Crop and colour with your canon

VIEW THE VIDEO We continue our camera setup guide by showing you how to customize aspect ratio and colour space

Changing some of your Canon’s default menu settings can help avoid post-production tinkering. For example, you can change the shape of images to save time cropping later.

By default, your Canon captures shots with a 3:2 aspect ratio. This is the shape you see through the viewfinder that creates a landscape- or portrait-oriented photo that fits in a typical picture frame. However, you may want to share your shots digitally, on a widescreen TV, for example. This has an aspect ratio of 16:9, so a default 3:2 photo will be framed by black bars at either side when viewed on-screen (these bars are referred to as ‘letterboxing’). To create widescreen-friendly photos you could crop the default 3:2 images in Canon’s free Digital Photo Professional software to a 16:9 ratio, but this would be a time-consuming task when processing a batch of shots. Fortunately you can change your Canon’s default 3:2 shape to other aspect ratios, including 16:9, so that the cropping is done in-camera as you take the shot.