Zomg what are all these adjustments and what do they do Canon S5 IS

[five.five-six]

I used to get a kick out of taking photos of my tank with my Canon A80, and I got some good results but it died a very slow death and that took the fun out of photography for me

what i really thought i wanted was a DSLR like a rebel or D40, but my goodness that is a lot of money in lenses and and I don't see me shooting for sports illustrated any time soon

I came across this canon which had some nice adjustments like ISO, aperture, shutter, and manual focus. also, being as it is a canon and i have owned several, i figured I would be somewhat familiar with the menu system. all that said, it was an impulse buy

I am having some serious trouble getting good macro photos. the lights are to light, the darks are two dark and the color is not vibe rent.. but I can focus

here is a prime example of the brightness problem

and here is typical of non vibrant color

 

[drparker]

556,

Your top shot is over exposed. I don't know that camera but you need to find the balance of Shutter, aperture and ISO to get the correct exposure. try a faster shutter or smaller aperture(larger number).

Have you croped this photo? Are you in auto mode? If yes your camera's meter is reading the whole darker image and adjusting for it. Go into manual mode and play with the three thing that effect exposure.

P.O.T.N. Is a great site for Canon knowledge and you should be able to find someone there who will know how to use the controls on that model.

 

[five.five-six]

thanks,
I noticed if the ISO goes too high things look grainy

I was thinking of installing this CHDK firmware which will allow me to shoot in raw but I am not quite sure what RAW will do for me

 

[BlueCorn]

The sensor in your camera outputs raw pixel data. That data is converted into a readable format by the software in your camera. During the conversion process sharpness is added, saturation is adjusted, white balance settings applied, contrast adjusted and then it writes out a .jpg to your memory card. You probably have a few tweaks that you can make, in the camera settings, to adjust that but not much. The resulting .jpg file is also an 8-bit compressed file; i.e. you've already lost data. JPG files, because they're already compressed degrade very quickly when you start editing or adjusting things.

Shooting RAW takes that same sensor data and writes it directly to your card. Instead of the camera determining the developing settings, you do. You decide how much sharpness to add, the amount of saturation and contrast......etc

After converting the file you can save it in any format you'd like. TIFF and PSD are good choices because they're both uncompressed and can handle 16 bit data. The bit depth of the file determines how many colors are in your palette. 16bit files can handle a bunch more change before they start to degrade.

Don't be afraid of processing your image in something like Photoshop or Lightroom. Ansel Adams didn't take his film to Costco for developing, you shouldn't either by letting the camera make all of the decisions.

 

[drparker]

When you bump up the ISO your making the sensor more sensitive to light which results in more noise. Film is the same, as the ISO increases so does grain. I'm not familiar with that hack but someone on P.O.T.N. has probably done it and can tell you if it's a good idea.