Access to the Canon 40D's menu system can be achieved
by pressing the menu button at the back of camera just below the mode
dial. Menus are organized under nine tabs: two shooting, two playback,
three tool and two for custom settings.
With the first shooting tab, you have access to menu items for the quality
settings for photos, red-eye reduction, sounding or muting the camera's
beep, shooting without a memory card and setting the amount of time a
captured image remains on the screen.
Here are the menu choices with the
second shooting tab.
AEB. With this slider control, you can
define the plus and minus exposure values when bracketing a shot.
White Balance. Options available here are auto, daylight, shade, cloudy,
tungsten light, white fluorescent light, flash, custom and color temperature.
The temperature for the custom and color items can be set between 2500
and 10,000 Kelvin in 100K increments.
WB SHIFT/BKT. This allows you to change a white balance that has already
been set. It emulates a commercially-available color temperature conversion
filter or color compensating filter. Each color can be corrected to one
of nine levels. You can also define a white balance bracket in this mode.
Brackets available are standard-blue-amber or standard-magenta-green.
White balance bracketing can be used with exposure bracketing. In that
case, nine continuous shots will be taken of your scene.
Color space. This allows you to switch between sRGB and Adobe RGB.
Picture Style. This menu allows you to tinker with the atmosphere of a shot.
For example, Landscape style will create vivid blues and greens and very
sharp images in a shot. Neutral style will capture more natural colors
and subdued images. In Basic mode, the settings for the picture styles--sharpness,
contrast, saturation and color tone--are locked, but in the Creative mode,
the settings can be modified. You do that by pressing the picture style
button located just to the left of the power switch. Use the Quick Control
Dial to choose a style. Then press the INFO button adjacent to the picture
style button.
Dust Delete Data. Activating this item will collect data that will
be used to erase dust from photos with the software included with the
camera.
From the first shooting tab you
can protect, rotate and erase images, as well as order them for printing
and transfer.
From the second shooting tab, you can enable or disable the highlight
alert or AF point display. When framing a photograph, highlight alert
will cause overexposed areas in the shot to flash off and on. The AF point
display, when enabled, will show in the viewfinder on the LCD the AF point
used to achieve focus for the shot. In addition, this tab includes options
for controlling the characteristics of histograms displayed on the LCD
and playing back images stored on the memory card in the camera as a slideshow
on the unit's display.
The first tool tab lets you set the power off
time, determine file numbering conventions, rotate vertical images automatically
on the display, choose the data screens that will appear on the LCD when
the INFO button is pressed and format the CompactFlash card in the camera.
With the second tool tab options available are
controlling the brightness of the camera's LCD, setting the date and time,
choosing a language, determining the video output standard, selecting a
method of sensor cleaning, picking the Live View settings and defining the
flash control settings.
The final tool tab allows you to
assign the camera's current settings to a custom option on the Mode Dial,
reset the unit to its default settings and update its firmware.
With the first custom tab, you can change almost every default setting
for the camera. For example, the exposure bracketing sequence is standard,
underexposed and overexposed. You can change it to underexposed, standard
and overexposed. In addition to changing exposure defaults, you can alter
image, autofocusing, drive and metering defaults.
The remaining custom tab is My Menu settings. It allows you to pick items
from other menus for quick access. For example, you can "register"
to quality menu as a My Menu item. When you do that, the quality menu
will appear under the My Menu tab.
The Canon 40D's menu system can seem like a bottomless pit at times but
it does give you access to almost every function on a camera and it allows
you to alter those functions to suit your taste.
Four major Windows applications are packaged
with the 40D: Digital Photo Professional, EOS Utility, Picture Style Editor
and ZoomBrowser.
Digital Photo Professional (DPP) is a RAW image processor
for Canon EOS cameras. Its Windows interface consists of four parts--a
file browser, picture palette, toolbar and menu bar. You can select folders
containing images with the file browser and thumbnails of the images will
appear on the picture palette.
Double clicking on an image will display it
in a preview window. The preview window has a menu bar with standard Windows
menus--File, Edit, View and Window. There is also an Adjustment menu and
a Tools menu.
The Adjustmnent menu lets you rotate photos, rate photos with checkmarks,
set automatically a tone curve for a shot and choose work color space
for the image. Color space options include sRGB, Adobe RGB and Apple RGB.
The Tools menu contains trimming and stamping
tools and a transfer link to Photoshop if it's installed on your computer.
On the DPP interface, the tool buttons grouped in two clusters. One cluster
lets you edit an image, close the pane for browsing folders, launch a
tool palette, select all thumbnails on the picture palette or clear all
selections there.
When you open an editing window, you can toggle between a full palette
and palette with thumbnail view, resize the image in the window and superimpose
a grid on the image. You also have access to items on the main tool bar
like rotate and batch process photos, as well as the tool palette.
With the tool palette, you can tinker with a photo's brightness, white
balance, picture style, color tone and saturation, sharpness and noise
levels.
The second cluster of tools on the
DPP's interface permits you to prioritize photos with one, two or three
checkmarks, a means of organizing your images. Rotation and batch processing
are also available in the cluster.
The menu bar on the interface contains menus similar to those in the
Preview window. However, there's a Bookmark menu for quickly accessing
individual images where ever they reside on your system. In addition,
the Adjustment and Tools menus contain additional items like rotate, rename
and launch the EOS Utility.
As a bare bones editing and organizing application, DPP will suffice,
but it won't fulfill the needs of even a moderate power user.
The EOS Utility is for downloading images, controlling the camera remotely
and accessing accessories, such as Canon's optional wireless file transfer
hardware. A number of preferences can be chosen from this program such
as what the application does on start-up, what images should be downloaded,
where they should go after they're downloaded and how they're named.
The Picture Style program allows you to define
custom picture styles--combiniations of tone, saturation, sharpness and
contrast--that can be used in any camera that supports such styles or to
modify RAW images in Digital Photo Professional. You can also fine tune
specific colors in a style and adjust its gamma characteristics. If you
enjoy tweaking photo characrteristics, you can do it with this program until
you're cross-eyed.
ZoomBrowser is Canon's all-purpose photo
organization and editing program. It's more elaborate than Digital Photo
Professional, but it's designed to work only with JPG files. Its interface
has two primary window panes--one is a combination task and navigation pane;
the other, a thumbnail palette. Across the top of the interface is a toolbar
and menu bar.
From the task pane, you can
acquire photos from a digital camera connected to a computer and modify
the camera's settings.
You can view photos as a slideshow, rename multiple image files, classify
pictures to make them easier to find and you can search for snapshots
based on criteria such as star rating, modification date, shooting date,
comment and keywords.
A photo editor is also available from within this pane which includes
tools for red-eye correction, color and brightness adjustment, sharpening,
trimming, inserting text, automatic photo adjustment and sending a picture
to an external image editor for more elaborate modifications.
Export tasks can also be performed from the pane. As you export pictures
to a folder, you can resize them, change their file type, modify their
quality and change their file names. You can also export only the shooting
properties of a photo, as well as export it as a screensaver or wallpaper.
What's more, you can back up your photos to a CD.
Printing functions available from the task pane include print one photo
per page, print an index of images or print a picture using other software.
You can also e-mail images from within ZoomBrowser.
In addition to tasks, a folder browser is located in the pane, as well
as an area to identify favorite folders.
The thumbnail palette has three tabs. In zoom mode, thumbnails of all
the images in a folder are displayed on the palate and as you roll your
cursor over a photo a larger version of it pops up for better viewing.
In scroll mode, larger thumbnails are displayed on the palette so scrolling
may be necessary to find images. Finally, in preview mode, the palette
is similar to filmstrip view in Windows, with a strip of thumbnails along
the bottom of the palette and a larger version of a selected thumbnail
and information about it appearing above the strip.
In the toolbar above the picture palette, are tools for viewing an image,
displaying its properties, viewing a slideshow of images, searching for
pictures, deleting them and rotating them.
The program's menu bar is standard Windows fare with keyword management
being the primary items on the tools menu and e-mailing photos the major
choice on the Internet menu.
ZoomBrowser has a lot of functionality and is good for organizing photos
and light image editing.
The Macintosh versions of Canon's photo applications
pretty much mirror their Windows' counterparts. Digital Photo Professional,
EOS Utility and Picture Style look and essentially perform the same way
on the Mac as they do on a PC.
ZoomBrowser is rechristened ImageBrowser on the Apple machine. Its
interface is a less cluttered than its Windows doppelgänger, and
in addition to preview and list views for the picture palette, it has
something called TimeTunnel. TimeTunnel lets you look at your images
as if you were moving in and out of, well, a tunnel through time.
The Mac suite of photo applications also includes PhotoStitch, a handy
utility for creating panoramas from several photos.
Canon covers all the basics with its suite
of photographic programs, but--maybe with the exception of ZoomBrowser--once
most shutterbugs get a taste for the kinds of functions these applications
can perform, they will quickly start looking for more robust replacements.
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