Canon® EOS Digital Rebel XSi/450D For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Manipulating Focus and Color

In This Chapter

• Controlling the camera's autofocusing performance

• Choosing an autofocus mode

• Autofocusing in Live View mode

• Understanding focal lengths, depth of field, and other focus factors

• Exploring white balance and its affect on color

• Stretching your color palette with Adobe RGB

• Tweaking color and sharpening via Picture Styles

To many people, the word focus has just one interpretation when applied to a photograph: Either the subject is in focus or it's blurry. And it's true, this characteristic of your photographs is an important one. There's not much to appreciate about an image that's so blurry that you can't make out whether you're looking at Peru or Peoria.

But an artful photographer knows that there's more to focus than simply getting a sharp image of a subject. You also need to consider depth of field, or the distance over which objects remain sharply focused. This chapter explains all the ways to control depth of field and also discusses how to use your Canon's advanced autofocus options.

In addition, this chapter dives into the topic of color, explaining such concepts as white balancing, which compensates for the varying color casts created by different light sources, and color space, which determines the spectrum of colors your camera can capture. Finally, a section near the end of the chapter introduces you to Picture Styles, which enable ...