How to Shoot "Professionally" with the Canon Powershot G10

At first, this short manual was intended for my friend Tania to whom I lent my Canon G10 for a trip to Europe. Then I decided that it might be interesting for the readers of this blog. It is not for advanced amateurs, but casual street shooters or tourists.

Why did I put "professionally" in quotation marks? Because it doesn't mean: "shoot like a pro", but "shoot in P-mode", which used to be called "program" and now is called "professional". I use P-mode for about 95% of my shooting with the G10 and get the best results with it.

Why Not the "Auto" Mode?

The G10 is a fine camera that in most cases can produce acceptable results in fully automatic mode, but it can't think for you and sometimes makes mistakes. It also has some drawbacks inherent to all compact point & shoot cameras, the most serious being low dynamic range and poor image quality at high ISO. To work around these drawbacks and correct camera's mistakes, manual adjustments are required that can easily be done in P-mode.

The following are a few simple tips that allow you to greatly improve your image quality in comparison with fully automatic shooting:

• Shoot in P (Professional) mode.
• Adjust exposure carefully, avoid highlight clipping, use exposure compensation.
• Check exposure and focus after taking every picture. Reshoot if necessary.
• Keep ISO sensitivity at minimum
• Use proper white balance and colour settings.

These tips are explained in detail below.

All this can be applied to Canon G11 as well, except it has better high ISO performance.

All photos of the camera and screenshots © Dpreview.com.
Sample images taken by Tania and me.

How to Shoot "Professionally" with the Canon Powershot G10. – Part II.

Getting Right Exposure

These are my usual settings for outdoor shooting at daytime: P-mode, ISO 80 and exposure compensation -2/3 EV.

Why do you need exposure compensation? The camera has low dynamic range – it means it has problems with high contrast scenes containing both very dark and light areas. Automatic exposure is often calculated incorrectly, and the camera tends to overexpose. In these cases some lighter areas turn out completely white (highlight clipping). You can recover shadow details later in post-processing (though with some graininess and discoloration), but details in white areas are lost permanently and cannot be recovered. If important parts of the scene are clipped, manual exposure compensation is required. Fortunately, the G10 has the dedicated exposure compensation dial on top left of the camera that allows easy adjustments without going to menu. As a rule I set it to -1/3 or -2/3 for outdoor shooting to avoid highlight clipping.

In some cases positive compensation is required. For example, shooting a winter landscape with lots of snow requires exposure compensation about +1 or more. Otherwise it would turn out dark and gray.

When shooting against the light, flash can greatly improve the exposure. Even in bright sunlight use flash to fill shadows and make your photos less contrasty and more pleasing.

You can adjust exposure before taking the picture judging by the screen, but the good idea is to check it afterward, too. After taking a picture, press DISPLAY button to review it. The G10 has 3 review modes that can be switched in cycle by pressing DISPLAY. The first mode is full screen image review, the second shows the little image along with technical information like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, etc. In this mode overexposed (clipped) parts of the image are blinking.


Below the image the histogram is located. It shows distribution of pixel brightness between black (left edge) and white (right edge). It is OK to have lots of black in night shots, but for properly exposed day shots brightness is distributed evenly across the histogram with blacks and whites close to zero.


The third review mode is called Focus Check. A small portion of the image is magnified, and you can navigate across the frame using direction buttons to check focus of different areas.


It is a good habit to check exposure, histogram and focus after each shooting. If any important details of the image are clipped or blurry, delete and reshoot it.

Sometimes clipping cannot be avoided for very contrasty scenes. Try to keep main parts of the image exposed properly and sacrifice insignificant parts. If necessary, shoot several times with different exposure compensation.

In some cases i-contrast can help, but I prefer to avoid it as it makes photos look artificial.

How to Shoot "Professionally" with the Canon Powershot G10 – Part III.

Keeping Minimum ISO

The lower is ISO sensitivity the better is image quality. The G10 produces best quality images at ISO 80-100, good at 200 and acceptable at 400. Increasing ISO introduces digital noise (grain), reduces image sharpness and colour saturation. I don't recommend using ISO 800 and 1600 for colour shooting.


When shooting outdoors during daylight, set ISO to 80. Switch to a higher ISO only if it is getting darker and your images are getting blurry. Keep the image stabilization always on. It reduces camera shake and allows taking sharp photos at shutter speeds as slow as 1/15 or even 1/8 sec. When shooting at dusk or indoors, Auto ISO works fine.


To keep minimum ISO, use a tripod or flash. A mini-tripod is very useful for a tourist. It is light, fits in your coat pocket and can be put on any flat surface like a table or bench.

When shooting with a tripod, use minimum ISO. Pressing the shutter button can introduce camera shake, so it is a good idea to use a delay. Press this button and select 2 sec. delay, it would be enough.


If you purchase the optional Canon RS-60E3 remote release, you can shoot without a delay.

The G10's built-in flash is very powerful, and can be used not only for portrait and interior shots, but outdoors as well. It can produce interesting creative effects. Here are the examples of the same scene shot with and without flash.

Use HI ISO only if it is too dark, and you can use neither tripod nor flash.


The left shot of the clock tower was taken at Auto ISO and 1/60 sec. (too dark); the middle one at Auto ISO and 0.8 sec (too blurry); and the right one at ISO 1600, 1/30 sec. It is properly exposed and not blurry, but look at the 100% crop below!



You wouldn't want such a quality for your colour pictures, however black & white ones can turn out good. Here are a couple of examples taken at ISO 800 (top) and 1600 (bottom):





Click to enlarge.

How to Shoot "Professionally" with the Canon Powershot G10. – Part IV.

White Balance and Custom Colours

You can't go wrong using Auto White Balance (AWB) most of the time, however, using appropriate white balance presets can improve colour accuracy. Considering weather conditions of Western European winter, the most suitable would be Cloudy. It can also be used under sunlight to make pictures warmer.

It is subjective, but I think that default colours of the G10 are too dull, and default sharpening is too high. Combined with automatic noise reduction it makes small details and sharp edges look coarse and introduces sharpening halos, which are ugly and difficult to get rid of. Here are 100% crops taken at default sharpening:


To fix this I created the Custom Colour setting with sharpening set to -2 and saturation to +2. Here is an example:


Colour modes also can be selected by pressing FUNC button. You may experiment with different mode (black & white, sepia, etc.) but after that I recommend switching back to the Custom Colour.

The Canon G11 review

The review of the Canon Powershot G11 is finally up: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canong11

It confirms what I suspected: the G11's high ISO quality isn't dramatically better than G10's. The difference is about one stop and it is achieved by more aggressive noise reduction rather than by better sensor quality. If you shoot RAW with both cameras, run the photos through the same noise reduction program and downsize the G10's photos to 10 MP you wouldn't see much difference. However, at low ISOs the G10 has visible resolution advantage. I still think producing a camera with G10-like sensor and articulated screen makes sense. Well, until more micro 4/3 cameras come out and their prices start to drop. Notice how much better the Panasonic GF1 is in terms of image quality! Of course, it HAS TO BE given the 2X price difference, but I'm sure in the next couple of years the m4/3 cameras will kill the G series, unless Canon puts a much larger sensor in it.

Elton John's Boots

Shot at the Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto. Click to enlarge.

Canon Powershot G10

The Canon G10 vs Medium Format Film

Michael Reichmann of luminous-landscape.com compared picture quality of the Canon Powershot G10 with that of Digital Hasselblad and found them very similar on print. Since I don't have a Digital Hasselblad yet, let me show you a little non-scientific comparison between pictures of my G10 and Mamiya 645 film camera with 80mm f/1.9 lens. The film was Fuji Reala scanned with the Epson V700, resized and cropped to match the G10's images.

Canon 1:



Mamiya 1:




Canon 2:



Mamiya 2:



Click to see full resolution images on Flickr.com

As you can see both cameras can resolve similar amount of detail. Mamiya's images look overall better, but don't forget: we are comparing an average consumer grade zoom with one of the best manual prime lenses made by Mamiya.

However, the most obvious difference is in dynamic range. The film got more shadow details on the first photo and beautifully captured all subtle gradations of the overcast sky on the second one, while the G10 blew out the sky completely (I added the blue fill later in Photoshop).

Even though top models of compact cameras are getting close to medium format in resolution, they still have a long way to go before they can match the dynamic range of film.

Autumn Lake

Click to enlarge.

Canon Powershot G10

Boat

Click to enlarge.

Canon Powershot G10

Canon G10 with a flip-out screen?

As I have written already, the most significant improvement of the G11 over G10 is the flip-out screen giving a photographer much more creative flexibility. However, not everyone would want to trade it for 4.7 megapixels, especially landscape shooters who appreciate every extra pixel under good light and don't care much about low light performance, which, however good, still sucks in comparison with a DSLR. Not to mention 10 years of "the more megapixels the better" propaganda has taken its effect that cannot be undone overnight.

I think Canon should make something like Powershot G10 Mark II with flip-out screen and the same 14.7MP sensor. No doubt, it would be a great hit!