ACE Camera Photography Magazine, Sony Mavica Digital Camera Tips page 2

Sony Mavica Digital Camera Tips:
Configuring your settings

field and frame settings on the Mavica digital camera, Adobe Photoshop image editing

The field setting will get you greater contrast and what appears to be a sharper image. Watch lines at an angle as they will be pixelated. Frame smoothes everything out and gives you more to work with in Photoshop. You can always sharpen it with the "unsharp" mask.

Getting started.

There are a number of settings that you can configure on the camera. Starting with the options found in the "menu" section (use the black toggle switch on the back to navigate the options) you have "field/frame" and "quality" settings. From what I understand, loosely speaking the camera takes two shots within a short time span in "frame" mode and then averages the result out. "Field" on the other hand only takes one shot. So my rule of thumb is that for quality pictures I always use the "frame" setting and for action shots I use "field". A word of advice though: keep your camera very still because in "frame" mode the Mavica is very sensitive to camera shake.

For quality settings, I leave it set on "fine". Finally, you also have the environment settings which lighten or darken the overall picture. See the results below. A darker picture is not necessarily worse though-- it may in fact give you more to work with in Photoshop. The best is to experiment and see what works best for you.

cleaning up the colours

TIP #2: Select a proper environment setting
-1.5 EV	-1.0 EV	-0.5 EV
normal	+0.5 EV	+1.5 EV