Menu Position MENU --> 
7 --> Soft Skin Effect
What it Does Removes wrinkles and blemishes under certain circumstances.
Recommended Setting: It depends on the age of your subject. :-)
Menu Position MENU --> 7 --> Soft Skin Effect
What it Does Removes wrinkles and blemishes under certain circumstances.
Recommended Setting: It depends on the age of your subject. :-)
This feature is designed to give your subject smoother skin when in fact they have “wrinkles and blemishes”. It’s hard to see its effects unless you happen to have a blemish-ridden subject, but it does do a pretty good job of getting rid of zits without requiring Photoshop.
TIP: Like many of the processing-intensive features of this camera, the Soft Skin mode can’t be used when in any kind of continuous shooting mode or bracketing mode, movie mode, panorama mode, etc. Only modes which take one picture at a time. (It doesn’t work in RAW mode, either.) |
When enabling the function, you can use the Left and Right cursor keys to choose between Lo, Mid, and Hi intensity.
I had a hard time finding a subject on which this feature made a difference. According to Sony’s press release, the effect “removes or reduces blemishes and smooths skin texture. It also maintains sharpness in higher contrast areas, like eyes and mouth.” Figure 6-77 shows an example (you may have to zoom in a little to see the differences, but they are there!)
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Figure 6-77: The effects of the soft-skin feature can’t really be seen unless you have access to a blemish-ridden teenager. But it does do a good job of smoothing the skin for the rest of us, too. |
Menu Position MENU --> 
7 --> Auto Object Framing
What it Does Gives the camera permission to analyze the picture you just shot and then save a 2nd version – one where the image is cropped so the subject is placed according to the Rule of Thirds.
Recommended Setting: On if you want to have a laugh. (Then turn it OFF and keep it there. :-) )
This function can be useful if you’re handing your camera to a stranger and saying “Please take a picture of me!” You already know they will do a miserable job of composition. This feature might give you a more palatable version of their bad shot.
This feature determines the subject for you and then crops your image so the subject appears according to the “Rule of Thirds” (Section A.10). In experimenting with this, I was often surprised by the framing the camera chose, cropping in close on faces, or changing the format from landscape to portrait (or the other way round).
Figure 6-78: Auto Object Framing. If it recognizes a face, the image will be cropped so the face appears according to the rule of thirds. The feature has been expanded to behave the same way for ANY object. |
You probably guessed by now that I don’t care much for this feature. I’m not much for throwing pixels away in the camera when I can crop it later in my computer. Besides, I expect that if you can remember how to turn on this feature in your camera’s menu, then you can probably remember the “rule of thirds” composition rule that Auto Object Framing applies, and frame your picture to your own liking. :-)
It’s worth noting that you can only use Auto Object Framing if the Drive Mode is set to “Single Shooting” AND the Autofocus Area is set to “Wide”. When this feature is invoked, “Continuous Shooting” to capture multiple frames is greyed out on the function menu.
