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Quick Menu Overview

Lesson 7 from: Fujifilm X-T3 Fast Start

John Greengo

Quick Menu Overview

Lesson 7 from: Fujifilm X-T3 Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

7. Quick Menu Overview

What settings are available in the default quick menu and what are they used for? John shares how to adjust the focus box size and move the focus point, a unique feature to the XT-3. Get quick access to AF mode, dynamic range, white balance, noise reduction, image size, image quality, and more.

Lesson Info

Quick Menu Overview

So let's take a closer look at what is in the quick menu. First thing to note is that once you make a change on something in the quick menu away from the default setting, they'll be a little indicator a little red dot to indicate that that setting has been changed or altered in some way starting along the top row. We have our custom setting, and this allows us to go in and make a number of changes to the look of our image. And so one of the things that I think Fuji's air really good at is black and white. But when I shoot black and white, I have different style. Sometimes I want a bit of contrast. Sometimes I want a lot of contrast. Sometimes I want to use a C p a tone, and I can set the camera up to have many different looks. And I can go ahead and save those looks here in these seven different custom options. And so any of the modes that we have in the quick menu can be saved as a preset favorite. And so we already have. I think, what do we have? About 16 20 different settings here i...

n the quick menu, set him all up exactly as you want him for a certain type of photography, and then you can save them as one of the custom modes here. So, for instance, let's do a little demo here, and I'm gonna My camera turned on turned on the quick menu in here. And so when we go in here with the base, you'll see that we have all these customs, seven settings and we can just turn the dial on the back of the camera base means that's standard setting. And I could come over to one of these settings for auto focus. And let's say I choose this to be a small bracket and I'm gonna change this to B 400 I'm going to change the white balance to be okay. And let's just say I want to save this as a particular setting. I can go in to the menu system, and I can save this as one of the C one c two C three settings. And that way I could just quickly select that setting and my camera will be set up in the manner that I want. And so it's one of many different ways to customize the camera. Okay, so there's a little bit of a shortcut you should know about. If you do want a re program where things are and what you've selected in the quick menu, you can hit the cue button and hold that for two seconds. As a real general tip on this camera. A lot of these buttons, if you hold him for two seconds, will allow you to go in and customize the way that that particular button works. And so, in this case, you can reorganize what's going on in there. And so let me quickly show you on the camera what that is like. So once again, we pressed the Q button to turn this feature on and off. But if I hold it in for two seconds, I can now go through and select different items. And let's say I'm gonna take this first item and onion hit, Okay, I can then go through the entire menu system, and I could choose what I want, say, for instance, I like the self timer and I hit OK, now the self timer is in that first location. And if you don't like where something is, you can say you can go in there and select whatever item you want, and in fact, if you want nothing in there, you can collect nothing. And if you only want to have two or three things in there, because they're things that you're always going to, and you don't want to be confused with anything else, you can completely customize that menu exactly the way you want it. All right, Next up is R. A F mode. This is a really important feature that allows you to change the size of the focusing area that you're gonna be using when auto focusing. So let's take a closer look at what some of these options are in here. First off, when you see the white box that is your selected focusing area, and so that's where the camera's gonna be looking to focus. If it's red, there's a problem. If it's green, that means the focus has been achieved, the cameras using in an intelligent hybrid autofocus system. So it's using contrast, detection and phase detection, and it has a wider area than on any previous Fuji camera, so it is easily the best camera that they've ever had. We're covering pretty much the entire scene in 425 points in 17 rose and 25 columns. So one of the problems is that 425 points. Well, we've been getting Mawr and Maurin points on cameras as they progressed, and it's gotten so many in how that it takes a long time to select a certain point because there's so many different points. So one of the options that the camera has is to reduce it down to 117 points, which is still a lot and gives you focus points just about everywhere you want. And so a lot of people have reduced this down to 117 points because it makes navigating and placing your focus point just a little bit quicker and easier. If you do need the fine tune, you can switch it back over to for 25. One of the options is choosing a single point in which to focus, and this is nice when you want to be very precise about your focusing. It's also good when you want to move it around the frame a little bit, and so you can use that focus stick to move it around the frame if necessary, and so you would use the focus stick to move it around. You could also use Thesis elector on the back of the camera, up, down and left and right to move it as necessary. If you want to activate the focusing point to make changes, you can press in on the button, and we're going to see how to do this in just a moment. There are six different size boxes that you can change with the dial on the back of the camera. And so let me show you real quickly on the back of the camera what that looks like. And so I'm gonna make this a little bit darker exposure so that we can see what's going on in the viewfinder a little bit more easily. And so by pressing in on the button, we can activate it Now we can move it around any time we want with the focus stick. But if we press in on the button, we can turn the back dial and change the size anywhere through these six sizes. and then we can move it around wherever we want. If we press in on the middle, it goes back to the center of the frame press on the shutter release. It gets out of the programming mode, and it's set in its particular size. And so it's very easy to work with in the little joystick on the back has made that a lot easier to work with, and then, once again, to re program it, you press end, dial the size you want, press down on the shutter release to reset it. So any time you want to get the focus point back at the center, you either press in on the focusing stick or you compress the display back button. It'll work to center that focusing point as well. Another option is zone. We have three different zones three by by five and seven by seven and weaken move this zone around the frame. If we want us, well, then we have a wide tracking area which looks over all the focusing points and will just choose whatever happens to be closest to the frame. And that will also be what we use when we go into facial detection, focus. It uses the entire frame and just picks up wherever it sees the face. And so we have a very nice system here that allows us a wide variety of options of any size box we want, for the most part in any part of the frame. Now, the last option down there in all is an interesting one, because that is my favorite. And so I want to show you a little bit about that, how that works on the camera. So I'm gonna go into the Q menu, come over here to the focusing point, and rather than single or group or all for the entire area, I'm going to go with all. And the beauty of this now is that if I want to reframe my box, I can go down and I have 12345678 nine, 10. I have 10 different steps from small box to big box, and I could just go through and choose whatever size box I want. And I can move it around the frame in multiple different ways. And I don't know of another camera system that is this free in how to use it. I can choose any size box and put it anywhere on the frame. Every other company has kind of specific size boxes, and they limit where they are. Sometimes they're only in the center or they're only of a particular size. And I love this. This is This is the future of how all cameras were going to be, and it's the only camera on the market that does it right now. So nice job, Fuji All right. Our next item is dynamic range, and so this allows the camera to kind of tweak with the contrast range, at least on J peg images. And so what happens is normally you would have this camera said it D r 100 normal 100%. But let me go in and show you some examples of setting this up at higher settings. So what happens as you set it up at a higher setting of 200%? What it does is it typically holds the highlights from going to bright. What it's doing is it's actually under exposing, and then it's brightening as necessary, but making sure not to over expose the highlights. And so you can set this two D R 200 and then d r and you can see on the hissed a gram that I've thrown in there, how it's protecting the highlights and making them a little bit darker. And so, if you do shoot J pegs and once again this only works with J. Peg, and it does not work with raw images. If you have a situation where highlights tend to be a problem when they get blown out, which it is a problem with highlights get blowing out on J pegs. This is a way of protecting those highlights so that they get they don't get too far to the right on the hissed a gram. Our next item is white balance, and this is controlling the color of our seen. Depending on the type of light that we're using, we'll have many different options here because there are many different options in the color of light source that we might be photographing under. So this is the Kelvin scale. Daylight is around degrees Kelvin, and we have different lighting scenarios, different artificial lights at very different places along the scale. If you want to get correct. True color. With incandescent light, you should set white balance to incandescent. And so which is around degrees. There's many different types of fluorescent lights. There's lots of different options for that. We have a Kelvin setting, which allows you to set a specific kelvin temperature, which could be good if you're trying to match with another camera. We have three different custom settings where you can choose a white source and the camera will calibrate the light to that white source. And then finally, we have an auto white balance where the camera will choose white balance for you, and the camera does a pretty good job in white balance. If you shoot raw, you can always, of course, adjust white balance later on. But if you shoot J pegs, you want to be a little bit more exact about getting it right on. But the white balance on this camera, in my opinion, has been quite good. It's a good place to leave it as a default starting place and then making adjustments as necessary from there. All right, working on to our second line of information, we're gonna have a lot of new controls in here. We have noise reduction. And so in this case, the camera is going to go in and add noise reduction in for J peg images. So let's take a look at what this is going to look like. So once again, shooting my standard test subject, looking at the highlights in the shadows and looking for how much noise were getting. And this is at I s 0 6400 and we get a little bit of noise when we're doing that with a minus four setting. And as we crank the setting up, we start getting rid of noise. But we also start losing a little bit of edge detail. So noise reduction seems like that would be a good thing to have, but too much of it is a little bit too much in my opinion. And so a setting of around zero is a reasonable amount to have in there. But if you need to crank it up or crank it down a little bit, you do have that option here. Once again, this is for J. Peg Images does not have any impact on raw images. Next up is the image size once again for JPEG images, we can record a couple of different options. We have small, medium and large J pegs, and then we have different aspect ratios. So let's take a look at what some of this is. And so this is mainly designed for people who don't have computers or I need to get the image right in camera exactly as they need it in their Final four. So large, medium and small just has to do with the number of pixels that you're recording and the file size of that final image. And so normally, if you are gonna be shooting J. Peg, you would want to be shooting in the largest J pegs. That gives you the most option later on. But sometimes you have a project where you know all you need is a small J pagan size. Now the other option is aspect ratio. If you know how it's going to be used and you want to adjust the aspect ratio, the advantage of doing that in camera is that you can actually see it in the viewfinder. The sensor, of course, is a three by two aspect ratio, so if you want to get as much as the sensor can record for image quality purposes. That's where you normally want to leave it. But some people like to shoot square. There's a great thing about square composition. Or if you want to match up the HD TV format of 16 by nine, you can choose to do that as well in here. So those your options with image size next up is image quality. And this is basically where we get to choose between J. Peg and raw file type. So first and foremost are actually we'll get the 2nd 1st We have J. Peg, and we have two different options. Fine in normal, which is just two different compression levels. Find us a little bit higher quality normal is more basic in its quality. Raw is, of course, all the information off the sensor. You get all the detail and exposure information that you might need later on, and this would be the recommended setting for this camera for most types of shooting to give you the mostly way and the highest quality after the fact. And it's a 26 megapixel sensor and we do have some additional options of shooting un compressed or a lossless compressed raw, which will change the file size by quite a bit. And I've done some testing that I'll show you when we get to the menu section as faras. How I think it's best to have this set up, but Ross setting will give you the most exposure most latitude toe work with images later on. We can also record raw with J Peg. And so, if you want a J pig image along with the raw, you could do that either with a fine JPEG or a normal J pig. Of course, those air different compression levels and you'll end up with two duplicate files that are nearly identical, identical in content but different in file size and structure. And so that might be good if you have a short term project where you want the raws. But somebody else might need J pegs right away for uploading to the Web or something like that. All right, next up is film simulation. I mentioned before that Fuji is very good at film and color science, and so this is where they've incorporated a lot of that technology into designing film simulations that a lot of food delight users out there like now, To be honest, if you shoot raw, this isn't gonna matter too much because you're gonna get this raw, kind of flat image that you're gonna work with later on. But if you do like J pegs and this camera is one of the best on the market for shooting straight J pegs at a camera that look good, there's a lot of different options in here for preset options as well as going in and tweaking them yourself. So here it's a little might be a little hard to tell, but you'll notice a difference in the saturation the color contrast of these particular images. And I'm gonna show you a scale on where all of these different styles fit in just a moment. There's also a number of black and white options in here is well, you'll see, so they have a scale. And I think this is a really interesting scale because it shows you saturation levels and contrast levels. So the basic film setting that they have is pro via, and that's kind of right in the middle of everything and asked, he is a nice soft portrait film style of Elvia is very popular for landscapes very saturated, bold look to it. They have classic chrome, which could has this classic old look to it very popular for street shooting. For a lot of people, there's a couple of studio style film based looks here, which give you a little bit lower contrast so that you can work with one work with the images later on and then their latest one is eternal, and I don't know why it got placed outside the scale because the scale has no numbers. They could have just made everything smaller and closer to the middle. But they put it outside. And so I'm just telling you what Fuji's telling you. And so it's very low in saturation and obviously very low. In contrast, as I mentioned before, they do have a number of black and white options in here. I think these air really nice. They have the monochrome with filter options, and so the colors are gonna look a little bit different. So the red filter option is a very popular one for landscapes, and then a green one seems to be very popular for Portrait's We also have the A cross, which is a little bit a little different than the black and white. It's it is still black and white, but it's got more of a film structure to undergo. Show an example to you in just a slider to and so you can choose monochrome or a cross or C p a. All for different versions of a monotone. Look to it. And so this monochrome versus a cross, I think, is an interesting difference because it's very, very subtle, and you really have to zoom in to see the difference between these. And so, of course, want to go in and take a look at this, and I prefer just the standard monochrome look. The A cross has a bit of a film grain structure to it, and it depends on what you're looking for in it. In the look to it, I think they're both good, and I'm glad they have them both on there because then we can choose which ones we like, and so take a look at that and see which one works for you. If you like to shoot black and white and those are different film simulation modes, and once again they only matter for JPEG images. If you shoot raw, you're going to get a standard raw. But this is what the preview that you're going to see in the viewfinder when you're composing. And when you play back the image moving to our third line in the quick menu, we're gonna have a lot of JPEG controls for controlling the exposure in one targeted area. So first up, we have our highlight tone, and this is gonna be from minus two to plus four. We're gonna have our shadow tones and when we talk about plus four a minus for we kind of meat cranking up, intensifying what that does or backing off on it. So here's an example of what this would look like. And so if we leave it at zero and we go down to minus two with decreasing the highlights, you'll notice the highlights are changing in their brightness levels. Do you want to make the highlights more intense and even brighter and you can see in the history Graham What it's done with those highlights is its held them back or it's made him or intense. We could do the same thing with the shadows. We can lighten up the shadows or make the shadows more intense. And so one of the things that I've done is taken a black and white film, and I've come in here, and I've made it more contrast, E. So it's got a little bit more definitive. Look to it, you might say. And so in this case, plus and minus don't mean exact exposure. It means, um well, it means we're going to intensify that particular setting. And so, when it comes to the shadow, tones were making the shadows even darker. Next up is our color, also known as saturation, once again for J. Peg only. And so if you do want to make your images mawr saturated, you can control the exact level of saturation that you think is appropriate for a particular image. A lot of times, the raw image comes out a little flat, so when you're shooting J pegs, it's nice to get a little bit punchier and you can set that level of punch right here. Sharpness is going to play around with the edge detail in order to get a little bit more of that in a particular scene. Let's take a look at an example here. Blow this up pretty large so that you can see it clearly and have different levels of sharpness. And as you intensify this, it looks good in many cases. But you want to be careful about going overboard with sharpness. And so ah, set according to your needs. All right, final line On the quick menu. One of the things that still perturbed me a little bit about this camera is the self timer is something that turns off automatically when you turn the camera off and doesn't stay kind of position on. And it's just because I use the two second self timer. When doing landscape shots, I turn the camera off to save battery power. Turn it back on and then I have to turn the self timer back on again. Eso just before warned that it does turn off on a regular basis. We have our to second and our 10 seconds self timer, obviously normally kept in the off position but pretty easy to switch there. Next up is our face and I detection, and first option is to leave. It turned off you can do the face on where it's just looking for faces, not particularly looking for eyes, Um, and you can do a right eye or left eye if you want. And so, if you want to focus on a particular I, you could do that as well. Next up is the flash mode. Now the camera does not have a built in flash, but when you do add on a flash to it, you can control how it works. And so there's a few common ways that you might want to have the camera set up. T T L Auto Flash will fire in a through the lens automated system that will automatically figure out how much light you need for a particular scene. Next up is a slow sync mode, which will synchronize the flash with a slow shutter speed. This allows you to do panning and get a little bit of blur in the background. Let in some or ambient light that's around the subject. You can have the camera set up with multiple flashes, and that would be in the commander mode. You can set up a second curtain sink for special trailing streak effects with subjects that are moving around. If the camera's turned on, you can suppress the flash, and a forced flash will force the flash, even though the camera doesn't think you need it for brightness reasons. And so it's a great thing for daylight. Fill flash. We also have the option of red eye reduction or red eye removal in this case. And there's two different options. Either the flash will fire pre flashes or the camera. Will Elektronik Lee fix red eye after the fact? And this is something that could be turned on and off when you go into the flash menu system on the camera. One thing last to note about the flash is that the top flash speed is 1 to 50th of a second. And if you ever forget, you can just look down at the shutter speed dial and the 2 50 on the shutter speed now has an expired to indicate that that is the top flash sync speed on the camera. Final item in here is the LCD brightness. If you want to adjust the brightness on the back of the camera to make it easier to see whether you're in very low light conditions were very bright like conditions. You can do so by going up and down on the LCD brightness scale. So those air your controls in the quick menu. Remember that you can re program the entire quick menu by holding in on the Q button for two seconds, and you can go in select an item. Choose which menu item you want to show up there and get it all customized so that you don't have to go digging into the full menu to find your features, and you can get him here very quickly and easily.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Fuji X-T3 Recommended Settings
Fuji X-T3 Shortcuts

Ratings and Reviews

Justina Tumaite
 

Thank you it's super helpful. I loved it :)

Eric Geerts
 

I've been with CL for quite a while and I pretty much got used to (all of) John's top quality classes. Kinda been waiting for this one over the last months. So thanks again, John, for your consistent 5 star quality standard!!

Robert Felice
 

I loved this class! How much did I love this class? I loved this class and I don't even have an X-T3! I have the Fujifilm X100V, a camera similar enough to the X-T3 that this class easily covered 85% - 90% of the features on my camera. It's also a camera new enough that there isn't much available on how to use it. This class got the job done for me. Well done, John!

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