Camera Basics Part 3: White Balance, Picture Profiles, Aspect Ratios & More!

1. Camera Basics Part 3 Overview: Hello, Welcome back to another tutorial. This is part three in our camera basics tutorials, we're learning all about the camera settings and functions to level up your photography. And this tutorial, we'll be going over white balance, picture styles and aspect ratios. You don't want to take a photo just to find out later that it's too orange looking or ends up looking blue. Or you find out that you were shooting in 16 by nine and you can't crop it in, otherwise you'll lose a good portion of the edges of that photo. What we're getting into that as well as image color and more. So by the end of this class, you'll know what color setting you need for the location you're in, as well as what size of photos you should be taking and how to use them. Then putting it all together to help you get more out of your camera and take better photos. We're going to cover the basics of white balanced picture styles and aspect ratios. Now we know how to use each of these settings will help you level up your photography skills. Let's get right into it. 2. White Balance: This is probably happened to you one time or another. You go through those photos you've just taken and you find out they're looking very orange, or maybe they're looking blue. That is the color temperature setting in your camera. Maybe you were just shooting outside earlier that day. And now inside your photos are looking very orange or maybe it's the other way around you or just enzyme the night before. Now you're outside and it looks very cool or blue. The white balance is how the camera adjust depending on the color temperature of the scene. To change this, you will go to the white balance studying here on the right side on this camera. And we have auto white balance, daylight shade, cloudy, tungsten light, white fluorescent light. All right, Pashto, our white balance here. We also have the flash mode, which will adjust for the flash of the camera. And we have this custom setting, which we can change to be more bluish, more green. We can add more reds to the photo depending on your color style that you like or how you want to take those photos. And you also have the magenta colored down here. So that is another way you can set custom colors to your photos. For example, you'll set your camera to the daylight setting when you're shooting outdoors, maybe it's cloudy. You'll select that option. Or when you're indoors, you can select tungsten or fluorescent light, and it will just for the lights in the room. Basically in the name itself, white balance, adjusting the balance of the photo. Now those settings are just like an auto setting, just like our shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, when we go to manual mode, you can fine tune your colors even more by switching to the Kelvin setting that is shown here by this K Kelvin allows you to fine tune your color temperature even more. You'll see that 3000 makes the image very blue or cool looking. Just like when we were set to the tungsten setting. And as you scroll up and will be more balanced and going even higher, OB warmer and warmer. This is great when you want a particular color in your photos. If you have a certain color style that you shoot in, whether it's a slightly warmer or cooler, or when you're out with another photographer taking photos for any event, you can match your white balance. So all the photos you took that day are the same color for when you go to edit them later. Here on our drone, we can switch from the auto setting to the proceedings that allows us to change the white balance with the Kelvin scale from 2000 to 10000. So that is how you can adjust that on your drum here on our action camera, you can also change your white balance. Here it is set to the auto white balance. It also has an underwater by valence and a custom setting which goes to the Kelvin scale. So you can adjust this to the time of day or location. And this one also has the decent unlike setting, which will give you that flat color profile with more details in the highlights and shadows. For better editing later on in post, we can change this four photos as well. The auto white balance, underwater white balance, and the Kelvin scale. So you can have more control over your photos as well on this camera. 3. Picture Styles: Now the picture style also affects the color of the photo, but not like the white balance. This could be called the picture style of the image. This changes the fine details of the photo based on your camera. And your camera has a predetermined picture style for shooting landscapes, portraits, and standard images. These picture profiles have different settings within them. Things like contrast, saturation, sharpness, and color tones to capture the image depending on the scene. Now your camera may have an auto or a standard setting on this MAFFT. We haven't auto and a standard setting. We also have a portrait setting, landscape, fine detail, and neutral. We have faithful, monochrome, and we also have user-defined settings here, we can set those to how we want our picture profile to look. Standard is the basic Canon coloring. Portrait will keep nice skin colors. Landscape will have deeper greens and blues, neutral. We'll give you the best coloring for editing later on. It will take the most detailed photo with a lot of details in the highlights and the shadows. And you'll notice that it looks pretty flat or have very little contrast to it. This will allow you to edit it more later on, Given a better final result, since it has those details in it, you can also set your own custom picture style with the settings like sharpness, saturation, contrast, and color tone, or just them depending on your style. You can also do this on your action cameras, your drone and other DSLR or mirrorless cameras. And if your camera doesn't have a neutral profile, you can drop the contrast, sharpness and saturation to be able to capture more details and give yourself kind of a fake flat profile. On this MAFFT, it has the user-defined settings. So we can change one of these to act as our flat color profile. 4. JPEG & RAW: A few bonus tips for you here in this section, we're going to cover the JPEG and raw formats and why you would pick one over the other, knowing which one to shoot in depends on what you're going to do later with that photo. Well, you'd be printing them for photo albums or something larger like a poster or an art print. How will you be using your photos? Do you want good image quality or the best image quality your camera can provide? Here are some of the differences between the two. Shooting in JPEG is probably the most common for everyday photos. And you can shoot a lot of photos in this format because of the smaller file size, this is the most common because it's used across so many different devices. But when you want to get into the details and you want to get into editing your photos. A JPEG won't have as much image data. So you can't edit a JPEG photo as much as you can with the raw photo without losing any image quality. If you want to take your photography to the next level, then you should consider switching to rob. You may noticed when you switch to grow that you can't take as many photos. A raw photo contains a lot of image data which allows you to do more editing to it. So the file size is going to be much greater than a JPEG. It has much more dynamic range, so you're able to adjust things like exposure, highlights, shadows, another fine details without losing the image quality you would when editing a JPEG raw also allows you to blow up the image to a larger size without losing as much quality. So if you're wanting to take the best quality photos and you should shoot in the raw format. Shooting raw compared to JPEG will be slightly slower when shooting because of the data that's being processed to the memory card as you take your photos. And also remember that the graph files are going to take up more storage for family photos to peg is totally fine, but shooting for an art print that you want to crop in at, at the coloring and have printed. You'll want to choose the raw format. 5. Aspect Ratios: Let's talk about our aspect ratios here. This will help when it comes to what type of shooting you intend on doing. So for me, I shoot a lot of landscape and adventure photography. So I'll set my camera to shoot in full frame and we'll get more into that later. I also shoot cover photos for videos as well as for social channels. So for that, I can switch the aspect ratio to 16 by nine to get me a wider image, which is commonly used for cover photos of my videos. What exactly is the aspect ratio? That's the size of the image, That's the width and the height of your photos. Full-frame is based off the 35 millimeter film format. A camera with a crop sensor is just that. It's a cropped inversion based off that 35 millimeter size. Some of the other differences between your full frame and a crop sensor camera is costs generally, you'll find that the full-frame cameras cost quite a bit more and are better in low light, better dynamic range for photo and video, and they have a wider field of view. A crop sensor camera does have its perks as well. Being more affordable for beginner photographers. Crop sensor camera can also give you a bit more Zoom because of that 1.6 crop factor. So if you were using a full frame and a crop sensor camera with the same lens on both of them, crop sensor camera would look like it was zoomed in a little bit more or cropped in. Here we are at 50 millimeters on our lens. And if we have a crop sensor, it will look like this. This is corrupting. At that 1.6 crop factor. It is the same dimensions, but it is just going to be cropped it. So if you have a crop sensor camera, that can be an advantage if you went to get farther in when you're zooming in on a subject, having a corrupt sensor camera will help you get closer. So say you have a 70 to 200 millimeter lens and you have a crop sensor camera, you're going to get further than your 70 to 200 millimeters on that crop sensor camera. Now in a full-frame camera, it is a true 70 to 200 millimeter lens. You're not gonna get any crop on it unless you crop in later in near post-production. Generally taking a photo on the largest setting gives you more room for copying the image how you like. So keep that in mind for editing later on. 16 by 9 is commonly used in video format. Cover photos or landscapes. One by one is a square image, obviously. And three by two is the equivalent of a six by four photograph. Just to give you an idea of what we're looking at on this him 50. It isn't a full-frame camera, but isn't 1.6 crops. So I have it set to 32, which is the largest image. It will take. 6. Set Your Settings: Now here are some ways you can apply these settings really helps when you're starting out in photography to try all these different settings in different locations. So you can better understand your camera, whether you're shooting landscapes or portraits, who knows you may enjoy it so much. You can take those home photos to the next level. First off, with the white balance your set this to the condition you're in, whether you're in a building with fluorescent lights or out on a cloudy day or it's sunny. You can set your white balance depending on the condition. If you want to get more fine tuned, switch that to Kelvin and adjust to the color you like. Their picture profile you can set depending on your preference, whether you like the tones in a particular setting or not, it's up to you. These just make it easier and simpler to use. I like to set mine here on neutral to give me the most flat or detailed photo for editing later. Lastly, pick an aspect ratio. Normally I will have this set to the largest the camera can shoot in and crop it in later. Or you can set it to the type of photo you're shooting at the time. But just remember when you're out shooting if you went to crop into a different aspect ratio later to capture enough of the scene that you can crop the edges off. 7. Get out, Shoot, & Keep Learning!: Great, you've completed Part 3 of camera basics. Now you can save your photos from ending up to orangeish or very cold. Lucky. Your color tones are set to the best mood in your photos. And you've got your aspect ratio is down for the type of photos you're taking. If you haven't already be sure to check out Part 1 of camera basics to get more familiar any fishing with how your camera operates. Or part 2 on the basics of manual mode, with your shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Learning how to master those three settings will give you more control over your photos. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next class.