K20d settings

Hi everyone!
I know they are on personal preferences, but any setting (saturation, etc.) recommended to improve IQ on a k20d?

I found some regarding k200d (reduce saturation)

thank you

If you shoot in RAW those won't matter.
If you shoot in JPG and it means you doing less PP then yes it does improve IQ but only because you don't downgrade your photo when saturating the photo in photoshop.
Beside that I can't see why desaturation will improve IQ TBH.

My advice would be as Stefan says to shoot RAW

You can then play about almost to your heart's content

For sure it would be better, but I'm afraid that work on every photo will take a lot of time...
To start with, I should do a proper monitor calibration, and so on

what I'm doing now is only rotate,crop and use automatic exposure and colour.

If you're new to this, you,ve enough to elearn without adding RAW capture to the list. Stick with JPEG at the highest quality setting.

As regards other settings, centre spot focusing, maybe sharpness +1 if you like very sharp images, but it's all very much to taste. I'd go with the defaults for a while and see how it goes before making changes that might not suit your own vision of your photography.

Hi Max,
if you are playing with exposure and colour in Jpeg ideally you would want to calibrate your monitor anyway.
With regard to RAW, I think you would find that with a good RAW converter it can be a pretty quick process

I'm with Greytop here aswell.
You don't need to change your work flow as it is now with RAW, atleast if you've a program that support it.

I do the most things you do but then with RAW, crop, rotate, exposure, white balance and if needed, sharpening and noise reduction.
Nothing special that you shouldn't do I believe.
The greatest thing is that you can do most of these adjustments without any lost in image quality.

Of course if your JPG is good straight out of the camera then yes compared to that RAW is time comsuming but not if you do post processing with JPG.

Most RAW converters have a trial version so try them out I would say and see if it makes a difference. You can shoot JPG and RAW at the same time so you have nothing to lose.

Thank you guys

The fact is that there are so many things to learn and would prefer to avoid to add the raw matter at the moment.

Anyway, which software are you using and can suggest?

As to the settings, I'll try the ones suggested: I like sharper images, but let's see how it is
(by the way I confused the center Focusing with the centre spot metering, so I was shooting with the last one: result was that often they were under exposed for my liking)
(by the way2=OT2 : I'm struggling to understand the _practical_ usefulness of the AF and AE-L lock: can't I have the same result pressing half-way the shutter button?)

Some people like to remove the AF from the shutter button half-press. They use the AF button to auto-focus, and know that the shutter button wont interfere with the chosen focus.

The AE-L lock is very useful. Lets say you have a lot of sky in your image. If you let the meter do it's thing normally you will probably have an underexposed subject (foreground). By pointing the camera down so you have very little sky and then pressing AE-L you lock the meter reading. It wont change as you move the camera back up to frame the picture. The subject will be then perfectly exposed. This is especially useful if you are using spot metering.

Max it depends on what programs you're used to work with, if you've photoshop you have ACR in that so no need to buy one or get lightroom that works really well. Silkypix is a very good program for that money but I'm used to Adobe so couldn't get my head around it.
I believe that free programs as picasa also can work with RAW not sure though.

Spot meting only meters a very small part of the photo so yes the rest of the photo the exposure might be off but that small part should be correctly exposured. My spot meter is coupled with the focus point so where ever I focus only that part it meters.

The AF and AE-L lock, Peter already explained AE but yes I also don't see the point in combining AF with EA-L lock.

My favorite at the moment is Silkypix Studio 3.0, but it is not free.

If you are a PC user, you might like to look at

http://www.rawtherapee.com/

It is currently free and does a fine job of processing RAW images...

If nothing else it is a great learning tool on RAW development. And the final image is very good.

Dick

My favourite.... CaptureOne 4 Pro and as rlebleu says Rawtherapee is really rather good considering it's donation-ware

Thank you for your clear explanations and software suggestions!

I too would like sharp shots but after over a year with the K20, most of my shots are a little soft. I have seen some really nice sharp shots on this forum that are spectacular but mine are not. I normally use raw plus jpeg and play with the raw shots in elements 7 but when I attempt to sharpen up the shots they end up grainy or with hallows. I have updated my kit lensese to the 55-300 and 16-45 and have been using a tripod in an attempt to get better results but withour sucsess. I am a novice and would like some good jpeg settings from experienced users that will give me sharp shots and when I can get this right, I can then play with the Raw in elements 7.