0:00 want to use it in the first place. >> Your exposure is correct when you decide that it is >> not your camera. [music] Welcome to Palto Tech. A histogram is the little display graph that appears either on your camera while you're taking or playing back a photo, or it's available later on in post-p production software such as Lightroom and Capture 1. A histogram never tells you what's right or wrong with your photo. It's simply a tool, one of the many tools in your photography toolbox that's there to help you make the best exposure decision that you can based on
0:47 what you want to achieve artistically. Now, many photographers use the histogram because they have either one or both of the two big exposure fears. Fear number one is that they are afraid of overexposing areas in their scene with too much light. This is known as blowing the highlights. And this is a valid fear because once you blow your highlights, you end up with nothing but white in areas of your image. No sensor data, no image data, nothing. Fear number two is the fear of underexposing areas of your image so much you lose data. And this is otherwise known as crushing your blacks. And you also will get sent to underexposure jail. No $200 for you. There are basically three types of histograms and they all function in
1:34 basically the same manner. The first is a standard luminosity histogram and it looks like this. So to enable the histogram, go into the settings of your camera located in the wrench area under screen setup and look for disisp custom setting and go ahead and tick the box that says histogram. Now you will see your histogram right here. You see that? And it changes depending upon your scene. Okay, live. Look at that. This histogram has no color information displayed at all. It's just a grayscale reduction of the exposure range of your image. The second type is called your RGB histogram, and it will show you four histograms at the same time. A regular histogram and a separate histogram for red, green, and blue color channels.
2:20 Now, most Fujifilm cameras have this type of histogram that you can enable. Press and hold down the DISP back button. Once you get to this menu, simply assign a custom button or a swipe gesture to the histogram. In this case, I'm assigning it to the swipe up gesture histogram. Now, when I swipe up, boom, there's my RGB histogram. And the third type of histogram you may see is the combined histogram, where you see everything all at once in the same graph. The red, green, blue, and luminosity values are all represented together. Now, this type of histogram is used most often in a post-p production workflow. As I mentioned, all of these histograms function in basically the same way. Looking at the histogram here, if you've never used one before, it
3:06 often resembles a silhouette of a few mountains off in the distance. These areas and shapes on the histogram represent the number of pixels in a specific tone in your image. The higher up they go, the more pixels there are for that specific tone. But what tone or level of brightness exactly? Well, you generally need to read a histogram from the left to the right. It starts on the left with pure black or 0% brightness. As you move this way toward the right side, you will see the brighter tones in your image represented here on the graph. Now, when you finally get to the furthest right side, if you happen to see pixels there, this means that there are areas at 100% brightness somewhere in your image. It would be very helpful
3:53 in understanding the histogram for you to group segments of the histogram together. So for example, starting with the left, this segment shows you if you have any black areas in your image. Then moving right the next segment over, we have the shadows. Then we have the midtones. And continuing right, we have the highlights. And finally, the whites. And if you're in Lightroom and you hover your mouse over the histogram, you can even see little hints as to what each section means. And since there is pixel information in the whites, that means there's an area in the shot that's pure white. No image data at all. Just blown white. Okay? This area right here. You see that? Look at that. And so the histogram records that little bit of the
4:40 picture that's blinding white on the right side right here. But look at the histogram over here. There's some areas of pixels that are all the way over in the black area of the picture. Right? And obviously that must be this area right here perhaps. Or look at this. Have a look at this. You see that? And that area right here is represented on the histogram right here. And if you look at the midtones, you see how there's a whole bunch of pixels in the midtone areas. Well, obviously that would be the sky. You see that? A lot of that is right there. Perhaps some of the water here. Now, anytime you make adjustments to the image, the histogram is going to change. Look at how this histogram is changing as I'm bringing up the exposure and then bringing it back down. But where you absolutely need the
5:26 histogram the most is at the time you're taking your photo in the first place. Now, while you're out shooting, you want to make sure that you check your histogram as one of the last steps in the process after you've framed and composed and set up your shot, obviously. So, let's say this is the scene I'm shooting right here. Look at my histogram. It's like all the way either side, right? That's because there's extremes in this photo. So, there's very dark areas and very light areas. And this is why the histogram is never meant to be used as something that tells you whether you're doing it either wrong or right. Okay? Because in this example, I'm blowing my highlights and I'm crushing my blacks. However, my subject is the Monopoly board. And if I go ahead and adjust my exposure to fix
6:12 the histogram, have a look at this. Okay, look at that. Bringing down the exposure there. I'm not clipping anything, but you can't see the monopoly board. Okay? Obviously, you need to make artistic decisions yourself. This just simply guides you in what you want to do. And it's basically saying, "Okay, photographer, just know that if you have your Monopoly board looking good, you're going to have areas of your image that's going to be completely blown out. Are you okay with that?" That's all the histogram is doing really. Now, something very important. Whenever you're looking at the live histogram on your Fujifilm camera, you are actually seeing the representation of the JPEG of your image based on the film simulation and JPEG settings that you've dialed in.
6:58 It does not directly reflect the RAW file. And because of this, your histogram may be over representing any clipping that may be going on. And this is more noticeable if you are using the RGB histogram for color channels. Let me show you what I mean. So, for example, here the RGB histogram is telling me that my red channel is clipping. Do you see that? And that's because it's basing its readings off the settings I have in the camera, such as Via Vivid, that's the film simulation I'm using. But if I change it to say, I don't know, classic negative. Now, let's have a look. No more clipping because I changed the film sim. However, remember that if you're shooting RAW, you have more latitude. Now, a handy tip. If you want to force the camera to render your histogram
7:44 exactly as your sensor will see it, then simply turn on natural live view. Go into the menu under screen setup, natural live view, turn it on. You could also assign a shortcut button to that. Now, what your histogram sees through the viewfinder is exactly what your camera sensor sees without the film simulation stepping in the way and changing it. So, I'm in natural live view here. And if I go up to here, I'm definitely not clipping. Now, keep in mind that if you're shooting with natural live view on, right, and you're shooting JPEGs, if you're shooting that way, then yes, your JPEGs will still have the film simulation baked into them, even with natural live view turned on. It just changes what you see in the viewfinder and also, and more
8:31 importantly, what the histogram sees. Let's discuss exposing to the right. Exposing to the right, for those of you that don't know what it is, is a common practice where you look at your histogram and then you make exposure adjustments to move that graph over as far to the right as you possibly can get without clipping. Or in other words, getting the pixel lines creeping up the right side like this in your shot. The idea behind this technique is that by exposing to the right, you are saturating your sensor with as much light and detail as possible from your scene. This has the benefit of giving you a wider dynamic range and helps to prevent more noise from appearing in the shadows when you try and recover them in post-prouction. This is because you
9:17 generally will find more noise present in your shadows than in your highlights. So exposing to the right is usually the end goal being you want to later on raise your shadows in post-prouction with as little noise as possible. So you expose as much as possible saturate that sensor with light without clipping. Let me show you an example. Okay, for this scene, have a look. According to my Fujifilm camera, this scene is perfectly exposed. The exposure meter right here, it's at zero. The histogram looks good. We don't have any blowing of highlights or clipping of shadows. It's perfect. I'm going to go ahead and take the shot. Now, I'm going to try exposing to the right. So, I'm going to bring more light into the camera by reducing my shutter speed. Okay. So, I'm going to go ahead
10:02 now and drop my shutter speed and bring more light in. Look, moving the histogram over to the right. You see that? Just a little bit. I don't want to go too much and start clipping. Just a little bit over. As far as I can get to the right without the clipping and taking the shot. Okay, let's have a look and see what we got. Okay, the first shot I took is on the left right here and the second one on the right. Now, for each of these, I'm going to go ahead and bring up my shadows as far as I can. I'm cranking the shadows all the way up. And look at the difference. The shot on the left was done without exposing to the right. The shot on the right I had exposed to the right by about 2/3 of a stop. There's definitely less noise in the shadows in the image that I exposed to the right when I tried to bring back the shadows in Lightroom. You can see it
10:48 here. Now, this is a subtle difference and I'm at 400% and I have the shadow slider cranked all the [clears throat] way up as much as I can get. I'm just trying to make a point as to why people expose to the right and use the histogram to help them do that. So, the very first thing we need to get out of the way right now is that the exposure compensation dial will not work if your camera is set to all manual mode. Meaning that if you have your aperture set to a specific value, your ISO set to a specific value, and your shutter speed set to a specific value, then your camera is in manual mode. And at this point, if you rotate the exposure compensation dial, nothing will
11:33 happen. It's now a nice piece of exercise gear that you can use to work out your thumb muscles. However, when you set at least one of the three exposure triangle settings, aperture, ISO, or shutter speed to A or automatic, that's when the exposure dial gets activated and can now be used. Now, your camera can help and it has a very good exposure metering system built right into it. The problem is the Fujifilm engineers, like all camera manufacturers, have programmed this camera to always look at the world in middle gray. Middle gray is what our eyes see as about halfway between black and white. In technical terms, it's called 18% middle gray, and it's what your camera is always trying to expose
12:21 for. 18% middle gay is an important concept and that's why there are so many tools out there that try and help you achieve middle gay but always looking at the world through 18% middleg gray glasses can cause problems. Now have a look at this scene right here in my living room. According to the camera it's perfectly exposed but is it really? I have the camera set to multimemeter mode. So now according to Fuji, the camera will determine proper exposure based on the analysis of composition, color, and brightness distribution. So in other words, the camera is trying to balance out the scene to that 18% middle gray that we talked about. But here's the problem. The camera doesn't know that Stormtroopers have bright white
13:06 armor. It's not dull gray. And if it were dull gray, then that would make this guy mad, bad, and sad to find out that you've exposed Stormtroopers incorrectly. So, you need to turn the exposure compensation dial, which rotates 1/3 stops of exposure to override the camera's exposure choice. You see how I've overridden the camera's exposure to more accurately portray what a stormtrooper would look like if it was, I don't know, standing in your living room. Okay, so this is one silly example of a photographer being in a position to better know what's best for the exposure of the scene. But remember that background, lighting, and high dynamic range can all play a part in fooling the camera from time to time. Swap out one background for another, and
13:53 you may find that your camera just doesn't get the correct settings as you'd want them. Now you need to remember that anytime you rotate the exposure compensation dial, your camera is either going to adjust your shutter speed, your ISO or your aperture depending upon what is set in automatic for each one of them. So for example, let's say I set my ISO to 800 and my aperture to f2.8 and my shutter speed to automatic. Now, when I rotate my exposure compensation dial, you can see that the camera is adjusting the shutter speed because that's what was in automatic. Likewise, if I set my aperture dial to automatic and my shutter speed dial to 1/500th of a second and my ISO to 800, now when I rotate my exposure command dial, it's
14:40 the aperture that now changes. And lastly, if I set a fixed aperture of say f4, a fixed shutter speed of 1 250th of a second, and I put my ISO dial in automatic, now when I rotate the exposure compensation dial, you can see that the camera is changing my ISO value. As you've probably figured out by now, the problem with the exposure compensation dial is that you do lose control over some of the exposure settings of the camera. the camera could when you rotate the exposure compensation dial choose a shutter speed that's too slow and you would end up with a blurry photo. So what I do is I firmly set my shutter speed to say 1 250th of a second which helps to prevent subject blur especially with people.
15:25 Then I set my aperture to a fixed value based on how much I want in focus in my scene. Say f2.8 for portraits for example. Then, and most importantly, my ISO dial is set to automatic. Because my ISO is set to automatic, my exposure compensation dial is now active, and it works, but it will only adjust the ISO when making exposure compensation adjustments. It will not change my aperture or my shutter speed. Now, what's interesting is that by setting your ISO dial to automatic and your aperture and shutter speed to fixed values, you're basically turning your exposure compensation dial to another ISO dial, right? As it's just basically setting the ISO just like the ISO dial
16:11 is doing. However, the idea here is that you're not using the exposure compensation dial except for cases where you really need to kind of step in and nudge the camera to better expose the picture. Let's go over some settings and guidelines for using your exposure compensation dial. Looking at it from the top, you can see that it allows for exposure compensation adjustments for up to three stops. However, you can also set the dial to C. This does two things. The first is that it relocates the exposure compensation adjustment settings over to the front command dial right here. So now you can rotate the front command dial which does the exact same thing as rotating the exposure compensation dial. And the second thing that it does is it gives you two extra
16:57 stops of exposure compensation to work with. Have a look at this. Now it goes up to five. You see that? Now if you put your exposure compensation dial in C, you need to be very careful that your front command dial is set to the correct roll. Otherwise it will not work. to check if your front command dial is in the correct roll. Put your exposure compensation dial to C. Then press the front command dial quickly like this. Boom. You see the menu that popped up? Have a look at this. You see that? It immediately puts it in shutter speed roll or exposure compensation dial roll. Every time you press it, it toggles between the various roles that this front command dial can be set to. And here's another thing. If you have your ISO dial set to C as well, you get all
17:44 three separate rolls to toggle the front command dial between. The point here is that you need to check and be sure that the exposure command roll is enabled on the front command dial if you're going to be using the C option on the exposure compensation dial. Also, you can enable a better and additional view of your exposure compensation values so that they appear right here. You see that as digits? To do this, go into your menu into screen setup and go to disisp custom setting. See how there's scale and digit. Go ahead and put a checkin digit. Now you'll see them both on the left side of the screen and at the bottom. But wait, there's more. You can even set them to appear if you are in large indicators mode on your camera.
18:29 Check this out. If I go to screen setup, large indicators mode to on, then go to large indicators display setting right here, the first one, and then tick this box like this. Have a look at this. There it is. Now, something you need to be very careful with if you're planning on using the exposure compensation dial regularly. If you have your camera's dynamic range setting to either 200 or 400% or your D-range priority setting is set to strong or weak or your exposure compensation amount you are dialing in exceeds three stops, then what you see in the viewfinder or the rear LCD screen, including the histogram, may not accurately reflect the scene based on the exposure compensation that you're
19:16 setting. Now this same care also needs to be taken if you are shooting in FLOG for movies as well. There is a lot more to this that we can explore and the relationship between dynamic range your exposure compensation dial and your LCD screen including your histogram is a vast topic. Overall your usage of the exposure compensation dial will be strongly dictated by the type of shooting that you do. Some people own Fujifilm cameras and never once touched the exposure compensation dial. Others cannot live without it and use it all the time. Exposure smoothing on Fujifilm cameras. Now, some of you may not even be aware that this setting even exists. So, well, that's where I come in. That's what this
20:02 channel's handy for. In the camera icon area, if you look down, you'll see you have two options. Interval timer shooting and this one right here, interval timer shooting exposure smoothing. So, what exactly happens when you set this to on? Suppose you're shooting a time-lapse scene where you have a subject in the foreground and perhaps behind it the horizon. Now, as you're shooting the time-lapse photos and the camera is taking one every few seconds, if the lighting in your scene changes, like clouds going overhead blocking the sun or the sun coming up, right? any kind of exposure changes. What this setting does is it tells the Fujifilm camera to make automatic adjustments to that exposure so that you have as least
20:49 amount of exposure changing as possible between each time-lapse shot that you're taking. And so it will be in control of the exposure during your time-lapse scene. And if the scene changes with regard to light, remember some clouds blocking the sun, the sun coming up, whatever, the camera, if you've got interval timer, shooting exposure setting set to on, the camera will adjust exposure to match what it meters to be the correct exposure. Let's just test this out. Okay, [laughter] I set up this little scene with these four ninja turtles on this beautiful beach. We are going to shoot a 30 second time lapse toward the end of the day. Okay. But uh-oh, the sun's coming. The sun's coming down right during the time we're shooting. OH NO. WHAT DO WE DO?
21:36 WELL, we need to try using our interval timer exposure smoothing setting. That's what we need to do. I set my aperture to a fixed f5.6, my shutter speed to a fixed 1 over 60th of a second, but I put my ISO dial in automatic. And I did this so that my camera would have control over the exposure. Now once I finished shooting the first test, I again shot the exact same thing. Only this time I changed the interval, timer, shooting, exposure, smoothing setting to on. Everything else was the same. Okay, let's see what we got. And what I did was I put all of my individual photos on my timeline. You see that right here? I have one set for when I turn the smoothing off and I have one set for when I turn the smoothing on. I made the
22:22 length of each photo one frame in duration. Therefore, it's a very fast scene. So, what I did was I slowed it down to 25% of the speed just so we could see it a little bit better. All right, here it is with smoothing off. And here it is with smoothing on. Now, at first glance, it's kind of hard to see much of a difference. Let's check them out now side by side. Okay, here we go. You see that? Take a look. Take a look. You see this area? Check it out. Have a look at this. You see that? Okay. Let's now have a look at the straight out of camera JPEG. Okay. So, the JPEG on the left was shot with interval timer shooting exposure smoothing to off. For the JPEG on the right, I had it turned
23:07 on. Everything else was the same on the camera. No other settings were changed. Have a look at this. Can you see that there's so much more detail in the JPEG that was produced by the camera when I had that setting set to on? And that's because the camera was exposing a bit better for and protecting the highlights. You can see right here, it's almost blown out. In fact, it looks it is blown out, right? It looks a bit blown out to me. Okay, let's try and fix the first JPEG. The one that I shot with the setting off, right? The one that's more blown out. I'm just going to punch the auto button. Boom. [laughter] I don't know about this. It brought my highlights all the way down. If I bring them even further, look at that. But let's go to the other one now. Check this out. I'm going to go ahead
23:52 and hit auto. Just with that one edit change, look at this. Even in a JPEG that's not a RAW file, a JPEG, I have so much more flexibility in post-p production if I have that smoothing on because the camera got the correct exposure. The camera did a better job of protecting the highlights. Now remember, these are JPEGs, not RAW images. If I had raw images, I would even have more latitude. Now, keep in mind, obviously, if you're shooting time-lapse, you're going to want to have the camera most of the time in all manual mode, right? That just makes sense. That way, you have complete control over the exposure. If you are in a position where for whatever reason, you're wanting to be flexible with your ISO and you throw that into automatic,
24:39 your camera will do a better job of smoothing out the exposure. you jackass. >> Five exposure warning tools that are built right into your Fujifilm camera to warn you about your exposure before you take your shot. Those are the LCD screen, the exposure indicator, the histogram, the live view highlight alert, and the zebra. Well, not that kind of the other kind of zebra. Got that? Good. Now, let's get to the tools. First up is the LCD screen. This is the most oftenus tool that beginning photographers go to. An LCD screen is just a guideline. It kind of gives you
25:24 an overall impression of what the scene will look like. But on a screen this small with too many variables of brightness and ambient light, etc. It should not be the only tool that you use to properly judge your exposure. Okay, have a look at this example here. Here's a situation where let's say you're using the LCD screen only and you realize you want to make you know the word on the hammer appear brighter. So you turn up your exposure and now hey it looks great. You can read the word Stanley perfectly. So if you bring the photo into Lightroom have a look at this. You can clearly see that right at this part of the image that you were looking at through the LCD screen. It came out fine. You can see it great. No problem there. But look at the other areas of
26:11 the image that you may not have noticed when you were looking through the back of the LCD screen. It's completely blown out. These highlights are ruined. You're never going to get them back. There's no color information. You may as well toss them out the window. Have a look at this. If I go and I try and bring down those highlights to recover, I've got this thing cranked all the way down. And even if I try and bring my exposure down, look at that. Nothing. There's nothing there. Garbage in, garbage out. That's the problem with relying on the LCD screen. And of course, if you're shooting JPEG only, it's far worse as I'm showing you here. But let's switch over to the RAW version of this same image. Have a look at this. I'm looking at RAW. And you know how they say with RAW, oh, you can fix it in post. Well,
26:56 no, you can't. Not all the time if you've blown out your highlights. I'm going to bring down the highlights all the way. And it's better than the JPEG. It's better, but look, look at that. It still sucks. So, do not rely on the LCD screen for your exposure tool. Use another tool as well. Think of the LCD screen as sort of a starting point and what you would use obviously to judge your framing and compose the shot. Next up is number two, the exposure indicator. This is the little guide located on the left side of your screen that shows the number of stops that the camera thinks is either over, under, or properly exposed. You know, that's just like the camera's [music] opinion, man. And if you have spot metering on, then it may miss things that are outside of
27:43 where the camera is metering the scene. So, I would not use this one a whole lot, particularly in situations with high dynamic range and when you have spot metering turned on. Number three is the histogram. Now, overall, the histogram is the single best tool available on the Fujifilm camera to help you accurately nail exposure, and it will especially prevent you from blowing out those highlights. This is because often times there are areas in your image that you can't see that are blowing out highlights if you're just using your LCD screen to judge exposure. A histogram is a graph that shows the amount of tones that are all contained in your image that range from pure black on the left to pure white on the right
28:31 and everything in between like all the various shades of gray and so forth. This little graph sits right here and changes live as you aim and move your camera around and expose the scene. Now, as you crank up exposure and let more light into your image, the histogram moves all the pixels over toward the right. Now, at some point, you may have an area of your photo that's so bright, it literally shows all of the pixels crunched up to the right side in the pure white area. And having large areas of pure white in your images will make me mad bad and sad because when your histogram builds that skyscraper way up right there, you end up with clipped or blown highlights. And that means it's so
29:19 damn bright that the color information has been stripped away. It's It's like this bright light blowing everything out. You see that? No color information at all. completely blown out. And remember, the opposite direction is true. If you have that skyscraper building rising up to the sky all the way on the left, then you will be stuck with black areas of your image, and that will suck. Also, like any tool, the use of a histogram will depend entirely on your subject, scene, and the story that you're trying to tell in your photo. But as a general rule of thumb, and especially if you're new to reading a histogram, you want to keep those lines from going up on either side, and the pixels in your histogram spread
30:06 evenly across the tonality of your image, the the tonal range of your image. The XT3 and XT4 also offer an RGB histogram. An RGB histogram is like a regular histogram, but on steroids. This histogram displays four different histograms at the same time. The standard histogram and a separate histogram for red, green, and blue. Here's what I want you to do. Go into your screen setup. Scroll down to the second page. Display custom setting. In here, tick off histogram. Next, we're going to assign a touch function to it. And what you do there is you press and hold the disp back button down. Boom. until it's like that. Scroll down
30:53 till you get to your touch screen. And what I like to do on the touch screen going up like I like to assign that to histogram. And if you assign it to histogram on the touch screen, it will then give you the RGB histogram. So once I do that now watch what happens. I take my finger, I go check it out. How about that? And you turn it off just like that. And so what's great about that is not only are you getting the histogram on steroids RGB version of it, but you are also getting it larger, so it's easier to see if you have crappy eyes like I do. And then the other one obviously that you set is the regular histogram that appears at all times, the little one right on the screen right
31:39 there. But your histogram is not a perfect tool either. The histogram shows you the exposure as the camera interprets it after and the word is after. It applies whatever film simulation and JPEG settings you've already set in the camera. This means that you are seeing the effects of in camera processing in your histogram already, including the white balance, the film sims, etc. And the only way to prevent that is to turn on natural live view. But but I'm getting down another rabbit hole here. I will make a fast Friday video on this very subject, including my she method. There's more to unpack here with this, so stay tuned for that video, [music] but in the meantime,
32:26 definitely enable both your regular histogram and your RGB histogram as well. Number four is the live view highlight alert. Live view highlight alert is a great tool. To quickly see clipped highlights in the scene. To enable it, you go into your menu into screen setup, scroll down to disisp custom setting, and tick the box that says live view highlight alert. Once you do that, as you rotate the camera and get it to a situation where something's going to be clipped, like my white shirt, check it out. That's too much white. Color loss. Color loss. That's what the live view highlight alert does. So, you turn down the exposure. See this? See that? Till it's gone. The
33:11 problem with this tool is that you don't want to have it on all the time. It kind of gets annoying cuz, you know, it's down all the time. And still, it can be a very handy tool to use in certain situations. And finally, we come to Zebra. The video capabilities on your Fujifilm camera include one additional exposure tool that's not available for still shooting, and that's called the zebra function. The zebra function allows you to pick a brightness threshold. And then the camera will show you zebra stripes if you match or go above that value. To turn on the zebra for video mode, scroll down until you see the word zebra. There it is. and simply turn it on. Now, you
33:57 have a choice here. You can make them zebra to the right or zebra to the left, right? Who cares? Whichever one, pick one, choose it. The next one is called zebra level. And the camera will allow you to set the zebra level from either 50% all the way up to 100%. These numbers are meant to match waveform values, which is how video signal is measured. Pure black is zero and pure white is 100. I usually set my zebra I set my zebra I usually set my zebra between 60% and 70% and I've had fairly good results with those settings. So give that a shot if you haven't set it up yet. Unlike the live view highlight alert tool, the zebra function can be
34:43 assigned to a custom button or a menu item, which is great for video shooters. long exposure noise reduction. The setting is located right here in the IQ section of your menu and it has two choices, either on or off. Now, according to Fujifilm, this setting will help to reduce noise when you're taking long exposures. Now, when I'm talking about reducing noise in your exposures, I'm not talking about the kind of noise that appears when you have way too high of an ISO value. If you shoot an ISO value of say above 3200, you will most likely see noise that looks like film grain. That is not what this setting is trying to prevent. Rather, according to Fujifilm, it is designed to reduce
35:29 modeling that can occur in long exposure images. sort of a cleaning of the blotchy areas that can sometimes appear across the image frame from the sensor as the sensor gets hotter and therefore noisier while you're taking long exposures. Now what your camera is doing when you have long exposure noise reduction enabled is that once your first and main photo is finished, the camera will then automatically take a second photo but of nothing but pure black and for the same amount of time. So for example, let's say you're taking a 3inut long exposure and then you have long exposure noise reduction enabled. The camera will then as soon as you're finished with your 3minut exposure, it
36:15 will take another equally long exposure for 3 minutes of pure black. So basically you're now standing there for 6 minutes. Right? Once it does that, it uses that black exposure which can more easily show imperfections like hot pixels, etc. to know where to reduce those imperfections in your original exposure. and then it saves a final and more cleaned up exposure to your SD card. At least in theory. Let's take a look. Okay, right here I have two different 15minute exposures. In other words, my shutter speed was set for 15 minutes. Both of them are using the lowest base ISO value and shot with the same lens at f16. The image on the left
37:01 was shot without the noise reduction turned on. The image on the right, I turned it on. I am now zoomed in 800%. And I am not seeing much of a difference at all. These RAW images look identical. I mean identical. Now let's look at the outof camera JPEGs. Same as before, exact same settings except the one on the left has noise reduction turned off and the one on the right has it turned on. Again, absolutely identical. So from this I can tell you that if you shoot for 15 minutes at the base ISO value, you will see no difference whatsoever with noise reduction using that setting. But what happens if we crank up the ISO value? Here are two raw images taken with a 4minute exposure time. Both of
37:47 them have f16 and both of them have an ISO value of 3200. And zooming in 800%, have a look at this. Pretty much identical. In fact, interestingly, the photo on the right, which has the noise reduction turned on, has this extra whether it's a hot or defective pixel area. You see that right there? But these are just pretty much identical. I ran a number of other tests at different ISO values and different exposure times. And all the results I got for both RAW and straight out of the camera JPEG files were the same. They looked identical to me. And if there were differences, they were so minor that you really have to be cranked in at 800 or more percent to see them. Now, one test I didn't do was aim it up at the stars at an extremely high ISO value and let
38:34 it run for maybe 30 minutes. I did not have time and was not able to do that for this video. So, I can't say if maybe I would have seen a more significant amount of noise reduced if I had had those settings. But for those of you that are wondering about that and average use cases, no, I couldn't tell a difference. They looked identical to me for both RAW and JPEGs. Honestly, I never use this setting. And not just because I couldn't tell a difference in the shots that I showed you. First, and most problematically, if you have long exposure noise reduction turned on, this will double the time it takes for you to get a shot. Imagine taking a 30 minute timed exposure and then you need to sit there and wait another 30 minutes for the camera to take and process the long
39:21 exposure noise reduction version. So yeah, doubling the time it takes to do each shot is a problem, at least for me. The metering modes of Fujifilm cameras. Most Fujifilm cameras have four metering modes that you can choose from. Now, on some cameras, such as the X-T2 and the X-T3, there's an entire area of a top dial that's dedicated for those metering mode selection choices. On other cameras, such as the XT4, they're in an area of the cameras menu called the photometry settings. Now, one quick thing to know, if your photometry settings are located in the menu, and you see this gold icon, you see this right here, and you can't select it, see how it's grayed out? The reason why you
40:07 see that is because you have your camera set in face eye auto detect. Turn that off. Now when you go back into it, you will see it appear. Also note that you can assign a shortcut button on the back to access this menu faster. Now Fujifilm cameras offer you these settings for one very good reason. You are the photographer and only you know exactly how to best expose your scene. The camera has no idea. But with correct metering settings, you can sort of help give the camera a better idea of what you're trying to do with your image. Okay, so the first metering setting on the list is called multi. Multi is the one you want to set if you have no idea what metering mode you should use. What it does is it looks at your entire scene and it breaks it up into 256 separate
40:55 zones. It then consults a special database inside the camera to make an exposure decision. Now this decision is based on three things. Composition, color, and distribution of brightness. And it does it all in like a in a millisecond, right? It's pouring rain outside. I am not going outside today. So we are doing this all indoors. This will be our sun. Okay. Take a scene like this for example. And think like the camera would with multimemetering. It would break this apart into different zones and it would focus on the different aspects of the scene. For example, right here, that's the bright aspect, and it calculates how much of it is bright. And then there's kind of a mid-range aspect, and then over here are the shadows, right? What it does is that
41:41 it consults that database inside the camera, puts it all together, and gives you the best possible exposure, kind of using artificial intelligence, so to speak. It's a great default metering setting to use for many shooting situations. The second metering mode is called center weighted. Now, for this one, the camera has to do two things. First, it looks at the entire scene and calculates an average exposure of everything together. Then, it takes another look at it and says, "What's happening right in the center is what I think you think is the most important. So, I'll give the most priority to that when I make my calculations." In other words, the camera prioritizes the center of the frame when it calculates the average of the entire scene. If you're
42:27 shooting portraits or subjects that lie mostly in the center of the frame, then this would definitely be a good mode to try out. The next metering mode on the list is called spot. I love this one, but you've got to be a bit careful with it, and it's definitely not for all shooting situations. According to Fuji, if you use spot, the camera only looks at the center of the frame. That's equivalent to 2% of the dimensions of your image, the overall image. Okay? 2% of the overall image right in the center. That is spot. Watch what happens when I position my camera so that the light source is in the center. Look at that. You see that? You see how it changes the exposure? Look at that. If it's right in the center of the frame,
43:13 it's going to work out just fine. So, here's the problem with using spot. So, I want to get Thanos and the Ninja Turtles in the same shot with the light in the center. I'll go to focus on Thanos. The minute I turn my camera, uhoh. Uhoh. It only works if I'm aimed at Thanos, right? Or the Ninja Turtles. But look at this. Because the light is in the center. Okay, you see that? You see that? So, what do we do about it? It's actually pretty simple. You go into the camera menu settings into AFMF. You see where it says interlock spot auto exposure and focus area. Okay. Turn that on. Okay. Now, what that means is the little spot that you can move around the frame with the joystick on the camera,
43:59 that will not only set your focus point, but it will also set the spot that the camera will be using when it's metering the scene for exposure. Does that make sense? So, watch this. I want my frame to be right here. Okay? You see that? I want it to be just like that. Now, I'm going to use the joystick on the camera. Move this over here. Boom. It has exposed properly for my subject in the foreground. That is Thanos and the Ninja Turtles. And it's not blowing out the scene. You see that? I'm going to hold the camera just like this and let's put it back to the other setting and see what would have happened. And I'm back here. Look at that. You see the problem? I have the spot focused on Thanos because I want Thanos to be in focus, but the camera is
44:45 exposing spot metering in the center. So, I think it's a better idea to lock those two together as much as possible. Try that out if you've not done so yet. Now, the last metering mode is called average, and it's well, average, right? [laughter] So, I'm not a huge fan of this one. The camera basically looks at your entire scene as one big blob and averages everything together to get the exposure. Now, Fujifilm does recommend using average when you're needing to get consistent exposure across multiple shots using the same lighting, such as product photography or some landscapes. However, if you're going to average across everything, then I think that multi that you know, the first one that I mentioned works a lot better.
45:34 The RGB histogram, it displays four different histograms at the same time. our regular histogram and a separate histogram for red, green, and blue color channels. Now, the RGB histogram is not available as a regular setting in the Fujifilm menu. In order to enable it, you must assign the regular histogram function to a touch button. Once you do, then you will have the RGB histogram appear when you activate that touch button. Now the other thing to know about is the RGB histogram also comes bundled with the live view highlight alert tool as well. Like the regular histogram, the RGB histogram is based on the current JPEG settings that you have on the camera and does not directly
46:21 reflect the raw file itself. As I go to take a photo of the Rubik's Cube, my regular histogram seems like things are okay. However, when I flip over to my RGB histogram, you can see that the red channel, you know, the red in the Rubik's cube is going to be clipped most likely. Therefore, I turn down my exposure to prevent this from happening before taking the shot. However, have a look now with the Eterna film simulation turned on. I don't have to turn down the exposure at all. In fact, I can actually turn it up, which allows me to capture more light onto the sensor for better manipulation in post-prouction. Remember, the histogram is never reading the RAW file in the camera. It's simply reading the JPEG preview. Or in the case
47:07 of playing back the image on the camera and you have the camera set to both JPEG and RAW, it will read the full size JPEG file. And because of that, your histogram may actually be over representing any clipping that may be going on, particularly if you're using the RGB histogram for the color channels. Now, there's a little method that I use when I'm shooting raw files that I know are going to be processed later, and I want my histogram to better match [music] what the raw file will be like when I bring it into Lightroom or Capture 1. I call this the SHIE method. She stands for shadow, highlights, >> [music] >> eternal. I will go into my camera and set my shadows to minus2, my highlights
47:54 to minus2, and my film simulation to Eterna. The histogram will be in a better place to represent what I'm eventually going to be getting from my RAW file. I shot both of these images where I used the RGB histogram to make sure I had the proper exposure. Take a look at the shot on the left. In that shot, I had my film sim set to Vvilla. No other JPEG settings were specified in the camera. For the shot on the right, I used the shei method where I had the film simulation set to eternal, my shadows to minus2, and my highlights to minus2. And I brought both these images in Lightroom and tried to match them as best I could. Have a look at the image on the left. There's more noise in the shadows. And that's because that image
48:40 was shot slightly underexposed based on my concern of a false reading of the RGB histogram. But now on the shot on the right, you have much less noise. It looks better. And that's because there was more light that eventually went into and hit the sensor. And as you can see, it is not as noisy. It looks better. Have a look at this right here. It's a slightly cleaner [music] image because my histogram was not giving me that false positive clipping the red color channel because I had the histogram reading these she settings that better represented what the actual RAW file was capable of. Now, some of you may already have a recipe formula that works for you to better enable your histogram [snorts]
49:27 to match your in camera JPEGs. One additional setting that I would recommend that you consider as well would be to perhaps turn the color down to minus2 and that will sort of help flatten the image a little bit and even more closely resemble the raw file. Now let's [laughter] I can't do this. I need a weekend fast. Thank goodness it's Friday. >> [music]
