing goes for the custom functions on the external flash units and so just being able to control it from the camera side and so that's all in flash control. So there's a lot of things buried in there for people who want to fine tune it. Ok, so we're going to be moving over to the next tab in the menu system, just kind of the shooting tab. Number two we have exposure, compensation and auto bracketing. Now we already saw this in the quick menu, and this is what gave us the ability. The bracketing part gives us the ability to shoot a siri's of pictures that are overexposed and under exposed. Now you can manually do this with exposure compensation, but with exposure bracketing. The difference is, is that the pictures can be fired off very quickly and the camera makes the setting adjustments for you. Now this is a one stop bracket. You could do it to stop bracket where the pictures are two stops apart. You could do a one stop racket, but the whole thing is based off of a minus two exposure pictures so everything's bracketed around a darker picture. And so this was a technique that was commonly used with slide film users because they needed to get the right exposure, and they would shoot a bracket siri's out in the field. It's less important with digital cameras in general. But there's, some people who like to do a type of photography called hdr photography stands for high dynamic range, and they need to shoot a siri's of pictures. A stop or two stops apart, for instance, and then they use those to create one image combined in a special photo compositing program to work with the different tonal values of that particular image. And so it's something that you might need. Typically you're gonna need to use it in a situation where you are working from a tripod, so the camera does not move next up. Auto lightning, optimizer. Now, we did talk about this before I would recommend turning this off. This is where it might try to lighten up the shadows, and it shows in the viewfinder is a d plus and it's just I think, better to leave this turn off in those situations. Next up, we have a custom white balance, if you recall, when we were shooting the white piece of paper to get the correct color balance for a room that we were in, you would shoot a white piece of paper first, you would then come to the custom white balance sitting in your menu system, and it would ask you about setting the last image you took as the example for white balance, so if you were going to do a custom white balance, and this is where you need to come in the menu system next up, his white balance shift in bracketing if you're white balance, seems to be off the daylight setting, or for potentially most likely problem you're going to have is either in the tungsten setting or in the fluorescent setting, so the artificial light sources aren't really matched exactly with light sources that you're working with. You could go in and tweak this I've never really tweaked with this it's possible to do, but something very few people do color space. I'm going to recommend a change to adobe rgb it's, a slightly whiter color gamut sometimes publications requests that images are set to this city that's a larger color standard thie internet works in what's called srg be, but we can change that down in the computer systems, and so you'll be able to see images on all computers that won't be a problem with this next up, his picture style doesn't affect people who shoot rob for people who shoot j peg it slightly effects the color saturation and contrast of your images I think for really basic user auto is goingto be a pretty safe choice the camera will adjust it though and so for a slightly more advanced user who is going to use j peg I would probably just leave it it's standard so it's fairly consistent from shot to shot in what it's doing now if you dive in, you'll notice at the bottom of the screen it says info details set and this allows you to go in and adjust the sharpness contrast saturation in color tone and so you could find to it this is like creating your own film emotion so that it has a little bit more vibrancy or contrast so you could tweak with this all you want in lieu of having a computer and photo shop for light room personally, I would rather just work in light room where you have much better controls to work on it. Next up is the meter in mode we've already seen this before in the quick menu but once again that's our choice of about evaluative partial spotted center waited. I leave my non evaluative pretty much all the time so I'd recommend that for most users so you got to get used to their symbol system which matches up sometimes awkwardly with what the actual meeting system does okay, next up is the third tab in the shooting menu and the first option here is dust delete data dust on the sensor is a problem and a last ditch effort on fixing the problem let's say you're on safari in africa and there's no camera shops nearby. You don't have any devices for cleaning the sensor and you've got dust specks on your censor. What can you do about it? Well, once again you go back to the white sheet of paper, you photograph a clean white sheet of paper, you come to dust, delete data and it maps out where all the dust is on your sensor and it then clones over it on future pictures so it magically gets rid of it. Now I don't like my camera cloning things on the screen, so I prefer not to do this that's why I call it a last ditch effort and this will work on both j pegs and raw images. And so I it's an emergency thing only I would say I esso auto, the camera has the ability to automatically set the iast so if you want to and I kind of failed to mention this before, but when you could set theis so between one hundred and twelve thousand eight hundred as well as the high setting of twenty five thousand, one of the options is to set it in automatic this is kind of like having a car that has an automatic drive it's determining what gear you are in. I think any good thinking photographer is going to know what I also there in and what s so they want to be in and make those changes manually and that's what I highly recommend for anyone who wants to take manual control of their camera. However, if you do put it in auto and there's a few special circumstances that this will work out quite well, you can limit how high of ice so it will choose. So if you can remember back to where we were talking about the s o capabilities, you can kind of figure out what your limit is of what you think is acceptable and put that in perhaps it's thirty, two hundred, maybe it's higher, maybe it's slower, but that's on lee going to affect you when you use auto in the cell. Now the next two settings air kind of similar, so let me talk about both of them at the same time. The first is long exposure noise reduction, and the second one is high eso noise reduction. So noise reduction is where the cameras going in, using software to help reduce the noise of a particular image, you remember that images shot really high, I cells don't look real good well, images shot over a long period of time say two seconds, four seconds or ten seconds they're not going to look good as well because of this noise problem, the camera has a built in processing system for getting rid of this noise. Now this is something that is only gonna work on j pegs does not work on raw images, and if you do turn this on, it is going to slow your camera down because it has to go through processing in order to do this. In fact, just last night I was shooting some ten second and fifteen second exposures with the camera and with a fifteen second exposure, what it does is it shoots a ten second exposure, and then it spends ten seconds processing that image, and so you can't do anything with the camera for twenty seconds, and so it does slow things down quite a bit. And so once again, going back to shooting raw and dealing with it later, I think works better in this situation for a very basic user, you could leave them at auto and standard, but for the more advanced users, I would turn both of these off all right, the next tab deals with live view shooting remember how I said when you put the camera in live you with that button in the back of the camera a lot of things change about the way the camera shoots, especially auto, focusing first off, some people don't even like to go into live you, so you could disable it if you want to. I find it handy from time to time, and so I like to leave it enabled the auto focus method he's going to determine how the camera focuses when it's in line view and on ly life, you not the movie mod, not standard picture taking you could use face tracking in here. I would probably go with flexi zone single, maybe multi, with single you have a little bit more discretion over a small area. In one particular area, you can play around with ease, the additional one. The quick mode is when I talked about earlier, where the mere drops down, the camera goes back to the standard mode for just a moment to focus its kind of disruptive, because you can't see what's going on. So try these out. If you're going to use the focusing the other option beyond this is manual focus, which is what I do a lot when I'm in live you next up is the choice of whether you want your camera to continually auto focus while you are shooting your movie in general, I think even though this camera is potentially the best that cannon has ever had that does this it's still not real good and so I would just plain old disabled this feature unless you're going to be shooting video where you need that focus to actually adjust while you are making the shot next up is the touch shutter this is the ability of the on screen lcd to be able to be touched to fire the shutter and it's kind of a nice feature it doesn't really get in the way of anything, so I'm going to leave it enabled it's my recommendation while you're working with the lcd display, you could have a grid display, which some people like for leveling horizons or just for compositional reasons it does clutter up the screen a little bit, so I tend to want to turn it off. We have a different aspect ratio that we can shoot with when we have, when when we're in the live view mode. Now the aspect ratio of the sensor on the camera, which is the important thing is three by two, and if you choose anything other than that, you're not getting the full area of the sensors so it's just cropping something in camera for you? This is something that you can do later, but if for some reason you want to do it in camera, you can do that with the aspect ratio and finally in this tab the meter in time or when you press the shutter release how long does the meeting system on the camera stay active and for most people sixteen seconds the standard matter time is going to work just fine ok, now we're going to switch gears a little bit and you got to go up and put your camera in the movie mode so you gotta flip that on switch up to the movie mode so that you have access to these settings in here so you got to hit the menu button once you've done that and then died back in and look for those little symbols with the camera in the video camera so we have a half method this is what we just talked about in live you but now you could have a different setting for live you versus when you're in the movie mode so you could separate those two types of functions once again flexi zone single is going to work out pretty good it's a tight box in the middle where the camera is best in focusing the servo movie mode you can choose to have the camera do continuous focusing or disable that I think for most video shooting you're going to probably want to have it disabled just cause it's not very fast in tracking movement do you want to use the auto focus button to help focus the camera while you are shooting video and so on this one, you can leave it on so you can just press that button to get the focus. Go focus going while you're shooting, but in general, I would recommend focusing ahead of the shot. We could turn a grid display on or off, just like we had in live you and the same thing with the meter in time, or how long the camera stays active. Meteor there is a second tab, which is actually where some of the more important stuff is for the movie mode. And first thing in here is the recording size. Now there are two different video systems. There's, thie, ntsc and the palace system. These are the two most common video systems here in north america. We use ntsc in europe and a lot of middle eastern countries they use pal system. You probably know it system you're using in your country, and they'll very the options that you have in the camera and we'll get to that study and actually a little bit later on. But in there you can choose to shoot in full hd, which is nineteen. Twenty. H d, which is twelve, eighty or a smaller resolution at six hundred forty pixels on the long side. So for most people, if you want the highest quality video, you're going to shoot it in nineteen twenty by thirty frames a second. If you want to emulate the look of hollywood movies, which is shot at twenty four frames a second there's an option there for you as well, and if you want to shoot something at a faster frame rate so that you can play it back at a slower frieri, there is a sixty frames per second option as well. For a sound recording, the camera automatically adjust the levels that it uses on the microphone for recording the sound. Whether the sound is louder or softer, you can go in and manually adjusted as well, so if you're going to be making a serious film and you're going to use one of these cameras, you can go in and manually adjusted, so, um, or advanced user might want to get in there and play with those controls themselves now within their I should also mention that there is a wind filter that you can enable or disabled, depending on how windy the situation is, and so you can play with that as well the video snapshot mode. Frankly, I don't get this moment. I just don't I understand what it does I just don't understand why okay so what it does is it allows you to shoot video but on lee in two four or eight second clips so it forces you to shoot really short clips I think it's something that's popular in japan that just doesn't translate well here in the united states and many other places so I'm going to leave that disabled in my camera ok so now you can flip the camera back out in the movie mode and just get back into the regular camera mode and come back into the menu to where we have the blue playback options now a lot of options in here we're not gonna spend too much time on because they're not that important protecting images you can lock your images so people can't delete him downside is is that people can reform at the card and they could be deleted there we can rotate images in camera after we have taken them of course we could erase images but there is a trash button on the back of the camera that's far easier to get to but if you're going to erase a lot of images you can do it through here you could hook your camera toe a printer there's all sorts of instructions in the instruction manual about how to do this I'm not going to go into it but you're selecting picture picture sizes and quantities um I think it's much better done from an actual computer. A new feature in this camera is the photo book set up. This is where you can create a book in camera that you would then upload to a service so that they could print the book for you so it's kind of in lieu of having a computer to set this all up creative filters. Now these are things that you can do to a picture after they've been taken and in I think all cases on this one you know, I think all cases you take a normal picture and it's going to save it as a fish eye or a toy a fact or soft focus or some other goofy effect and it's going to save it as a copy so the original image is not harmed whether it's a j peg or raw you get this new funny version of it this is all better done in a computer, but now you can do it in your camera if you want to. We can resize images. For instance, if your training get a smaller file size for e mailing, you could create that in camera once again it's just kind of taking the place of what a computer program would do. Second tab for playback first option in here is history graham display and so this is a display graphical display of the total information that you have shot basically telling you in a visual way, whether your pictures too light or too dark, and I like the rg because it shows you in red, green and blue what your history ram looks like. Want more information on that? Take a good camera class or photography class on that one image jump with dial. All right. When you play back an image, the tabs on the back of the camera will go previous picture next picture, but if you want to jump ten images at a time, you turn the top die along the camera, so if you're trying to do scroll through a lot of images to get back to the beginning of the day, you could just turn that top dial. Now you can go in, and you can adjust it to one hundred images, too. Pictures by different dates, folders, movies, stills or by the rating of the picture so there's a lot of different ways that you can customize that you can create a slide show. Hope your camera up to a t v, and it will go through your images one by one for particular links of time, and you can do this set up with a slide show in this setting, the rating you can go in and you can rate your images now when this first came out in cameras, I thought this was a really, well waste of space in a real joke, but actually, I use this when I go out and I take pictures on, I'm sitting in a car and I have nothing to do for half an hour, I can look at my pictures, go through pick out which ones I think are better than the others give him two or three stars, and when I get home, I've just got a jump on my editing because of those stars carry forward to light room and other types of programs so you can rate your images one through five stars, and basically my system is just to rate all the good images to stars and then in toe look at him on my computer because the images so small here I made a mistake and there's a number of two star images that are not to star images there one star and there's a number of one star images that I could tell were good that later get rated so it does not replace a computer, but it gives you a good head start, especially if you're on vacation and wasting time in an airport control over hd my if you're going to hook your camera up to your tv. You can go into this and enable it and it's going to enable your tvs remote control to go forward and back in your camera to play image to image all right now we're going to get into the set up part of this uh cameron just kind of basic set ups on how the functions of your camera work first off is the folder selection when you shoot pictures all your pictures go in a folder and if you want you can create a new folder you could have two folders one for your personal photography one for your business photography and you could shoot pictures and playback pictures within a particular folder you can create and select those folders in this setting normally for file numbering you're going to want to leave this on continuous you can go in and have it manually reset to zero zero zero one every time you put in a new memory card but for most people their best just to have it continuously count so that you have less likely of a chance of having images with the same file member just as a kind of a side note you should be remembering your files when you get him into your home computer you shouldn't just be leaving them with the same file numbers because this will reset every ten thousand pictures. Next up is auto rotate recommended change here it should say on computer only not on camera the reason for this is that when you shoot a vertical picture, it will stay vertical and fill the frame of the entire lcd panel. If you turn it on computer and camera, it rotates it, it becomes a very small picture. Harder to see. Next up is format the card when you first get a brand new memory card, you should form at the card for your camera. This kind of sets the tone communication protocol between the camera and the car. Every time I go out on a shoot and I come back and I download my pictures after their downloaded and backed up, I put the card in the camera and I reformatted it, deletes the pictures, clears the file directory and cleans everything up so that you can start fresh again so highly recommend formatting cards on a regular basis. Anytime you're going out on it. Important shoot, but be aware you're getting rid of everything on the card and so on. Lee. Do it after you've backed up the car, it's safer to form at the card, then to delete pictures, deleting pictures leaves some kind of residue of ghost folders on the car. You probably won't see this, but if you purchase what's called an eye fi card, which is related to y fi, you could have pictures. As you take him from your camera transmitted to a nearby computer and you can go in here and set this up if you have that card installed on your camera next tab, we're going to control the power off. How long your camera goes before it powers down and goes to sleep. Thirty seconds is the normal amount of time. Longer periods of time would use up more battery power, but might fit your needs. The lcd brightness can be manually adjusted and should probably be normally left in the middle of the settings. The lcd auto off. Normally, I would leave this on enable you could turn it off to disable and basically what's going to happen is if you turn let's, see it's going to turn off the lcd. We go back to the beginning of this on enable it's going to use thie sensor in the back of the camera has to win to turn the key, the lcd on and off. And so basically it's turning that sensor right above the eye piece on and off time zone you're simply going to adjust this for what part of the world you live in. All right, so this is my big test. This is my prediction I was predicting months ago when I made this class. What time I would reach when I got here and I thought it would be one thirty but it's only twelve forty five so my clock is just a little off obviously just putting in the date and time here what time zone did you haven't said oh, maybe a different time zone yes I'm in mountain time zone or or maybe the daylight savings time yeah that's what I was thinking sure I mean our off I'm thinking daylight savings time already all right, next up language if you see this language in your camera please call me right away because that is the klingon language and hopefully it doesn't say cling on eso fixed that to the appropriate language as it probably is already there okay, what do we got next getting a little goofy as we get stuck inside this menu system here. Okay, the video system so ntsc and pal we talked about that earlier in north america were using ntsc other parts of the world you probably know what you're already at camera probably comes set up properly for that okay, so we're under the third to old chap getting getting closer to the end you can change the color of the screen two different colors one is the normal two's not bad there's some really wacky colors with three foreign five so if you like unusual colors you can change the menu color the feature guide all right, so for a very beginning photographer you might want to leave this enabled what happens when you go to a particular menu setting or feature it's going to pop up with a little bit of additional information once you get used to it and you know what you're doing this drives you nuts because there's constantly this menu blocking what you want to see and so for the more advanced users once you've had the camera for a month or two I would disable this touch control this is the touch sensitive control the lcd panels some people don't ever want to use it and you can completely disable it I don't have a major problem with it because you can use it or not use it a cz you want in the field sensor cleaning we talked about shooting that white piece of paper and doing registered dusty image will in this case here you can go in and normally I would leave this on auto cleaning and able what happens then is when you turn the camera off and turn it on it sends the camera through an automatic sensor cleaning which is a good thing it kind of keeps dust off the sensor but occasion away something gets stuck on the sensor that doesn't want to come off in which case you're going to need to either manually clean it or have somebody else manually cleaning and so there is a manual cleaning option and if you do want to do it there are kind of two stages stage one is pretty easy you get one of these bulb blowers you put the camera into the manual cleaning mode you take the lens off and what happens is the mere comes up the shutter opens up and you can see the sensor right there and you'll take this camera hold it upside down carefully and blow air inside to hopefully knock off dust and have it fall out now if that doesn't clean the dust off because it's got a sticky something on it and it's stuck to the sensor you're going to need to go to a swab and liquid and actually swab the deck here you need to sweep it clean now not everyone is comfortable doing this and if you don't feel comfortable going in and sweeping the sensor clean you can turn your camera in tow a repair facility will they will do it for you might cost you fifty to one hundred bucks and the little tools here and accessories might cost around twenty five so you can save some money if you think you're going to do it and feel comfortable doing it it's not for everyone I do it I haven't damaged two camera yet but it is possible you can hook gps devices up to this camera and you can use this to go in ah and control some of those gps and features okay, the most ridiculous thing in the entire menu system is the certification logo display you khun see different logos that they have been certified to use because of something they have done in the camera and I have no idea what these logos are but I'll have to find that out for the next version in this class you can look at the logos wow fun ok so we're been walking along going very good we ran into that rabbit hole earlier well here's to the other rabbit hole so when you go into a custom functions it opens up into a whole bunch of other options and they have changed this from previous rebel versions and they have actually made this smaller in size and they've pulled out some of the custom functions and put him in previous places in the menu. So now if you dive in here there are going to be eight different custom menu options in here the first of which is controlling the exposure level increments the standard that most cameras work with today his third stops but some people like working in half stops I would say third stops is just fine with me next up is I esso expansion if you recall back from the isos the highest I so twenty five thousand six hundred you cannot get to unless you turn this on now I don't recommend shooting in s o twenty five thousand for anything but just in case you want to go there this will allow you to go there so I'm going to recommend turning this on at least don't put the child safety locks I hate those child safety locks so this just kind of takes that one off next up deals with the image this is called highlight tone priority I would leave this on disabled but here's what's going on if you shoot an image that has a very bright highlights you might lose detail in those highlights by turning this on enable it holds back some of those highlights some of the data going to those highlights so that you get data there now that seems like a really good idea to me but I wasn't so fun of the fact that you can't use ice so one hundred when you use this you have to be a tie so two hundred or higher and so basically the camera is playing games with you as faras thie exposure in order to do this and so if you should draw this doesn't matter but if you shoot j pegs I would say leave this on disable so that you can shoot it aya so one hundred and that's going to be best for most people next up is the auto focus assist beam fiery when the camera can't focus in low light situations it does something that I consider that's very annoying to help focus the camera what it does is it fires this disco light of flashes so that there's a little bit of lights of the camera can focus. I'm gotten pretty proficient with manually focusing or being very precisely where about I am pointing that center brackets so that I have some contrast some lines to get on, and so I want to end to disable this so for very basic user who kind of not really familiar with using the cameras, I could see leaving it enable old, but I would think the more advanced user would want to disable this feature. Now there are a couple of options about using external flashes if you use external flashes, which would be very good if you're going to use those higher and flash units. Next up is something called mere lock up. You would never leave your camera and near lock up except for the most unusual situations, but here's what's going on is that when you are shooting pictures at relatively slow shutter speeds like an eighth of a second as that mere pops up, it causes a vibration in the camera, which might result in a blurred photograph. So by locking them europe well ahead of the picture and then taking the picture when it's in its up and steady position, you might get a sharper image. This works out very well for landscape photographers, macro photographers potentially any sort of product photography where your camera is at a slow shutter speed a quarter second eight second fifteenth of a second and so forth and so this is something that you could turn on and off for a particular situation next up is dealing with the exact functions of the shed a release and the auto exposure lock button in the back of the camera normally the but in the front will focus and kind of get your exposure set as well but you can lock the exposure in and back and so for a basic user, I recommend leaving this on the zero setting for a more advanced user you could do the exposure in the front like it's always done, but what you've done is you've taken off the focus so that it on ly focuses when you press this back but this is what some people refer to is back button focusing the advantage is is that you can focus when and where you want to with your thumb and you can take a picture completely independent of focusing and this is really handy. For instance, if I'm going to take the camera and I want to focus on somebody, I can use the rear button to focus on that person now I'm going to come a little bit off frame so I'm put them off to the left hand side and I want to take a picture now I can press the button and the camera's not going to refocus on this area that isn't the person and knowing that I got it focused right straight on pointed off to the side then I can shoot as many pictures as I want you going on and off the camera teo shoot the picture because the camera is still focused where it was back here that first time around it's not something that everyone likes using but I have found that a very high percentage of intermediate advanced in professional photographers like so you might want to give it a try to see if you like that style of working there's some other options in there too about kind of mixing up what button does what but those were the two most popular options next up is the set button in the back of the camera now as I said before this but normally doesn't do anything on its own and if you want to you can go in and customize its use it's kind of your choice here I really don't have any highly recommended choices I leave my camera and just normal all right next up l c d display when the power is turned off so when you turn the power off what happens when you turn the power back on normally people would just leave this display on some people wanted to stay wherever it was before they turn their camera off so it's a slight customization of just the way that display turns on and off display on is he going to be fine for most people? Ok, as we back our way out of that rabbit hole we're back into that third tab forth to have excuse me of the setup copyright information this is really cool. You can put your name in your camera you could put your your website your email so that if your camera got lost somebody could find you potentially or that all the pictures you take automatically have your name associated with all the pictures and so yes, that is your camera. My name is in it. All right, so if you have been totally not paying attention for the last forty five minutes, you could clear all the settings that we've just put into the camera and this would reset the camera back to the factory default settings finally and here the last item is the firmware version. Now the latest version is camera version one point oh one as of the recording of this class, there is a reasonably good chance that cannon will find some sort of bug in the software that runs the operations of the camera, which we call firm where and they will issue an update at their website in order to get it. The basic idea is to go to the website you download the new firm where you put it on a memory card you put the memory card in your camera and go to firmware version it sees the new firm where and then uploads it you can check the website as well as the instruction manual for more specific information on how to do it but there is also len's version which they will list at the website not in your camera and basically that's the data bank of all the lenses that they have the vignette ing and chromatic aberration problems those lenses have and so that will be updated in the future as well I assume so make sure that your camera is has the most current version of firmware in it they typically update this about once every six months to once a year. All right, the final menu in here is what you choose it's called my menu and what you can do when you get into here is you can go through and register to my menu about six items that you think are important to your type of photography that you might change on a regular basis so I would carefully go through after the class and register three, four, five, six items to my menu and then go down and to my to display from my menu that way when you press the menu button it automatically starts at my menu were all your favorite features are so it's just a quick short cut to the few favorite things that you do on a regular basis and folks that is the entire camera we're not done with the class but that we're done with the camera so we'll take a little question and answer break here's to I'm sure there's people who found things that I didn't find in there I don't know about that john alright what we got bill well let's see um actually I had a question I was wondering when you do the manual sensor cleaning um is it a good idea to reset the camera what you call it the dust reset the dusty image generally the idea is is that by manually cleaning you don't need to do the reset dusty image but I think maybe where you were going with that is if you had registered a dusty image and then you cleaned it you might want to go back and then register the dusty image because then it doesn't have to clone over those areas there, right? Good question, bill. Why thank you. Eh? Question from dance lady, if you could just clarify this for her under setup format card I never thought to reform at the card which delete the images and read does the formatting you said that it is safer to do this rather than just a leading them on the computer? Why I don't know that I said the leading on the computer is right I think I said all right meant deleting in the camera my problem with deleting in the camera is that there is a folder with all your pictures inside it deletes all the pictures but the folder is either is still there you may not be able to see it but it's still there you get enough of these folders it starts causing a communication problem potentially so that's why it's good to just reformat every time you are completely done with a card tumbleweed thirty three ass does using the eight yet okay a slash a know a lock affect the focusing in the servo mode no doesn't very simple answer no, uh I think I saw me need to think about your question in the audience. Yes. Um so updating the firm where can you explain a little bit more about that? I haven't been able to figure that out. How would you how to do it or what it's for how would you bring that for where onto a car on the memory card for the camera. Okay, well, you would download it on your home computer and it becomes a small file on your desk top generally and you would take that and you will you would need to plug your either your camera or your memory card into your computer so using a card reader or the slot on your computer you put a formatted empty card on your computer and so then you would drag that that download onto that card so it's transferring it to that memory card you take the memory card you put it in the camera go to firmware version it's going to see that on the card and ask if you want to update the firm where and so that's how you get it to the camera as complicated as it is it's a lot easier than sending the camera back to the factory cool several folks thank you they weren't aware of the formatting yeah it's kind of one of those newbie things you know it's not intuitively clear that that's what you're supposed to do but that's why you watch classes like this that's right? Ok one more question that came a long time ago but we were saving it someone asking now marcus be photography asked if there is a menu item to enhance, improve or reduce grain when using high s up by a so and have you found that toe work? Well well, yes, there is the high eso noise reduction and I was just needing to make sure of it so I was actually just getting a bunch of test shots last night and once again, if you shoot raw, it doesn't do anything in there with a good program like light room, you can go in and applying noise reduction to your raw image and fix it out, and you have a number of different sliders in control. So it's, very controllable in camera, I believe there's three settings kind of a light, medium and strong thatyou khun d'oh, and it can get a little heavy handed on its noise reduction, and I'm not completely happy with the way it works. It typically looks a little better than just the image as it's noisy, so you can take a look and maybe do some testing with the high eso noise reduction. And I think that was in the first or second shooting town think was in the first you need to have actually and see if that works for your type of photography, so they do have it. It does work, but it depends on what your standards are. It's going that ask one more quick question, and that is from marjah three says team, tell us again, what is the secret to entering our name on the camera, entering the name, look at the information, this is good for all sorts of things. Look at the information on the bottom row, because a lot of times you have to hit the cue button or the info button to kind of shift getting to the keyboard to deleting the letters in there and let me just because people are still in here looking confused, let me quickly go in and take a quick look, enter author's name and down at the bottom info, cancel menu. Ok, I hit the cue button. Yeah, it doesn't really say so clearly in there, it says on the upper right hand quarter, excuse me, it says q switches back and forth between the keyboard and the display so you could hit the cue and then you're going to be using the touch pad left, right? Ah, and the set button to choose different letters and so forth. So I think that ought to get that question answered. Um, let's see, did you gold rush marketing just had a comment that, uh, they're using a t two I and the co workers in the t three I you're looking to upgrade and, uh, may go with the sixty or the mark three, but this class has been so valuable, it's good, it seems to apply and everyone will get.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Canon®T4i

Ratings and Reviews

user-bd4b1d
 

I always loved photography and even did a 12 year stint as a correspondent for a local newspaper, back in the 35 mm/film days. In 2005 I bought my first Canon, a Rebel XT. I had fun with it but never really knew what I was doing. I would get a good photo about 1 ever 100 shots, just from sheer luck. I bought a Canon Rebel T4i in Nov. of 2012 and having never taken a photography class, have been fumbling along with it ever since. When saw John's Photography Starter Kit, I immediately signed on and loved it. I was so thrilled when I saw he had specific classes for specific cameras and dove into this class, head first! It's like a dream come true! I love John's teaching style. He's concise, gets right to the point and doesn't waste time on needless fluff. I just bought this course yesterday and have already finished it and am ready to do it all over again, until I get it all right. I even learned something with the first glimpse of his slides and the photos of the T4i...I didn't know you could open the back screen, turn it around and re-seat it and have your display right there on the back of the camera without it sticking out and in the way! This course is going to be a huge help in getting the very most out of my camera. Thanks, John!

Getting a lot better
 

I am a huge fan of John Greengo. John is pretty much my Elvis. I learned everything, and I mean everything about this camera,though I kind of felt john could have been a little more enthusiastic about the T4i. I shoot mostly video with 4k super 35 cameras in raw. I understand top of the live vs. consumer grade. My point is, I think this camera deserved a little more enthusiasm than I felt it got. Throw a high quality lens on this machine and it is magnificent. The T4i is only entry level in price point. The photos I've taken with L-series lenses are stellar. Video is very acceptable as well, even with the H.264 codec. I would't have gotten that feeling after watching the video. From a leaning stand point this series of videos is worth the price and then some. I would just hate for people to walk away feeling they bought a toy. They most certainly did not.

Frank Siebert
 

Excellent course and superb tutor. I thought the pace of the tutorials was perfect. I was particularly impressed with the coverage of the course, which was extensive and thorough. I liked the tutorial so much that I have now purchased 3 more of John Greengo's courses.

Student Work

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