Pro-Quality Digital SLRs

Live View
Now on to Live View. When used in conjunction with the large 3” monitor this is a most impressive-looking feature, and simulates the ground-glass effect of view cameras while having all the drawbacks of shooting with a digicam. For that reason, Canon, and I, suggest you do this for tripod-mounted shooting, though of course you can work handheld. While the monitor brightness and resolution outdoors is pretty good, some wise entrepreneur might want to reinvigorate the dark viewing cloth business. I did best with this outdoors when shading the camera with my body, which of course I could not do in all lighting conditions. There is also some delay in relaying the information to the monitor, recalling the EVF (though certainly not as bad or grainy) methodology of the past.

Picture Styles

Think of Picture Styles as a Menu offered by Canon for a host of image options, but now also something you can order “à la carte” by making your own bill of fare. Using the supplied software, you can create a wide variety of color and tonal response curves (along with being able to modify the supplied combos) and upload them to one, or many EOS 40D cameras. When using the 40D I upped the saturation level in the Landscape Picture Style and just kept it there. This set shows the “normal” saturation of Landscape mode and the +2 saturation I set myself. It’s as if we are now all film scientists being able to create our own emulsion concoctions.

There are numerous precautions and caveats with Live View which I will not enumerate here. One of the real benefits is the ability to use the Jump button to get a 5x or 10x magnification of the image, through which you can scroll with the toggle button, and this will make those making copies of fine art or close-ups of still objects quite happy. You can use AF for this operation, but you have to first turn off Live View to use AF and only use the center AF target, then turn it back on and shoot; normally you set manual focus on your lens to work in this mode. In all, it’s quite impressive, and makes you rethink some of your procedures for images you’d make using a tripod.

So while not a theorem we can say that this aspect of the camera might outmode the adage about the medium format advantage of working through a large viewfinder. And while Live View might be a tip of the hat to those thinking that shooting through the back of the camera is cool, and certainly has its charms, I think it has a way to go and will certainly evolve from this point forward. I know ground-glass shooting and this is no ground-glass shooting; the monitor will have to get a big boost in image quality and resolution to match that. But it is certainly a step into medium format’s territory.

Highlight Handling
Another piece of common wisdom is that you have to expose digital-like slide film, avoiding any hint of burnt-up highlights. There are numerous ways to diagnose exposure with the 40D, including a histogram and flashing where clipping occurs, and these are still very useful, particularly with the larger display. Some camera makers have tackled this problem with post-exposure, in camera shadow/highlight corrections, and even with the ability to add customized tonal curves, but they still count on your reading the light right. The 40D incorporates a Custom Function option dubbed “Highlight Tone Priority,” which is said to expand dynamic range to better control highlights. Canon does admit that this may increase shadow noise, and the base ISO for this function is 200. This certainly became a subject for one of our field tests, which follows.

Canon Software

Part of the fun and fulfillment of working digitally is the ability to nuance exposure and color options post-exposure. Canon supplies all the software you need to do just that, included in the price of the camera. The 14-bit images are quite rich with extended tones and color values. When transferred to Photoshop after some basic tweaks in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional this Canon raw file becomes a 16-bit TIFF. This yields a 57MB file (28.8MB at 8 bit) that can be used for a “straight” 13x19” print. This essentially mid-tone shot was modified for color and slight contrast increase.

In The Field
While the 40D feels a bit bulkier than comparable cameras in this class, you readily see that this is due to the larger monitor, a fair tradeoff, and something you’ll notice on all future models from all competitors who go the larger LCD route. But the controls have become modified so that access to all of its myriad functions and settings, especially those commonly used, and even Menu items, is much quicker and easier. One new addition is the Picture Style button, located along the base of the camera back. Rather than having to plow into the Menu every time you wanted to play with image attributes such as saturation and contrast, you merely push that button and the Picture Style Menu pops onto the screen. This is a big improvement.

You’ll recognize most of those Styles and you now have the ability to register three of them, dubbed User REF. 1-3 on the Menu after you do so. But you can in reality customize just about all the settings, from Standard through Portrait and Landscape. Once you choose the Picture Style you can add or subtract from the factory presets, thus have eight (plus Monochrome with all its variables) rather than the user-defined three. For example, I juiced up the saturation on Landscape mode, and just kept it that way. And, you can also create your own Style script by opening an image in raw using the supplied Utility (all the software required is free and supplied with the camera), making the changes you like and then “registering” them back into the camera. This can be done for one or many 40D cameras, which can be a boon to event and studio photographers alike. It expands the seemingly endless variations in the Picture Styles, but unfortunately you can’t do this in Monochrome. In essence, Picture Styles and the associated controls allow you to mix your own “film emulsions,” if you will, but to the nth degree. Don’t like the way red renders in a particular mode (even Standard)? Well, just modify the response as you will and upload it. Just as we can manipulate an exposed image in seemingly endless variations in Photoshop, we can now do so prior to capture to fit our own particular way of seeing.

Highlight Tone Priority

A new Custom Function is dubbed “Highlight Tone Priority” and addresses the bane of digital exposure—blown highlights. This is a pre-exposure choice, not post-exposure, and actually works quite well, but you have to notice the potential for the problem as you shoot. I tested this with various levels of exposure compensation and found that it indeed does suppress the highlight without affecting the other values too adversely. On the first shot in this set I exposed “normally” and the hull of the boat caused the highlight warning (clipping indicator) to flash on playback. I then enabled Highlight Tone Priority using the same exposure on the second shot and voilà, no clipping. There is, of course, a limit to this, and Canon tells us that some shadow noise will increase, but I didn’t notice that on this and other sets. (Exposure at ISO 100, f/22 at 160 sec.)