Skip to main content

Image Quality Menu

Lesson 18 from: Fujifilm X-Pro2 Fast Start

John Greengo

Image Quality Menu

Lesson 18 from: Fujifilm X-Pro2 Fast Start

John Greengo

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

18. Image Quality Menu

Lesson Info

Image Quality Menu

the first tab deals with image quality. So everything dealing with the quality of the image that you are shooting first up is something that we saw in the quick menu, which is the image size. And so this is for J peg shooters large, medium and small, and then the different aspect ratios. Most likely, you're gonna want to be shooting the large three by two aspect ratio, because that is the ratio of the sensor in the camera itself. Image quality allows us to shoot to choose between Raw and J Peg, as well as the compression size of the JPEG images. So, for instance, there's a fine J peg and a normal J peg. The fine has less compression and will be of a higher quality setting. And so, as I mentioned before, when I did the demo on the magnification versus of J peg versus raw Ah, lot of the photographers who used this camera, who are shooting raw are also shooting J pegs so that you can get that greater magnification now in the pdf that you get with the class as well as what you see appear o...

n screen, you're going to see my recommendations and my general recommendations are gonna be in gray. And this is where I think a typical user would be good to start their camera out, and the advanced user might be more interested in the settings in red. By no means do I think that this is where you should absolutely have your camera set up. It's your camera. You want to set it up as you want. But if you want some guidance in how to get it started and where you kind of start with and then tweak it from there, that's the idea. But behind my recommendations on the camera raw recording. All right now, I've seen this before in Nikon cameras, where they record a raw image either with uncompressed format or a lossless compressed. Now what does that mean? Well, un compressed means it's all the original information. What is lossless compressed me? Well, it means they've compressed it, but they've done it in a way that hasn't lost any information. And this is how Fuji has been storing their Roz in the past. But there have been some people who said, Well, I want the UN compressed image. I want everything I don't care if it's not necessary. I want everything. And so they added it in here, and I'm just really curious. What's the difference? I mean, what does it visually look like? And so I decided to go out and test it. And so there was an auto show near my house and so nice little fine detail. Let's check the highlight to shadow the detail information from a UN compressed image versus a compressed image. And I don't know how good of you you have of the screen. But I'm looking really closely at this, and I don't notice really any significant difference at all. I do see that one. The UN compressed is twice the file size of the other one, but I'm not getting any better information out of it. So I thought maybe I'd better do this again. So I shot another picture, and I wanted to shoot it both un compressed and compressed, checking file sizes, looking for details, sharpness, color. And once again, I just can't. I mean, I maybe could point out a little tiny difference, but definitely nothing significant. So I decided to go into the studio to make sure that I had, you know, all the parameters? Exactly, even. And so I'm just going to go in on my standard little test subject. Checking out sharpness, highlight shadows. Is there a difference between un compressed and, you know, right above where it says San Wa? I can see it's a little bit smoother with the UN compressed in. So I'd say, Yeah, it's a little bit better, but at the expense of twice the final size. That's a big price to pay. And so I decided, Well, let me try this in another way. Let me overexpose my image by three stops. Okay, I don't normally shoot like this, but, you know, just to test over, exposed by three stops and then corrected in post production and then compare the UN compressed versus compressed raw. And I'm looking for information in the highlights and the shadows and folks, I'm not seeing much of anything. I've seen only the smallest amount of detail difference between the two. All right, so let's under exposed by three stops. Let's correct it. In post. Let's compare the un compressed versus compressed and see what we see. Looking in the highlights, looking in shadows, looking at the noise level of the two images, and I'm just not seeing a noticeable difference. There's a huge difference in the file size. And so, folks, I gotta tell you, this is where we're going to save some space on her memory cards. And I think lossless compressed is gonna be fine for most everyone. If you're really, really picky, I encourage you to do your own tests and come to your own conclusion. But I have a feeling that the extra size of those files are not helping most people, but it will slow down the downloading and processing off all of those images. And so I think this is gonna be the best option for most people using this camera. Huh? Next up is our film simulation. We've seen this Ah, once, if not twice before on the camera, it's in the quick menu and so you can have different looks. Contrast color saturation to your images. Once again, that is only impacted on your JPEG images, not your raw images. Grain effect is something that's kind of knew that they've added in. And so we have an option of turning this off, having a weak version of it or a strong version. So of course I wanted to test this out, and I'm shooting a monochrome image. Let's blow this up and look like and look at what it looks like. Close up without any grain versus weak and strong, and you can clearly see the strong is very, very strong in that case. And so if you want to have this look on your images, it's a personal taste. You know, whether you like this or not, but that is what it looks like. Okay, the dynamic range. We've talked about this a couple of times before, and this is only impacting your J peg images. It's something that I have found that if you shoot with raw images, you'll actually have more control over those highlights and shadows than using dynamic range. But if you are shooting J pegs, it can help save those highlights from getting blown out on you. Uh huh, white balance we've seen before, just setting the white balance. It's the same as other places in the camera highlight tone. We saw this in the quick menu, just controlling how bright the highlights are. If you want to make your image a little bit more contrast. E you would set this to the plus side. If you want to recover those highlights, you would set it to the minus side. Same things with shadows. If you want them or intense, darker shadows, you go to the plus side. If you want to try to recover some of that shadow information, you would set it to the minus side color. This is gonna be you're saturation. You can increase and decrease the saturation. This, as in the previous couple, once we've been talking about once again, Onley deal with J pegs, not with Ross. We looked at some examples earlier of the sharpness. I think somewhere between 02 plus two is gonna be good for most people. Some people's taste might be a little different. Maybe you wanted on the minus side might want to throw it through a little bit of a test noise reduction deals with shooting with high I esos We looked at test results with this when we were going through the quick menu and probably gonna want to leave This said it zero. But there may be a little tweak if you're not liking the way that the cameras producing its J pegs long exposure, noise reduction deals with a longer shutter speed. And the way this works is, let's say you're gonna do a 15 2nd exposure. Well, it takes 15 seconds to take the picture, and then after that, the camera needs to process that information, which will take another 15 seconds. And so the question we should all be asking is. Is the processing that that 15 seconds takes? Is it worth the time that it takes away from us in our shooting? And so I wanted to throw the camera through a quick little test and so quick little version of shooting with noise reduction and without. And so here is what it looks like with a 15 2nd exposure, said it zero and then looking at minus four to plus four. I'm just not seeing much difference. And if you go in and shoot raw and you reduce the noise there, you can do a pretty good job cleaning up what very little noise there is. And so this often shows, slows down the shooting process quite a bit when you're out shooting. I know when I'm doing 15 2nd exposures It's usually nighttime. It's cold. I have a limited amount of time to get the shots, and I don't wanna waste time processing in the field if it's not helping me. And so I just don't see this doing much good, Which is why I'm recommending turning it off. Next up is lens modulation optimizer, and this is where the camera knows which Fuji lenses on the camera and what sort of problems that lens may have and how it could be improved. And what it's looking for is it's looking for wide open apertures and very close down apertures that have diffraction, and they're sometimes a slight loss of focus out on the edges of the lens. And what the camera will do is it will go in, and it will sharpen up those particular areas that need to be sharpened up. Now this only works in J. Peg, and it's not working in raw, but it's a very, very subtle difference. I was not even really able to see much of a difference in some of the practice test shots that I did, but this is something that I would probably leave turned on, and so that if you are shooting J pegs. It is kind of correcting for that diffraction that you get when you close down lenses to those really small apertures, huh? The color space. Normally, when you shoot a raw image, you are getting color in an adobe RGB color space. But when you shoot J pegs by default, it starts with S RGB. But if you want to change it to Adobe RGB, you can do it here. And if you print plan to print or try to get the most colors out of your images, you may want to change this to Adobe RGB so that you are getting the largest color gamut possible. Pixel mapping is something that you're likely not to need to do. But if you were to have some blown out pixels that are too bright or too dark, you could send the camera through its pixel mapping, and it's gonna look for pixels that are having problems. And then it's either gonna turn him off where it's gonna clone over them with other pixels. And it's something that you'll only need to do if there is a problem with the sensor. All right, third page image quality select custom setting in. So we looked earlier at the seven different custom settings that you could set where you would set different film looks and contrast in saturation levels. And you can have different settings for various different types of looks that you want. And so, just in case you're curious, what I do when I get a camera is I usually just set custom one to the default system, the way the camera is initially because I teach classes and cameras, I want it to work as it would work out of the box for anyone else. And then I set custom to the way that I personally kind of like it and then custom three l often set for a black and white mode, and then custom four might be a slightly different version of the black and white modes. But if you have a number of different styles of shots that you like to get, feel free to go in there and customized, really the look of your particular photographs, okay, so that is actually where you would select them. This is where you get to go in and make those savings, and so in here you can go in and you can select the different modes. And just as a quick little demo, let me go ahead and show you on my camera the way that you might want to go ahead and do this. So let's get my camera set up here, and we're gonna go ahead and hit the menu buttons so that we can dive into the menu. And so we are on image quality. Oh, here, let me show you another little thing. That's kind of interesting. So we want to go to image quality Page three, and we can get there two ways were at image quality. I can go right and I can page down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down. And finally, I'm at page three. Okay, let's go back and do this again. So up here it image quality. I can come down to auto focus manual focus, go to the right and go up one and I'm on pitch three. And so it's kind of the back door into getting Page three. So back to what we were going to talk about it. It saved custom settings, so I'll go to the right in here. You can see I've already adjusted some of these will Go ahead and adjust number six. Go to the right in here and I can select different film looks. Maybe I want the classic chrome for this one here. And then I want to take my highlights and I'm gonna bring those up just a little bit. I take my shadows, I'm gonna make them a little bit more intense. Remember, the plus and minus is not exposure. Think of it is how intense that particular features. So I want Maurin tense shadows. And then if I hit back back to custom six. Do you want to set this? And I'm going to say yes is okay. And now you can see I have classic Chrome said in there. And if I want to go back and take a look, you can see those settings that I just made in there and I could go back and it knows that I hadn't made any changes, Which is why it didn't ask me if I wanted to save a new one. And so if I want to set those, I would come over to the Q menu, and then I could quickly dial those in, and we can see if Number six, Where's number six? There's Number six has the classic crow with a plus one in the highlights and the plus two in the shadows, and so customize away Get your camera exactly the way you like it to work.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Fuji X-Pro2 Recommended Settings
Fuji X-Pro2 Keynote

Ratings and Reviews

MInna
 

WOW how I wish I had this to begin with!!!! Between manual and smart tip overload via books and U Tube, as well as, class instructor snafus I pretty much felt like an idiot. After this class not so much. Great job .

a Creativelive Student
 

I have the X Pro 2 for over a year and I thought that I might get more information on how to use it more efficiently. Boy this is a great course! I learned a lot and I loved the hidden feature :) Highly appreciated John and CL!

mi no
 

it's a great course would have loved to get the same quality course for my Fujifilm X-Pro3

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES