White Balance Shift
Sometimes neither Auto White Balance nor the white balance preset is quite right for your situation. If a custom white balance is not an option perhaps you don't have a white reference available , then you can always use the Tli's White Balance Shift feature. This is a fairly advanced option that is intended for shooters who are used to balancing light using colored filters. Such a topic is beyond the scope of this book, but even without an understanding of filter use, or mireds a unit of...
Processing Your Raw Files
When you're done shooting, copy your raw files to your computer using whatever technique you normally use for JPEGs. If you're using a version of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto, then you'll be able to work with your images just as if they were JPEGs. The browser functions built into these applications will be able to read the files assuming they've been updated with T1i support and display thumbnails. iPhoto, Aperture, and Lightroom let you use the same editing...
Depth of Field Preview
To ensure a viewfinder that's as bright as possible, the T1i keeps its aperture open as wide as possible all the time. Even if you or the camera have chosen a very small aperture, the aperture stays open all the way until you actually take the picture. Then the aperture closes down to the specified setting, and the sensor is exposed. In addition to letting as much light into the viewfinder as possible, the fact that the aperture is always wide open means you're possibly seeing less depth of...
Exposing So That Black Looks Black
Black objects are more likely to trip up the T1i's meter than are white objects. Again, if you point the camera at a black object, it will assume that the object is actually 18 gray and so will concoct exposure settings that will properly render that object as gray. Consequently, black objects can sometimes appear ashen. For instance, in this shot of a black car, the blacks are not as black as they could be, because the meter assumed that the car was actually gray and so chose exposure settings...
Manual Mode
For the ultimate in control, you'll want to use Manual mode, which lets you adjust both aperture and shutter speed. To activate Manual mode, move the Mode dial to M. The LCD screen will show both the shutter speed and aperture, with a box around the shutter speed. In Manual mode, you can change both shutter speed and aperture. The menu highlights which parameter is currently editable. Here, we're changing shutter speed. You can change shutter speed by turning the Main dial. If you want to...
Image Anatomy
You need to learn an additional bit of theory if you want to get the most out of your image-editing software. Just as good film shooters needed to have a certain understanding of film and paper chemistry, as a digital shooter you need to know something about how a digital image is constructed. Pixel is a pretty common term these days, and I've been using it off and on already, but just in case there's any confusion about it, here's a definition pixel stands for picture element and is used to...
What to Do When Autofocus Doesnt
The autofocus mechanism in the Rebel T1i is dependent on contrast the sharp edges in an image are composed of high-contrast lines. A crop of this image shows how much contrast there is. The lower crop shows an unfocused version of the image. As you can see, there is very little contrast in the image, since it is out of focus. When you half-press the shutter button on the T1i, it measures the contrast in your scene, and then it zooms in a little and measures the contrast again. If the contrast...
Displaying Your Images On A Tv
Viewing your image on a TV is a great way of showing your images to other people as a slideshow, but it can also be handy for shooting in a studio. If you're working with a model or shooting product shots, put your camera on a tripod and connect it to a TV while you're shooting. The same image review that displays on your camera's LCD screen will be shown on the attached TV. Your model, client, makeup crew, or anyone else in the room can see the shots right away and adjust their work...
Understanding Focus Points
The T1i uses a nine-point autofous system. You've already experienced the nine autofocus points in the work you've done in Full Auto mode. So, you know that when you half-press the shutter button to autofocus, the camera assesses your scene and tries to determine what the subject is. It then focuses on that subject. To let you know what it has focused on, the T1i lights up any of the autofocus points that are on the subject it has chosen. When focusing, it's important to keep an eye on which...
Picture Styles White Balance and Raw
Picture styles and white balance are functions that are performed by the camera during the image-processing steps that happen after you take a shot. Because raw files have no processing applied to them, picture styles and white balance choice are less significant. However, the white balance setting you choose is stored in the image's metadata. Later, your raw converter will read this setting and use it as the default white balance for that image. Because white balance in a raw file is...
Adjusting Predefined Picture Styles
You can tweak the six predefined picture styles by adjusting saturation, color tone, and contrast within the camera. Each of these parameters has a range from -4 to 4, whereas Sharpness has a range from 0 to 7. While you can't edit all of the effects of a picture style, these four parameters give you a fair amount of adjustment latitude. 1. To edit a picture style, select Picture Style from the second shooting menu. 2. Navigate to the picture style you want to edit, and then press the DISP...
Using an External Flash
On the top of the camera sits a hotshoe, a fairly standard camera interface that allows you to use a number of different accessories. It's called a hotshoe because it's an interface that provides electrical contacts through which the camera can communicate with an attached accessory as opposed to a coldshoe, which has the same type of mount but provides no communication between the camera body and whatever is in the shoe . You can attach an external flash to the hotshoe on the top of the...
Partial metering
If you're shooting a scene that has a background that is significantly brighter than the foreground, then the evaluative meter could get confused, resulting in your foreground being overexposed. Partial metering analyzes only a small area in the center of the image and ignores the metering zones in the rest of the frame. Partial metering uses the gray zones to determine exposure. Partial metering uses the gray zones to determine exposure. In the description of partial metering of the Rebel T1i...
Custom Functions
In Chapter 9, you got a glimpse of the T1i's custom functions when I discussed mirror lockup. Custom functions are special commands that you access through the Custom Functions command on the third tool menu. Although a few of these commands, such as Mirror Lockup, seem more like primary commands that should be in the normal menu system, the bulk of the custom functions are commands that let you tweak and alter the behavior of other commands. To alter a custom function, choose custom function...
Auto Bracketing
The T1i includes an auto bracketing feature that will perform an automatic exposure change for you, making it simple to take a bracketed set of shots. 1. To activate auto bracketing, choose Expo.Comp. AEB from the second shooting menu Expo Comp stands for Exposure Compensation, which you've already learned about. AEB stands for Auto Exposure Bracketing. When you select Expo.Comp AEB, you'll be taken to a new screen that lets you specify both a bracketing amount and an exposure compensation...
Fractional Stops
In the days of manual cameras, shutter speed and aperture controls used the progression of settings that we've looked at here, with one stop of exposure difference between each setting however, they provided a wider range than what I've shown . However, it's possible to adjust shutter speed and aperture by intervals that are smaller than a whole stop, and by default the T1i will use values that are fractions of stops. So, as you adjust the shutter speed control on the T1i, you might see a...
What Your Light Meter Actually Meters
Has this ever happened to you It's a nice snowy day, you take a picture, and when you look at the image, the snow seems much dingier than you remember. Surprisingly, this is not the camera doing something wrong. It's actually metering exactly the way it was designed. To understand what it's up to and how to fix it, you need to understand a little more about how a light meter works. Your light meter doesn't know anything about color it measures only luminance, or brightness. Perhaps the...
Snapshot Tips
While the rest of this book is going to cover just about every aspect of shooting in great detail from holding the camera to processing images you can do a lot with what you've already learned about the Full Auto capability. Since the camera is taking care of most of the technical issues for you, it's a good time to practice handling the camera and composing shots. We're going to talk about composition in great detail in Chapter 8. For now, consider the following tips when shooting snapshots.
Snapshot Shooting in Full Auto Mode
The Rebel T1i has full autofocus and autoexposure features that can make all of the necessary photographic decisions for most situations. When in Full Auto mode, all you have to do is frame the shot and press the shutter button, and the camera will automatically figure out just about every other relevant setting. However, you need to know a few things to get the most out of Full Auto mode. On the top of the T1i, on the right side of the camera, is a Mode dial. The mode you choose determines...
Getting to Know the Rebel T i
If you're new to the Rebel T1 i, you're probably much more interested in shooting than in reading a book. So, in this chapter I'm going to quickly get you up to speed on the camera's automatic features so that you can get out the door right away and start using the camera. One of the great things about the T1i's design is that you can start out using it just like a point-and-shoot camera and then activate more sophisticated controls as you need them. This first chapter explains the fundamental...
JPEG IMAGE PROCESSING continued
After gamma correction, the camera corrects the color according to the white balance settings on the camera. At this point, you have a very good-looking image that is recognizable as a quality color photo assuming you exposed well . But the camera still does more. Using the equivalent of an in-camera image-editing program, the T1i adjusts the contrast, color saturation, and color tone in your image, and then finally applies sharpening. These adjustments have nothing to do with any exposure...
Panoramic Exposure
From a panoramic photography standpoint, one of the things that's really annoying about the world is that it's not lit perfectly evenly. This problem is much more pronounced when shooting a panorama than when shooting a single frame. If you look at most any panoramic scene in the real world, you'll probably find that one end is brighter than the other. The reason this is a drag for panoramic shooting is that the area that's brighter will expose differently than the area that's darker, and when...
Exposure Lock
So far, you've been doing all of your metering using Evaluative gj metering. You've seen how, when you press the shutter button down halfway, the camera takes a meter reading and then locks that metering. If you reframe your shot, the camera will still use the metering that got locked in when you half-pressed the shutter buton. In Partial, Spot, and Centerweight metering, the camera will still meter when you half-press the shutter button, but if you reframe your shot, the T1i will re-meter as...
Knowing Your Aperture Sweet Spot
Many people assume if they want a shallow depth of field, they should just choose the widest aperture smallest number that they can, and if they want a deep depth of field, they should choose the smallest aperture largest number . Obviously, these aperture extremes can yield shutter speeds that may not be suitable, but there's another price to pay for this simplified approach to depth of field. Every lens has an aperture sweet spot. If you go outside of this sweet spot, the lens will yield...
Sensor Cleaning
Because you can remove the lens on the T1i, the sensor chamber is exposed to the outside world in a way that it never is on a point-and-shoot camera. This means it's possible for dust and other fine debris to get on the image sensor. And, because you don't ever remove the sensor and replace it with another one as you do with the film in a film camera once there's dust on the sensor, it's there to stay unless you take action. Pixels on your sensor are very, very tiny. Remember, 15 million of...
The Viewfinder Status Display
When you press the shutter button halfway down, several things happen inside the T1i's viewfinder. As I already mentioned, the camera shows you which focus points it has selected for autofocus. It also uses the readout at the bottom of the viewfinder to tell you about its exposure choices and to give you some additional status information. The content of this readout will vary depending on the mode you're in. Flash Flash exp Exp. Lock Exp Lock comp. The Rebel T1i's viewfinder shows all the...
Adep Mode For Maximum Dof
If you're shooting a landscape and want to ensure as much depth of field as possible, you have to choose settings that will yield a deep depth of field and focus at a point that will ensure that your depth of field covers the area you want. A-DEP is a special mode that will automatically try to calculate settings that will yield the maximum depth of field for your scene. To use it, switch the Mode dial to A-DEP, then frame your shot as you normally do, and press the shutter release halfway...
Exposure Bracketing
Now that I've thrown all this exposure theory at you and loaded up your head with all these things to remember, it's time to learn the easy solution to the whole exposure thing rather than worry about trying to nail the exposure with one shot, just shoot the same shot a few times with different exposure settings. This process is called bracketing. Bracketing is very simple. You shoot one shot at the camera's recommended metering, then another shot underexposed, and another shot overexposed. How...
Picture Styles
You've now seen how changes in exposure can affect the tones in your image, as well as the saturation. But the T1i has some other ways to alter the contrast, saturation, and color in your image. Picture styles allow you to change the way the camera processes its images, with direct control from the camera of sharpness, contrast, saturation, and color tone in your image. These processes are very different from what happens when you change exposure, and to understand how they work, you need to...
Using Canon zoomBrowser EX
If you installed the Canon Digital Solutions Disk, then you should have a shortcut to Canon ZoomBrowser EX sitting on your desktop. ZoomBrowser also provides you with import capabilities, as well as simple browsing, editing, searching, and sorting. It's worth playing around with ZoomBrowser to see if you like it. If you do, you might want to make it the default application that gets launched whenever you insert a media card. You can do this using the same method described in the previous tip,...
Recognizing Over and Underexposure in the Histogram
When an image is overexposed, there will be a big spike on the right side of the histogram, as in this image Because this image is overexposed, the histogram shows a spike on the right side. Here, we've overexposed the shot, and the highlights in the image have gone to complete white. That overexposure appears in the histogram as a big spike on the right side. In addition, the T1i will flash overexposed pixels in the image thumbnail, making it easy to tell which parts of the image are...
RedEye Reduction
If you've spent a lot of time shooting flash snapshots with a point-and-shoot camera, then you've probably seen red eye, that creepy phenomenon that causes your subject's eyes to glow red. The red glow is nothing more than the reflection of the flash's light off the back of the subject's irises. Dogs' eyes, by comparison, reflect blue light. Although image-editing tools can remove this effect, it's often better to try to solve the problem while shooting to save editing time later. The closer...
Focusing in Live View
The problem with focusing in Live View is that the camera's autofocus sensors are located in the top of the camera, where the pentamirror is. In Live View mode, since the main mirror is flipped up, the autofocus sensors can't see out the lens. Therefore, to focus, you have to choose one of several options. If you switch your lens over to manual focus, you can manually focus the camera in Live View, just as you would if you were looking through the viewfinder. However, the LCD screen is not...
Custom White Balance
For the most accurate color, you'll want to use a custom white balance. Custom white balance is also the best choice when you're in a lighting situation for which there is no preset, such as a mixed lighting situation sunlight falling into a fluorescent-lit room, for example . Auto White Balance works by identifying something in your image that's probably white, usually a bright highlight. This area is then used as the basis for the camera's white balance analysis. White balance presets don't...
Peripheral Illumination Correction
Sometimes a lens will yield an image with dark corners, a phenomenon most commonly referred to as vignetting. This is most prevalent in wide-angle lenses or zoom lenses that are being used at their widest angle . For some reason, Canon has chosen to call this a drop in peripheral illumination, and so they have built a peripheral illumination correction feature into the Rebel T1i. Whatever you choose to call the problem, the ability to correct it in-camera is very handy. The image on the left...
Anatomy of the Rebel Ti
LEARNING TO HOLD AND CONTROL YOUR CAMERA In the previous chapter you saw how you can use the Rebel Tli's automatic features for easy snapshot shooting. Before we go on to learn about its more advanced shooting features, we're going to take a tour of the camera and learn its parts. The T1i is a complex tool, and the better you know its workings, the more easily and effectively you'll be able to make it do what you want.
Panning With A Slow Shutter Speed
when you shoot with a slow shutter speed to try to introduce blur into your shot, you have two choices you can hold the camera still, and let the object move through your scene to create a blurred subject, or you can pan the camera to follow your subject and create a blurred background. When shooting with a slow shutter speed, you can pan the camera to follow a moving subject, rendering the background a blur. To create a blurred background, you pan the camera while the shutter is open. It can...
Controlling Color Tone with Exposure Compensation
It should make sense that a slight underexposure will make black tones appear more black than gray and vice versa for white tones . You've seen already that an underexposed image is darker than a regular exposure, so a bit of underexposure can be just what you need to restore a dark object to its true tone. Like black and white, color also has a tone. Some reds are darker than others, for example. Consequently, it's possible to adjust the saturation of a color in your image by over- or...
Using Adobe Photoshop Elements for Windows
If you've installed Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 or later, when you attach a media card reader or camera to your computer, the Elements 6.0 Photo Downloader will launch automatically. The Photo Downloader lets you choose a location to store your files, and can create subfolders within that location based on the date and timestamp on each image. Photo Downloader can also rename your images from the nonsensical camera names to something more meaningful. If you click the Advanced Dialog button at...
Evaluative metering
By default, the T1i uses an evaluative meter system for its light metering. The T1i's evaluative meter divides your scene into a grid of 35 zones. The brightness of each zone is measured, as well as the contrast between zones, the size of your subject, the brightness of your subject, the contrast between your subject and the other zones in the grid, and more. It determines what is your subject by looking at which focus points were selected when the camera autofocused. It then analyzes all of...
Using Exposure Compensation to Over or Underexpose
Now that you've seen some of the occasions when you might want to over- or underexpose, we'll look at one of the ways that you can tell the camera to make such an exposure adjustment. There are many ways of controlling exposure on the T1i, but the easiest method is to use exposure compensation. These days, almost all cameras have an Exposure Compensation control, which simply lets you make a relative exposure change. That is, you can tell the camera, I don't care how you metered the scene I...
AE Lock button
Use AE Lock so that your exposure doesn't change when reframing while using Spot, Centerweight, or Partial metering. When you press the AE Lock button, an asterisk will appear in the viewfinder status display to indicate that your exposure is now locked. The asterisk indicates that the exposure is now locked. The asterisk indicates that the exposure is now locked. As you'll see later, there are some ways to customize the behavior of the shutter and AE Lock buttons so that they better-suit your...
More Editing Latitude
Let's return for a moment to the 8-bit versus 14-bit issue and take a closer look at the raw file's bit depth advantage over JPEG files. Simply put, shooting with raw is like having a box of 64 crayons, rather than a wimpy box of 16 crayons. Straight out of the camera, you won't see a difference between a 14-bit processed raw file and an 8-bit JPEG file. But once you start editing, you'll find that raw files offer a lot more flexibility. Smooth gradients and transitions are a critical component...
Transferring Images Manually Using Windows or the Mac
If you want complete manual control of your image transfers, configure your computer to do nothing when a camera or card reader is plugged in. This will simply mount the camera or card reader on your desktop, just as if it were a hard drive, leaving you free to copy files as you please. The advantage of taking a manual approach is that you can completely control where files are placed, and create a folder structure on your drive that makes the most sense to you. The downside to importing using...
Adding Copyright Information
You've seen how your T1i embeds all essential exposure information as well as the date and time the image was shot, and more in the metadata of every image you take. In addition to all of this data, the T1i can also store a custom copyright message in your images. This is a great way to prove ownership of an image, especially if you plan on posting it to the Web. You create a copyright message using the Canon EOS Utility. If you have already installed the software from the EOS Solutions Disk,...
Handheld Shooting and Shutter Speed
No matter which mechanism you use, once you start fiddling with shutter speed, you have to be very careful about the shutter speed you choose. Pick one too low, and you'll run the risk of getting blurry images due to camera shake. The problem is simply that it's impossible to hold a camera perfectly still. As animals, we don't stand still, we sway it's a necessary part of balancing on two legs. When you throw in breathing and a beating heart and possible windy conditions, holding a couple of...
Getting Creative with Program Shift
In the previous chapter, you learned about the effects that different shutter speed and aperture choices have on your final image. You saw that by controlling shutter speed, you can choose how much you want to freeze or blur motion, and that by controlling aperture, you can choose how much you want to blur out the background. You also learned that these parameters have a reciprocal relationship if you change one, you can change the other to compensate. The Rebel T1i has a lot of different ways...
Stitching a Panorama
Once you've shot your panoramic frames, you'll be ready to stitch. Copy the pano frames to your computer using your method of choice. If you haven't already installed Canon PhotoStitch from the EOS Digital Solutions Disk, do so now and then launch the program. Click the Open button on the left side of the PhotoStitch toolbar. In the Open dialog box that appears, select the file you want to stitch. Hold down the Shift key to select multiple files. PhotoStitch will display your chosen images side...
Organizing Your Images
No matter which method you use to transfer images to your computer, if you're managing your image organization yourself as opposed to having a program such as iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom do it for you , you will want to think about how to organize your files. You'll be best-served in your organizational chores by making good use of folders. How to organize these folders is entirely a matter of personal preference just find a scheme that makes sense to you. You can create folders by subject...
The Light Meter Revisited
In Chapter 1, we looked at the T1i's light meter, which analyzes the light in your scene to determine an exposure that will yield an image that's neither too light nor too dark. The light meter is activated every time you half-press the shutter button, and while the automatic metering in the T1i is very good, it can be confused and won't always calculate the best exposure for every scene. For example, consider this image Bad backlighting is leaving the subject's face in shadow. Bad backlighting...