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Custom Menu D1-D4

Lesson 25 from: Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II Fast Start

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

25. Custom Menu D1-D4

Inside the display menu, choose the different view options and settings for both the viewfinder and the LCD screen.

Lesson Info

Custom Menu D1-D4

Okay, so live view info, so when you're just looking basically at the back of the camera that's what's considered live view. By pressing the info button which of the options do you want to see? And remember you can go into those custom1 and custom2 to choose histogram, and or level gauge, and or highlight and shadow. When you're going into the thumbnails on the playbacks, so if you want to see a group of images you can see four, nine, 25, or 100. You can see a collection of my clips which are those predetermined time length videos that you were shooting in the video mode, and a calendar mode. So real quickly let me just show you on my camera in case you're unaware. So you play back, and then if you wanna magnify in you can turn in, but if you wanna magnify you go out because there's a little playback symbol right here, thumbnails, and so that allows us to get to these thumbnails. And so I have, I don't have the four and nine, this is the 25, I don't have the 100 turned on, but then I c...

an go back to calendar. So if I shot images a week ago I can go back up and see when those other images are. And so I clearly don't have all of those checked off on my camera right now. Let's see, where are we? We're in info settings and so I can come in here, yep, they're not checked off, I can check off the four and the nine, and the 100, and go back to the left. And so now when I hit playback I can see my four, my nine, my 25, my 100, which I don't have 100 shots yet, and then my calendar shots. So there you go. Okay, next up. Picture mode settings. And so these are all the picture modes that you have as an options and there is a lot to dial through, and so if there are some ones in there that you just wanna get to on a regular basis. Like maybe you just like the grainy film, the black and white options, you can just check those boxes and get rid of that other garbage, as most people would say. But some people like having all the options available to them when they're out shooting. All right so these are drive and timer settings. And so once again as I said there was some ugly slides in this class and I'll apologize again for that, and that's because there's so many options and I had to turn on all the options to show you, well, here's totally what the camera can do. But you don't have to worry about that, you're like, "This is nuts, there's too much stuff." Well then just go in there an uncheck all the things that you don't think that you're ever gonna use. All I can say is don't forget that they're still there in case you need them. It's like, "Oh I really with this had a silent shutter." And then you go back and you watch this class five years after you bought the camera, you're like, "Oh, that's right, it's got a silent shutter," "I turned it off and forgot about it." And so that's why I leave a lot of things turned on so I can remember that they're there. Okay, the multi function settings. And so if you recall the function 2 button on the top of the camera allows us to relatively quickly change between these different modes. Now you can't add new modes to this but you can turn something off if you don't use it, and so if you don't use the magnify option we'll say, you could uncheck that box so that you don't get to it when you press down on the multi function button which is function button number two right now, and turn the dial on the camera. So you can unselect some items here, you can select a few but you can't add anything you don't see already to those functions. Moving on to D2. Live view boost. Okay, so I'm gonna just stop for a moment and let you know that this is a feature that is a little confusing because there's another feature very similar to this located in a different part of the menu that we haven't got to, and so what this one does right here is it. Where's my example? Oh it's this little submenu we've gotta get into, and so when you are in manual shooting one of the benefits of a mirrorless camera that you're looking at an electronic view of what's coming off the sensor is you get to determine, "Hey, that picture seems" "a little too bright, or a little too dark." And you can adjust your exposure so that it looks right. If the white balance isn't correct you can say, "Hey, the white balance doesn't look right," "let me fix it right here in the camera." Well, some people don't like that because they just want the best view looking through the camera possible. They don't care what the exposure is, they just want the best view, and for exposure they'll look at the light meter to determine if it's the correct amount of light. And so in the manual shooting live view boost if you turn this on it's not gonna be a representation of what the final image is going to look like. Now most of us who have these cameras usually like seeing what we're gonna get. I wanna see exactly what my final image is gonna look like, and so you should leave this turned off, but if you just want the best image possible this will give you a good quality image. Now the reason why you might wanna turn it on on1 and on2, and the difference between on1 and one two, let me check my notes, on2 will use very slow shutter speeds in order to give you a bright enough image to make it look good, which means things might look a little funny if you're panning with action under low-light conditions. Now the reason you would want to put it on1 or on2, a good reason would be if you're working with flash photography, and flash is the primary source of light, and so when it's gonna fire, it's gonna light your subject but currently it's very dark through the viewfinder and you're trying to focus and compose your subjects, so working in a studio or working with flash photography would be a good reason for going on1 or on2. Now as I mentioned before there is another setting that is very similar to this, and here is the distinction between the two. When you use this setting it affects both the viewfinder and the LCD on the camera. Okay? So it affects both viewing systems on the camera. The other system we'll talk about when we get there. So leave this off if you want to preview your exposure. Next up is the bulb and time setting, and so on this one on will give you an optimum brightness and on2 will give you optimum viewing, brightness with a slow frame, and so when you're using the bulb mode it's hard to simulate what your final picture is gonna be because it's a multi-second image and so this image is naturally boosted for you. In the composite option you still also have the same options where it is the view is boosted and brightened so that you can clearly see what's going on with on1 and on2. On2 is using slow shutter speeds and it basically gives you night vision capability, but if you want to preview what your final image is going to look like you would want to leave this turned off. There is some potentially other situations beyond these that you can have. The camera boosted for the exposure and so normally most people want to have this turned off so that what you see in the viewfinder or on the back of the camera represents the exposure of the final image. All right, next up is the Art Live View mode, and so when you put it into one of the art filter modes do you want to see that art filter mode? Now most of use would say, "Yeah, I want to see the effect," and that's gonna effect maybe the way I'm gonna compose and shoot my image. And so on1 reflects the exposure and the effect that you are getting, but if for some reason that's causing you difficulty in composing and shooting your image you can turn this on2 and it just reverts it to the normal image in the viewfinder but it records the art filter, so it's kind of separating out what type of image you're getting in the viewfinder versus what's being recorded to the memory card. The framerate can be set normal or high. And the reason that you would want it normal is that it's going to use up less battery power. In the high it's gonna go to 120 frames per second. They have not specified exactly what the normal rate is. I suspect it's 60 frames a second but I'm not 100% certain on that. If you are shooting action, put it this way, if you shoot action that moves back and forth, if you're moving the camera from side to side a lot, you're probably gonna appreciate the high setting, it's gonna give you a cleaner, crisper viewfinder. If you find that you are shooting static scenes like travel photography, landscape photography, the high frame rate is not really gonna add anything. As you look through the camera in a stationary position, you're not gonna see a difference between high and low. It's when you have subjects moving back and forth and when you have the camera moving back and forth. Live view close up settings, and so when you're in the live view option just looking through the viewfinder in a magnified close up way there is a few things you can tweak about the camera. Mode one and mode 2. Mode one the shutter ends the closeup mode, so if you're fine-tuning focus with the manual focus on your lens, as soon as you press halfway down on the shutter it kicks you back into the full frame view. Some people prefer mode two where the shutter will activate auto focus so you can zoom in on a subject and focus on a very particular area of that subject. Depends on how you like to work in the macro world. Live view boosting. So do you want the view boosted when you go into magnification? Because sometimes things will get a little bit darker in there. So if you do this on the brightness will be adjusted, if you leave it off it's gonna approximate the final exposure. On would be good for people who are trying to really critically focus and they just want it to be as easy to focus as possible. Off is good for people who want to make sure that they get the right exposure. All right, depth of field preview settings. So when you press that lower button on the front side it's gonna get you into the depth of field preview but there's a couple options on exactly how it works. The first option, do you want it to be a lock button where when you press it once it turns it on and you press it the second time it turns it off? That's what they mean by locking it. Most people use a depth of field button as they did on the SLRs, which is you press it in it turns it on and when you take your finger off it turns it off. And so it's either a press button or a click button. Next option is when you do activate the depth of field the aperture closes in and causes the whole image to get darker. Do you want it to be brightened so that you can see what your depth of field is? Because this is usually just a temporary type thing I think it's very good to leave this turned on so you can more clearly see the depth of field in your subject and whether it's getting as much in focus as possible, so this is a good way to have the live view boosted. Flicker reduction. So when you are working under fluorescent lights, they blink, and this is the way that they work, they're not consistent in their lighting. And so for the view through the viewfinder and the LCD the camera is normally set to automatically try to work around the flickering problems of these lights, and it usually does a pretty good job but if it's not doing a good job you can set it at 50, 60, or you can turn it off, but in most cases auto will be fine for most people in most situations. All right, moving on to D3. We're slowly getting through this folks. Grid settings, all right. So this is where you get to customize the grids in your camera. You can have two different presets, you can choose different colors by dialing in your RGB ratings and then you can dial in the opacity of it with the alpha channel, and so you can choose different colors with different intensities all according to what your needs are. And then you can have a preset one and a preset two so that it's pretty easy to change back and forth. Then you get to choose which grid you want and so there's lots of different grids for different reasons for composing or knowing where the center of the frame is or measuring different things. Now, do you want to apply those settings to the EVF, and this is a very important one because if you say on you're gonna get the same grid in the viewfinder as well as the back of the camera. If you say off it only applied it to the back of the camera and then you can choose separately in another place that we're gonna get to in a minute to choose on what type of grid you would prefer in the viewfinder, so some people prefer two quick grids, or they look at the different screens for different reasons. And so to change the other one, the one that we're gonna talk about is in the eye setting which controls the features of the EVF. So that's the other similar feature. The peaking settings. So if you remember earlier we have this little highlight area which shimmers in brightness where we are in focus. And so you can choose which color you want, red, yellow, white, black, okay? And then also get to choose the intensity. High, low, normal and so forth. And so I'm gonna do a quick little demo here, and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna throw my camera into manual focus and I'm gonna make sure that I turn my peaking on, and I gotta go up here to make sure that my peaking is turned on. And so AF magnification, where is this? Manual focus assist, I'm gonna make sure that I have my peaking turned on and my magnify turned on. And then what letter are we at? D3. Peaking settings. And red, black, white, let's go with red. And let's go with a high intensity because we really want to see what's going on here. And image brightness adjustment. And so I'll talk about this in a second but basically the image will be boosted in brightness which we'll go ahead and do just to take a look at. And so we have a scene back here, let's zoom in a little bit. It's clearly out of focus and just to show you what the boosting does. Oh actually I have it set for optimum image brightness it looks like right now. So if I start to focus, and let's get to something a little bit more interesting to focus on. There we go, that's a nice thing to focus on. Whoops. Come on. There we go, so as I focus back and forth it's gonna shimmer in red when it's in focus, now we're really close up, I'm gonna see if I can back off a little bit. And so now ... We can see as soon as it gets red we know that I've hit the best focusing point right there. And so you can choose the different colors and then the intensity because that is very, very technically helpful but it's also really irritating to see that on your subjects faces and so forth so you might want to dial it down a bit according to your needs. All right so the image brightness will once again either boost the image brightness so that you can see it more easily or just keep the normal exposure going. And that is the peaking settings. Histogram settings. So if you remember this part where it would blink at you if it's overexposed or underexposed, well, you can adjust the histogram settings so that it shows you those blinkies a little bit more easily or a little bit less easy, and so it depends on how much of a warning you want. Do you want to know that you are at the very limit or that you have a little bit of cushion and you're starting to get close to the limit? And so you can dial those down to or the shadow up to 10 if you wanted to have a little bit larger boundary. Next up is the mode guide, and this is something that will help a newcomer to the camera explain what any particular feature is. For somebody who is used to the camera it is an extremely irritating little box that pops up right on top of the features that I'm trying to look at. So you can turn it on and off here, but I'll give you an even better way to turn it on and off. Just hit the info button. So any time you're in the menu you can hit info, get a little extra information or take it away. Selfie assist. Okay, I typically do not want to assist anyone in getting a selfie shot, but I will actually recommend leaving the selfie assist on. It's so that when you flip the screen around it flips the image vertically so you can see yourself a little bit more easily. It's a very good blogging camera if anyone's interested. And that's one of the reasons why. All right, D4. The beep. Turn off the beep, I don't want to hear the beep. Just turn it off folks, just turn it off, please. HDMI, so controlling things from the HDMI port on the camera if you recall that's the little plugin on the side where you can get uncompressed 4K and HD video out of the camera, So you can choose what size is being output out of here. The series shooters are gonna be on the 4K, if you just need something basic, 1080, which is HD. HDMI control. So what is controlling, can the camera control an external device? So if you're doing a slideshow you can use the remote for your TV to go forward and back through images so your TV remote is controlling your camera. You would leave that turned on if you wanted to do that. The output frame rate if you are going out to an external device, what sort of frame rate do you want going to that for recording purposes? Next up. The USB mode. And so the USB would be used for downloading images. It would also be used for updating the software on the camera, and we'll talk more about firmware but you need to plug your camera into the computer, and in that case you're supposed to have it in the storage mode. Now if you're gonna print photos you can do that. Normally if you just put it in auto the camera will figure out what the device is. But if it can't figure it out and you want to narrow in and kind of prevent some sort of problem you can choose one of the other particular options if necessary, but auto will get you through most situations.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Olympus EM1II Recommended Settings

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

This is exactly what I was looking for - I really feel like I'm not able to control my camera, rather than the camera controlling me! :) I really learned a great deal - some of it was a great review, some of it was crucial information that will (hopefully) make me a better photographer. Thanks for a great class, John!!

Spyro Zarifopoulos
 

Great and very informative class.... John has done a fabulous job explaining all the simple and intricate details of the very sophisticated EM1 II. Thank you !!!

John Epperson
 

This is a great course on learning about the OM-D E-M1 Mark II. I have watched it many times to get to were I know it by memory the best I can. I like to go over it as much as possible because there is a lot to learn. I do wish that John would do an updated version since now it is up to Firmware 3.1. It is like a whole new camera with the new settings.

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