Frustrations with Canon's "Custom Settings" on Canon EOS R5

[pedz]

My question is if there is a way to configure the camera (change its settings) and then save the settings other than via the menu system on the camera itself?  I hoped that the EOS Utility could do it but I don't see a way to set the settings.  Perhaps there is a third party app?

C1-C3 don't "work for me" as the phrase goes.  For me, the root problem is I need way more than 3 settings AND the other major problem is that these are "modes" not groups of settings.  If C3 mode was saved while in manual mode, then program mode can not be switched to while in C3 mode and still keep all of the other settings from C3 mode.  The settings of program, manual, etc are one set of settings while the settings for C1, C2, and C3 each have the own complete set of settings.  With C1-C3 modes, you can change any particular settings except the shooting mode (i.e. from manual to program)

I thought I would use save and load files and use my SD card for what I'm thinking of as "groups of setting" but this is proving frustrating too.  Even "My Menu" changes when I load settings from a file.  That doesn't surprised me much but it did surprise me a bit.

I could, tediously, go through and create settings and save them to files being careful update each of these files when I made a "major" change such as adding a menu item to "My Menu" and I could do that via the camera's menu system but I was hoping for something that would more convenient.  Utopia would be an application that could translate the CSD to a text file and then another application that could translate the text file back into a CSD file.

Here is my problem: I shoot macro, wildlife, landscape, astrophotography, etc.  macro might be with a flash or not.  It might be hand held or not.  Wildlife is varied from super fast flying swallows to relatively static animal portraits.  Astrophotography has its own very different set of settings from the others.  

What I was hoping to achieve was not just one set for macro, one set for wildlife, etc but a saved settings file for macro with a flash, macro handheld, etc.  I suspect roughly 90% of the settings in the camera won't change or at least, I don't want them to change.  If I decide to add a menu item to "My Menu", I'd like that to propagate through to all of my saved settings files -- or at least, but fairly easy to update them all.

I'm interested in any ideas of techniques that others use in this area.

[p4pictures]

I understand your requirement and recently I saw that another photographer had found a workaround for having different modes within the same custom setting. The workaround is to start with Fv mode, then register the settings to the chosen custom mode. This means than C1 is now a copy Fv mode. Fv (flexible priority) mode can morph between P, Tv, Av and M modes depending on your choice to control and of shutter speed, ISO, aperture or exposure compensation. 

I often shoot manual exposure, and one of the aspects I like with regular M mode is that I have separate but consistently located controls for shutter speed, aperture, ISO. With Fv mode setup to operate like M I have to select the parameter I want to change with the main dial. 

[Waddizzle]

The custom shooting modes are “customizable preset” camera configurations, not a mechanism to remember your current camera settings.  That functionality is realized through saving the camera config to a memory card.

I, too, am not a fan of Fv model.  My muscle memory is built around the conventional shooting modes found on DSLRs.  Besides, I am shooting in M mode most 99.99% of the time.