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Now, I've gone over some of the technical theories to allow you to understand the basics of how all digital cameras work and the difference between expensive and lesser expensive digital cameras, but let's take a look now at what all this means in practical terms. When you buy your digital camera and you want to set it up to take advantage of all this vast knowledge. Let's take some time to review, though, our basic concepts in order to establish our premise for going forward with our camera settings and, as we know, resolution equals the number of photons available on the sensor to gather light, and of course the larger the sensor the more light information that's gathered. And we also know that this light is then converted into digital signals by the AB Converter. Now, since the goal is to capture the largest amount of light information that the camera can gather the more light information converted into digital signals, it stands to reason the larger the digital files will be. So, to summarize: the more light information the greater the amount of digital information, and therefore, the larger the digital files will be. Now this will be your premise moving forward and getting the most out of your camera for the highest possible quality image that it can generate. Let's move now and take a look at an actual owner's manual for a typical digital camera, a compact digital camera, in the 150 dollar range, and we'll look at this particular manual and it should look familiar to you because this is what is included in just about every owner's manual and you'll see a section there called the FUNC, or Function Menu, and this is one of the things that you should pay close attention to when you're setting up your camera. Exposure compensation should be set at zero. Long shutter mode, ignore that. White balance is an important area so let's go to that page and take a look at the information that's there so that when you encounter it in your own manual, you'll know how to set it. Now, you'll notice a number of settings here called Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Tungsten, and so on. Ninety-nine percent of your shooting situations will be served very well with the AWB setting, which is known, of course, as Automatic White Balance. The cameras do a wonderful job of adjusting white balance for the proper skin tones and the proper accurate color information of the scene that you're taking a picture of. However, if you're shooting in bright sunlight you might switch your white balance setting to the Daylight setting. It'll give you a slightly better result. Also for cloudy. If it's a cloudy day, you're shooting outside, set your white balance to Cloudy and you'll get a slightly better result. But in any outdoor shooting situation the Auto White Balance should do a very, very good job of making sure your colors are accurate when they come into the camera. Now when it comes to Tungsten, which are incandescent bulbs, fluorescent lighting and fluorescent H lighting, just use the Automatic setting. The camera will do a wonderful job in switching and making sure that the colors are balanced when they come into the camera. In addition, when you're in Tungsten lighting environments anyway you're going to be using the flash most of the time and the camera already knows how to set itself for the flash situation. Custom, ignore that. That's a higher-level function that most digital camera owners in the 150 dollar price range really do not understand fully how to set. This is a very complicated thing to do. I don't even know why it's included in most digital cameras in this price range, but let's take a look now at another topic in the Function Menu and that is Compression. We'll go to that page and talk about why you need to know about compression. And you'll notice here a very, very small section, doesn't have a lot of information but it is very important to pay attention to, and you want to set your compression at Super Fine. Not Fine or Normal, but you want to set that at Superfine, which means that all the resolution off that sensor is coming into the digital file and therefore into your print when you go to print this out, so it's high quality, super fine, compression. And of course the next thing we need to look at is the recording pixels section, and this is where all of our information will come together to mean something to you, and you will see this graphic in every owner's manual of every digital camera. Now there are settings for Large, Medium 1, Medium 2, Medium 3, or Small, certainly Large, Medium, and Small in every digital camera, and you want to set your camera on the Large setting; that's going to give you the largest file size and as we know, the larger the file size the more color or light information that's available in the image, which means a higher quality image. See how all this comes together? Now the Medium settings decline in final size all the way down to .3 megapixels, and this is going to result in a very, very inferior image. So again, large sizes. Now, let's go to the last setting, which is going to be the ISO setting, and the ISO setting is a description of the camera's sensitivity to light, and you always want the camera to be set at 80 or 100, and certainly no more than 200 ISO. Do not Ð I repeat Ð do not set your camera on the ISO Auto setting if you can get around it. Some digital cameras will switch to Auto automatically and there's no getting around it. So when you shop for a digital camera make sure you know that you can manually set the ISO setting and leave it there at either 80 or 100 and certainly not higher than 200 ISO because that means that you'll get the least amount of noise out of your image, okay? Follow these settings on your digital camera when you set it up and you'll get very, very good results out of the money that you spent for your equipment.