Natural T4i Camera Setting

NeverhadaPC said:

I have just stepped up to Manual shooting and want to go "all natural" in my pictures (i.e. only focus on exposure, ISO, aperture, and shutter speed with no camera processing). Thus, I was wondering if there any of the dozens of image/camera settings (white balance, background blah blah, etc) that I can just keep "off" or if any should be included.

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There's no such thing as a dumb question!

I would just be careful with what you mean by no processing.

If you shoot raw the photos will not come out on your computer as you see them on the back of your camera as your cameras LCD shows you a JPEG preview of the shot. This is sometimes why you will see shots dull as you load them up on your computer.

Shooting in M all the time is a good move to starting to take complete creative control.

Be careful as well with somethings that you have thrown into the image/camera settings genre. White balance has always been around and is a tool to explain to the camera the colour of light which is something our eyes do automatically.

If you want to have full creative control have a read up on white balance and kelvin and being able to guess the colour temperature of light instead of just leaving it on Auto.

I have my Canon next to me so these are a few options that you might like to look at:

Picture style. Keep this on neutral or faithful if you want to keep your images not overly saturated or contrasty. Maybe experiment with creating your own picture style to something that you like the look of. But in essence it has to shoot with a picture style so you can't turn this setting off. Shooting raw allows you to change this setting (along white balance) in post so don't worry about it too much.

Highlight tone priority you can afford to turn off.

Apart from those two I can't really see any other options for things that creatively change the colour/type of image whilst shooting. Where there others that you were thinking of?

NeverhadaPC said:

There are so many settings that it seems like they must have a purpose in improving pictures... is that so?

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They don't necessarily improve the images but they do make it easier to shoot faster. Your camera is a consumer based camera and there will be plenty of people that are happy to leave it on Auto and let the camera work out the best settings for them. You are a smaller niche of user that is keen to use the camera to it's full capacity. Having these settings turned off won't ruin your pictures it will mean that initially you will have to work a little bit harder to put in all the settings you need. But, given time, you will be able to then more creatively shoot the scenes you see. Something which might have been harder with all the settings turned on.

It's good to learn about all these various aspects, but is there any reason you want to shoot in full manual. Aperture or Shutter Priority mode might be a better way to go in terms of having more control of your camera.

RAW allows you to adjust the image in post processing. Search for the thread "Post Processing - before/after" to see some examples.

Good luck with your new camera!

Not to discourage you from shooting in manual, but keep in mind that you can use different metering modes when the lighting conditions are challenging. For example, with a strongly backlit subject, evaluative metering may try to balance the overall exposure, resulting in underexposure of your subject. Using partial (I think that is the Canon term -- on Nikon, it is "spot") or center-weighted may give you a properly exposed subject (but would result in an over-exposed background, unless you are also using flash and are balancing your flash and ambient).

When you say your flash only works in manual, I assume that means in manual flash mode (as opposed to TTL). It should still work in other shooting modes (i.e., A, S, P, etc.).

In any event, shooting in manual does give you control and makes it easier to achieve repeatable results.

As to your list, metering mode "sort of" affects the RAW file, but I don't believe the others do. They may affect the preview image that you see on the LCD, but not the underlying RAW file (other than that the setting data may be recorded). I say metering mode "sort of" affects the RAW file because it determines the exposure, unless you are shooting in manual. So it ultimately affects what will be recorded, but only to the extent that it changes the shutter speed, aperture, or ISO.

I would suggest to the OP to buy the David D. Bush book for his T4.