12 Things You Didn't Know Your DSLR Could Do

Your digital SLR (even if it’s a budget “entry-level” model) is a picture-making powerhouse. And sure, you know all about the still and video capture, burst shooting, tracking autofocus, and smart metering.

But your camera likely has additional capabilities you may not know about—features that can improve your photos and make for a more enjoyable shooting experience. You may be surprised at the clever elves lurking in your camera body.

Now for our standard weasel words: Not every camera will have all of these tricks onboard, and older models will have fewer of them than newer models. The best way to find out the deep capabilities of your camera is to read the instruction manual—backwards. Some of the most interesting stuff gets buried in appendixes or custom-function tables in the back of the book. Also read the manuals for any software included with your DSLR: Some features end up there instead of the camera manual. Happy hunting!

1. Keep the horizon horizontal with an in-camera leveling guide.

When a perfectly level horizon line is crucial to the success of your landscape, or you don't want to take your eye off the viewfinder, or you handhold your camera, a built-in electronic level rules. The leveling guide on the Nikon D3s, shown here, can be super-imposed in live view.

Even experienced landscape photographers occasionally find their horizons tilting in shots, especially when the actual horizon is uneven to begin with. Ditto for architectural shots. And while you can always straighten things out later in image editing, you will lose some of the frame edges when doing so. Enter the in-camera level, which has a great advantage over tripod and hot-shoe levels: You can see the indicator in the viewfinder, allowing you to compose and level simultaneously.

Some cameras also have a level for the pitch axis (up/down tilt). This proves useful for squaring the camera with buildings or other structures, thus avoid keystoning (also called toppling perspective).

Tip: We’ve found in-camera levels particularly useful for handheld shooting. Photographers take plenty of landscape and cityscape pictures without a tripod, after all, and these are the shots that most often end up tilted—particularly the verticals. The in-camera level lets you get it right with very little fuss.

2. Go from RAW to cooked with in-the-camera processing.
You don’t need image-editing programs to process RAW files if you have one of the many DSLRs that allow RAW-to-JPEG conversion, with image editing, right in the camera. (Most current Canon, Nikon, Olympus, and Pentax models have this ability.) Before your conversion, you can make many standard image edits, such as white balance, highlight and shadow adjustment, saturation, contrast, cropping, JPEG profile, and so on.

Cameras increasingly allow for more elaborate fixes and modifications, too, such the miniature effect or perspective correction in shots of buildings. The great part is that the processing leaves the RAW file untouched, so you can make multiple versions of the same image.

Tip: Want to travel light for a day or weekend trip? Leave the notebook computer at home and take some extra memory cards. Shoot in RAW, and convert your favorite shots during down time or while on the plane/train/bus.{C}{C}{C}{C}