Menu Position MENU --> 
2 --> Peaking Level
MENU --> 2 --> Peaking Color
What it Does Provides a GREAT visual Manual Focusing aid – things that are sharp will be highlighted in the color of your choice.
Recommended Setting Peaking Level: Mid / Peaking Color: Yellow
The two functions “Peaking Level” and “Peaking Color” make it significantly easier to focus critically than with using a camera with an optical viewfinder.
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Figure 7-13: The wonderfully useful Peaking Level function puts a splotch of color over things that are sharp when you’re focusing manually. Here you can see the slight differences between the function’s three settings: Low (left), Mid (middle), and High (right). |
What does it do? It highlights (via a color splotch) all the areas of the picture which are in focus RIGHT NOW. If you see a splotch on your subject in your chosen color, you know that part of your composition is sharp. (How does the camera know when something is in focus? Whenever there’s great contrast among adjacent pixels. This means that if the contrast is mild the peaking function may not show you any colors – even if it’s in proper focus. But don’t let that scare you off – try this feature, it’s quite useful.) Figure 7-13 shows an example of this feature in use. In this instance the peaking color is set to RED and you can see the minor differences between when the function is set to High, Mid, or Low.
There are two menu settings required to invoke this feature: The first is MENU --> 
2 --> Peaking Level --> [Choose from Low, Mid, High, or Off. (Off is the factory default.) Basically this setting dictates how thick the splotch of color is. I personally prefer “mid” myself.
The second menu setting is MENU --> 2 --> Peaking Color --> [Choose from Red, White, or Yellow]. Why would you choose one color over another? If you’re shooting a subject that’s red, then it’ll be hard to see the Peaking Level splotches if this function is set to “red”. (Kind of obvious.) I personally keep this set to yellow most of the time since that color is the easiest to see in most shooting situations. I’ll switch it to something else if there’s a conflict.
This Peaking Level feature is extremely handy when shooting movies in Manual Focusing mode. It is also very useful when combined with the DMF function as described earlier at the end of Section 2.2.
NEW FEATURE: Peaking Color is now available when manually focusing in movie mode! Woo hoo! |
