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Published:
July 25, 2016

Canon EOS 80D For Dummies

Overview

Take professional-quality photos with your Canon EOS 80D

Your Canon EOS 80D gives you pro-level photo power. All you need is some know-how about your camera's capabilities and a little experience to start capturing brag-worthy photos—and the expert tips and tricks inside get you there in a flash. Essentially a photography class in a book, Canon EOS 80D For Dummies offers plain-English explanations of your camera's settings, how to shoot in auto mode, ways to get creative with exposure settings, ideas for getting artistic, and so much more.

Complemented with inspiring full-color examples and simple photo 'recipes' for getting better portraits and close-up images, this hands-on guide covers the gamut of how to use your Canon

EOS 80D like the pros. In no time, you'll get up to speed on making sense of your camera's menus and functions, capturing first shots in auto mode, adjusting exposure settings, taking control of focus and color, shooting action shots, sharing your photos, and everything else in between.

  • Gain photography skills while learning your camera's controls
  • Build the confidence to apply pro techniques when you shoot
  • Follow simple steps for better portraits and action shots
  • Customize your Canon EOS 80D

Written with hobbyists and inexperienced photographers in mind, this no-nonsense guide shows you how to capture must-have images you'll be proud to add to your personal or professional portfolio.

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About The Author

Julie Adair King is a veteran digital photography educator. Her best selling books include Digital Photography For Dummies and thirty titles on Canon and Nikon cameras.
Robert Correll is a digital media expert who authored Digital SLR Photography All-in-One For Dummies.

Sample Chapters

canon eos 80d for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Your Canon 80D camera has so many features that it can be difficult to remember what each control does. To help you sort things out, study this handy reference to your Canon camera's external controls and exposure modes. Print out this guide, tuck it in your camera bag, and get a head start on taking great photographs!

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One of the many advantages of investing in the 80D is that you can customize its performance to suit the way you like to shoot. As you might expect, the majority of the basic operational options live on the Setup menus. At the risk of being conventional, start your camera customization by opening Setup Menu 1.
The EOS 80D has so many features to offer, but first you need to set up your camera. The beauty of this sophisticated Canon is that you can set it up to function based on your preferences. Setup Menu 2 offers these options: Auto Power Off: To help save battery power, your camera automatically powers down after a certain period of inactivity.
Most of the basic operational options live on the Setup menus of your Canon EOS 80D. Once you have completed the first two setup menus, you will find Setup Menu 3. Continuing to Setup Menu 3, you find the following goodies. Head to Setup Menu 3 to display battery info. Video System: This option is related to viewing your images and movies on a television.
Setup Menu 4 on your EOS 80D contains the following offerings. But note that you get access to all the menu items only when the Mode dial is set to one of the advanced exposure modes (P, Tv, Av, M, B, C1, or C2). You can set the camera back to its default settings by choosing Clear All Camera Settings on Setup Menu 4.
Your Canon 80D camera has so many features that it can be difficult to remember what each control does. To help you sort things out, study this handy reference to your Canon camera's external controls and exposure modes. Print out this guide, tuck it in your camera bag, and get a head start on taking great photographs!
Creating video snapshots and time lapse movies aren’t exactly must-know features, but they are fun to try out. Your EOS 80D offers two “rainy-day worthy” features that are both located in Shooting Menu 5 (Movie). They are: Video Snapshot: This feature on Shooting Menu 5 (Movie) captures short video clips that are stitched into a single recording, called a video album.
After you set the Live View switch to the Movie position on your EOS 80D, you can display critical recording settings on the monitor. If you don’t see the same data, press the Info button to cycle through different display styles. The image below shows the screen as it appears when you shoot in the P exposure mode; the data varies slightly depending on your exposure mode.
The Image Quality setting on your EOS 80D determines both the image resolution and file format of the pictures you shoot. To access the control, you can go two routes: Quick Control screen: In the advanced exposure modes, you can choose the option via the Quick Control screen. To do so, select the Image Quality option.
Your EOS 80D enables you to connect via a wireless network to various devices for picture sharing, printing, and downloading. To try out these features, visit Setup Menu 1 and select Wireless Communication Settings, as shown on the left. Make sure the Wi-Fi/NFC option is set to Enable, as shown in the center. Next, choose the Wi-Fi Function menu option to launch the screen shown on the right, which is the starting point for all the Wi-Fi functions.
Your Canon EOS 80D offers the following exposure modes, which you select via the Mode dial on top of the camera. The shooting mode determines how much control you have over exposure, ISO, and aperture. (Modes described as automatic scene modes in the table offer fully automatic photography, but some let you alter color and exposure slightly through the Shoot by Ambience and Shoot by Lighting or Scene Type features.
In addition to telling you EOS 80D where you want it to set focus, you can control how and when focus is set by selecting one of the following AF operation modes: One Shot: This mode, geared to shooting stationary subjects, locks focus when you press and hold the shutter button halfway down. This setting is used for all scene modes except Sports.
By default, your EOS 80D captures JPEG images using the sRGB color space, which refers to an industry-standard spectrum of colors. (The s is for standard, and the RGB is for red, green, blue, which are the primary colors in the digital color world.)The sRGB color space was created to help ensure color consistency as an image moves from camera or scanner to monitor and printer; the idea was to create a spectrum of colors that all devices can reproduce.
Your Canon EOS 80D gives you a couple of options for dealing with noise. Noise, the defect that gives your pictures a speckled look, can occur for two reasons: a long exposure time and a high ISO setting. Your camera offers two noise-removal filters, one to address each cause of noise. However, you can control whether and how they’re applied only in the advanced exposure modes; in other modes, the camera makes the call for you.
The Shoot by Lighting/Scene Type option on your EOS 80D might be better named “Eliminate Color Cast” because that’s what it’s designed to do: remove unwanted color casts that can occur when the camera makes a white balance misstep. In short, white balancing has to do with the fact that every light source emits its own color cast — candlelight, a warm hue; flash, a slightly cool hue, and so on.
When a scene you’ve snapped on your EOS 80D contains both very dark and very bright areas, achieving a good exposure can be difficult. If you choose exposure settings that render the shadows properly, the highlights are often overexposed, and if you go the other direction, you lose detail in the shadows. Your camera offers three tools to try in this situation: HDR Backlight Control mode: This mode, which you access through the SCN setting on the Mode dial, captures three images at different exposures and blends them for a final result that contains a greater tonal range (range of shadows to highlights) than can be captured in a single frame.
In dim lighting, the autofocus points that are used to establish focus flash red in the viewfinder of your EOS 80D when you initiate autofocusing. If you find them distracting, you can turn them off; if you instead want them to appear even in bright light, you can make it so. The control that adjusts this behavior is VF Display Illumination, which is Custom Function 15 in the Autofocus section.
In the Face+Tracking mode, which is the default for both still photography and movie recording on your EOS 80D, the camera searches for faces in the frame. If it finds one, it displays a white focus frame over the face, as shown on the.In a group shot where more than one face is recognized by the camera, you see arrows on either side of the focus frame.
By default, the FlexiZone-Multi Autofocusing mode on your EOS 80D is based on focus points spread throughout the area indicated by the framing marks.In the fully automated exposure modes, you don’t have any control over which points the camera uses to establish focus. Typically, focus is set on the object closest to the camera.
FlexiZone-Single AF mode lets you select a specific autofocus point on your EOS 80D. You see a single, small focus frame at the center of the screen, as shown on the left. The image shows how the frame looks in Live View mode; in Movie mode, it’s a little larger. Either way, the next step is to move the frame over your subject.
Digital zoom enables you to capture a movie using a smaller area of the image sensor on your EOS 80D than normal. The result is a movie that gives you a smaller angle of view, as if you zoomed to a longer focal length to record the scene — or, to put it another way, as if you shot the movie using the whole sensor and then cropped away the perimeter of each frame.
Your EOS 80D lets you play around a little with color, sharpness, contrast, and exposure in certain scene modes. The Shoot by Ambience mode can be fun for a little experimentation.The Picture Style feature enables you to choose how the camera “processes” your original picture data when you use one of the JPEG Image Quality settings.
The Shooting Information display mode on your EOS 80D presents a thumbnail of your image along with scads of shooting data. You also see a Brightness histogram — the chart-like thingy on the top right of the screen. (Remember, just press the Info button to cycle through the display modes to see this one.)How much data you see, though, depends on the exposure mode you used to take the picture.
Here’s a neat Live View photography feature to try on your EOS 80D: When touchscreen operation is enabled, you can tap the monitor to set focus and trigger the shutter release. Follow these steps: Enable the Touch Control option on Setup Menu 3. You can select Standard or Sensitive as the menu option; your choice determines how firm of a touch you need to use to get the touchscreen to respond.
Here’s a cool focusing feature on your EOS 80D not available during viewfinder photography: You can magnify the Live View display to ensure that focus is accurate. This trick works during manual focusing or in any AF mode except Face+Tracking mode. Follow these steps: Press the AF Point Selection button or tap the Zoom icon in the lower right of the screen.
Canon provides you with several photo programs, which are available for download from the Canon website. Just select your country and then enter EOS 80D in the model name prompt on the next page. Click the Drivers & Downloads link and then find the software you want to install for your system.Currently, Canon recommends downloading the EOS Digital Solution Disk Software, which has some cool extras like a lens registration tool.
By using the Copyright Information feature on Setup Menu 4 of your EOS 80D, you can add copyright information to the image metadata (extra data) recorded with the image file. You can view metadata in the Canon software.This feature isn’t available in the fully automatic shooting modes. So set the Mode dial to P, Tv, Av, M, B, C1, or C2 and then select Copyright Information from Setup Menu 4 to display the screen shown on the left.
Here's an overview of the buttons, dials, and other external controls on your Canon EOS 80D camera. The lens shown in the following figures is the Canon EF-S 18–55mm IS (Image Stabilization) II model sold with the camera; other lenses may vary.
If you’re nervous about pressing the shutter halfway on your EOS 80D for fear that you’ll accidentally take a photo, you might want to acquaint yourself with the AF-ON button. In the advanced exposure modes (P, Tv, Av, M, B, C1, and C2), you can hold down this button to accomplish the same goal as pressing the shutter button halfway.
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