[...] Perhaps I'm mistaken but I think ETC mode is ONLY available in video mode, anyway. There is no ETC mode for stills.
There is, in Panasonic cameras, a feature called "ETC".It works the same way (or the same sort of way) for video
and stills.In both cases, a crop of the relevant part of the sensor is made, and the result is as if the whole sensor was that.
The reason why it is widely discussed for video and not for stills, is that the feature is extremely useful for video. The image is clean as if we had only that part of the sensor, no resampling, as shown in the mentioned Luminous Landscape article.
For stills, it is kind of pointless, though in some circumstances it can be useful. The fact is that, it you are using JPEGs OoC, then what you get is a crop of the final image, very much like you would cropping it in the computer. Where it sometimes gets very useful is when the cropped out part would influence a lot the camera parameters. For example, cropping out a large area of sky in ETC frees the exposure of all that possible unused area, and that can change exposure
a lot! For some, it is claimed, it helps to concentrate on the important part of the image: the part that is selected.
If working in raw, or raw + JPEG, I think that it is better to do the cropping in pp, even from the composition point of view.
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Antonio
Gosto de Fotografia há mais de 40 anos. Comecei com uma Zeiss Ikon Ikoflex, comprada com o primeiro dinheiro que ganhei (ao terminar o Liceu). Depois, as SLR: Praktica, Pentax SP 1000, Olympus, Canon EOS 500 (e várias compactas). Entrei no digital com uma Olympus C2100uz, e depois voltei à...
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