Interesting. I thought of CF as saving settings for different days shooting but it never occurred to me that cfs would be helpful as you describe. Thanks everyone for the great education.

Awesome shot and a clear reason for CF. Thanks.

Thanks Dave. I stumbled across a helpful, basic tutorial about my camera by B&H earlier today and they only touched on CF. That caused my curiosity. Before that, I never even gave CF a thought.
Thanks to all who have responded and have helped me try to understand. You've all been great!

Thanks Mac, that's getting me closer to understanding.

Thanks Dave.

I guess I'm being thick headed and I apologise. What I'm trying to understand is what info would be programmed in CF. Would it be lighting conditions, image size, white balance, shutter speed, iso, apeture, etc? If so, how would that be helpful. I can see, for example, if you were panning shots of a race care and you found a good shutter speed to save but I that scenario, what if your saved settings we're saved on a sunny day and the next time you shot race cars, it was cloudy? Would settings in CF still be helpful?

Sorry Dave, I have a Canon 7D. My question is not so much about equipment as to why someone would use custom functions. What would one save there and why given the ever changing shooting conditions. Are they primarily for studio work or am I missing out by not understanding their usefulness?

Thanks.

I think I see your point but it seems like it would be easier to learn the proper manual settings and use that knowledge while evaluating the scene than to try to remember what settings you have saved in custom functions.

I don't follow.

I don't know how other manual shooters do it but all of the adjustments are done in my head as I evaluate the scene as I prepare to shoot. I don't know what information I would save between shots. I suppose for a studio shoot it could be helpful though.

Thanks Bob.

Because I shoot almost exclusively in manual, I never really looked into custom functions. As virtually every scene is different, for what would one use custom functions?

Tiff and raw are "lossless" files, meaning all of the information is retained in the file. In jpeg, the camera or the editing software (in forget which) discards a lot of the similar or closely related information.

I've been shooting for a while but I'm a relative newbie when it comes to post. I always shoot raw on images that are important but jpeg for snapshots. Over the years I would process raw in Photoshop CS2 and save in raw and the snaps would be processed in Irfanview, saved as jpeg. Recently I've been saving and posting on Facebookin png from Irfanview because it seems smoother. Does this sound ok? I've been hearing a lot of other formats on the Hog and wondering if I'm missing out on something better? Are there any benefits of other formats that I'm missing? Storage space is not an issue.
givings
Larz