10 Step RAW Editing / One Image from Start to Finish / Capture One

in this video we're going to edit a digital raw image from start to finish we'll begin with this and we'll finish with this stick around how's it going everyone always a pleasure to see you a couple of important points before we uh start the edit the first thing i want to mention is that everything that i'm going to do today will be in capture one now if you happen to use adobe lightroom don't worry because all of the tools and techniques that i'll be demonstrating in capture one are applicable to adobe lightroom as well they just may be labeled something different they may be called something different or look a little bit different in the lightroom interface but by and large everything you see here is available in lightroom as well second thing this video is not about how to get a particular style or look but rather to stress the importance of following a framework of having some type of outline and structure in your raw processing workflow because to be totally honest i had no structure um you know a number of years ago back when i you know first started editing raw images i would just jump in and move a bunch of sliders around and kind of hope for the best but the thing that i learned over time the thing that i really began to appreciate was the importance of having some structure of knowing not just where to start and what to do next but what order you should be editing in you know when all the world's your oyster when you have so many options available to you where do you start right i mean because you want to be progressively enhancing your image you want to build a strong foundation first and then be building layers and levels on top of that so what i hope to do in this video is to stress the importance of that and to demonstrate for you um how it works and to demonstrate for you how i do it in the hopes that perhaps you will find inspiration in it and find some ways to apply it to your own processing workflow as well so let's jump into capture one and start editing all right so here we are in capture one now if you're curious to know more about this image and where it was shot because we are gonna be looking at it for a few minutes here um this photograph was captured back in 2017 in a tiny little uh historic medieval village in uh italy uh named patigliano now if you've never heard it particularly on it before i wouldn't be surprised it's this walled fortress of it of a village i mean there's i think maybe only about a hundred people who live there now and they call it little jerusalem because it has a a rather large jewish population that lives there we were there because i was there on holiday with my with my wife and kids and we were doing a whole trip down the western seaboard of italy where we started in genoa in the north and then uh worked our way south uh to the amalfi coast in the south and along the way we stopped in various places and one of the places we spent at night was in particular and particularly auto was so fascinating to get out and to explore and to wander and look around and all these little nooks and crannies and alleyways and speaking of the photograph i mean the image was shot using a leica mp uh rangefinder awesome camera i actually don't own it anymore i ended up selling it because after this trip um i wasn't using the camera as much and it was spending too much time on the shelf to be honest i didn't want to hold on to it too long because i was afraid of the resale value going down especially once newer cameras came out so i decided to let it go but such an awesome little camera because there's no leica logo on it it's one of those uh variants that leica creates where they intentionally take their branding off of the camera which is great because especially when you're out doing street photography and travel photography and stuff like this you don't really want to be advertising the camera that you're using right and that's something that i loved about that leica and the images that it made the images that it created were just fantastic i kept the lens i mean this was shot with a 35 millimeter sumilux lens my intent is to someday uh pick up a new body and to pick up where i left off and and be using that lens again but for now uh that camera has a new home so i just have the old photographs so that should tell you more about where it is and uh and what i use to capture it so let's start editing all right so the first step is to edit lens corrections now if i come over here to the profile and take a look you can see that these are all the lens profiles that capture one has built into it and inferred from the metadata of the photo that i'm using one of these leica lenses here it automatically check chromatic aberration not a big deal doesn't really hurt anything in the image i don't think there is any chromatic aberration so i'll just leave it on then the next three sliders are distortion sharpness and light falloff now distortion is pin cushion distortion how much or how little distortion you have is entirely dependent on focal length my general philosophy on distortion and lens corrections in general is to just kind of decide for yourself whether you like the abnormalities that are contributed by the lens sometimes that gives it character sometimes it sometimes imperfect is better than perfect now sharpness is helm is is a is something that's unique to capture one what it does is apply additional sharpness to the corners to account for any softening that may have occurred um down here because i mean some of this is attributed to depth of field i think so i don't feel like sharpness is really going to do all that much for this image there's really nothing in the corners that i want to be drawing attention to anyway so i'm not going to bring up sharpness light fall off so this is essentially vignette it's just called light falloff and capture one i think part of the reason they do that is because in lightroom as you probably know there are like three different sliders named light named um uh vignette it can get kind of confusing i think which one does what now again like distortion maybe you like that maybe you're cool with the with the vignette and you want that natural vignette in the image but one of the things i know about this image because i don't like this corner down here in the lower right hand side of it this little edge is really distracting to me i am going to be doing some cropping and anytime you crop an image you should be applying your own vignette and not using the natural vignette because when you keep the natural vignette then you are you are cropping into it which makes it kind of uh out of balance i'm going to remove the vignette but then we're going to bring it back later so i just bring this up until it looks like i'm looking at the wall over here on the left hand side i'm just bringing it up until that lower left hand corner looks the same as the rest of the wall and right around there looks good basically you just push this until it seems unnatural see that's a little bright and then you just bring it back and right about there looks right all right the next step is to crop the image now as i said earlier this little edge on the side of the stairwell here is rather annoying so we're just going to bring this up from the bottom to get rid of that maybe bring it in a little bit from the top too and yeah see what's happening with the stairs now see that edge is now gone so the line now runs out of frame and your eye doesn't get hung up on that anymore i think that looks uh much much better all right the next step is to edit white balance now this is a a critical step i think in your overall workflow because this is really the moment in which you're starting to shift from just making technical edits like correcting some of the technical issues with the lens and now you're really starting to think about what is it that you want to achieve creatively with the image what is it that is in your mind's eye when you're thinking about where what is the net result of the photo when i think about this moment and when i remember being there i remember being warm it was sunny it was late in the afternoon to me it feels like a a a summer image like something that should be warm something that should be crunchy something that should have a bit of bite to it when it comes to the contrast because we can and i think the more of that it has i think the more visually interesting it'll be so let's begin by editing the white balance so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to add just a little bit of warmth to the image not so much that it starts to turn orange like this right i mean that's just that's just too much this is the default white balance this is as shot here but i'm just going to warm it up a little bit i'm just going to bring this up and you can see what's happening with this yellow wall back here right i mean it's starting to glow a little bit it's starting to get some of that color so somewhere right around there i think looks really good all right the next thing we're going to tackle is exposure now this is obviously a really big and important step during the process you might end up spending a fair amount of time here first thing that i like to do is come up here to the histogram and take a look at it and just see what's going on with the image because your eyes may deceive you and the histogram doesn't lie i mean you can look at it and you can see exactly what's going on with the tonal range of the image unfortunately with this one i mean there there's no clipping uh the blacks are good the whites are good and most of the information is right across the middle of it which means that it was well exposed and we have a lot of information here to be working with pretty happy with that i do think it's like a touch under exposed and this is something that i talked about in my in my framework video but part of what i like to do it's almost like an accordion of sorts like you you kind of want to bring everything in and just be um you know kind of bringing things towards the center of the histogram and then start stretching them back out again in order to be creating contrast so what i'm going to do is uh raise the exposure slider here just a little bit just to bring in a little extra light so that we're pushing the histogram to the right and kind of filling in some of this gap over here on the right side of it and right around there i think looks right now i'm not going to mess with contrast because i'm going to be doing that in the tone curve and the levels saturation definitely not saturation you save for color because when you start applying when you start making exposure edits and start applying contrast saturation is affected as well you inject more saturation when you apply contrast so a lot of times you don't even need to mess with saturation definitely do exposure first all right now we move on to what capture one calls the high dynamic range and this is where you have highlights and shadows and whites and blacks and this should this should look familiar to lightroom if you're a lightroom user now here's something that's really interesting about capture one and this is one of the reasons why i ended up changing over to it is because the highlight slider it has almost like this intelligence to it in capture one that i just like a lot better compared to how highlights work in lightroom which tend to be a little more aggressive you can see what's happening here right i mean when i bring that highlight slider up and down it's targeting the right side of the image over here and it's not affecting the left side it's not harming any of the other luminosity values it knows exactly where um this should be applied and it's over there on the left hand or on the right hand side so i'm just going to bring this thing all the way down to negative 100 and sometimes if you go like negative 100 in lightroom it's way too much but here it's it's just right and it made the right side of the image more tonally balanced with the left they feel more even now exposure add in editing in general for me is just a it's just a way of kind of normalizing the light so that there isn't anything that is obviously uh overly bright or too dark and you're basically bringing some things down you're bringing other things up and just trying to get a smooth roll-off of value from one side of the image to the other so that it's not too distracting we're still kind of in a fixing phase here as opposed to adding the look that we're going for so i dropped highlights all the way down let's see what's going on with shadows so i'm gonna bring this down yeah i don't know i don't think i'm gonna mess with shadows too much i think i think the information we have is good whites maybe bring that down just a touch now the next step is levels now levels this panel does not exist in lightroom but if you use photoshop you will recognize this it's basically the same as um as what you find there and in that you have like your your uh your black point your white point and your midpoint here and your values you know black is zero and white is 255. these are the input and output values for uh your black point and your white point in your image i don't like for anything to have for anything to be pure black look at the histogram up at the top of the the right column right see what's happening when i adjust that black point it's pushing in the histogram from the left side and pulling it away from that pure black zero value by bringing up the black point a little bit you're creating a little more detail and it's also i think giving it a slightly flatter kind of more like a matte film look anyway you can also do the same with the white point up here you could bring that down if you wanted to but there's so little information up there that it's not it's it's not really helping any so i'm just going to leave it right where it is i am now going to bring up the midpoint sum which is going to bring a little more light into the mid-tones of the image and as you can see up here at the top in the histogram pushing this midpoint to the left pushes the histogram to the right it's pushing more of those darker pixels towards the right side and it goes in in the reverse if i push it this way so i'm just trying to bring the histogram into the center so that it's not too dominant down on the left side just so that then i have some better material to be playing with when applying contrast all right so speaking of contrast now is the time to do that and to do that i'm going to use the tone curve now the tone curve when you make edits here it is within the black point and the white point and the midpoint that is set by levels i'm going to um create a midpoint here just so that we're locking down the midpoint so that we're not adversely affecting it and then i'm going to bring the shadows down now notice what's happening here is that not only are the shadows getting deeper but the colors are getting richer right i mean this gets back to the point i was talking about a minute ago about saturation where you don't need to be adding saturation because because when you start adding contrast you're going to inject saturation just by doing that and yeah i think that's good right there so let's just take a quick look at where we are so here's the before and after uh this is the after this is the before as you can see we've come a long way already i mean big changes just through very very slight edits to exposure and to levels into curves and that's it i mean it doesn't really require all that much all right the next thing that i want to do with regards to exposure is continue to address this right side of the image because it's a little hot it's still a little distracting even though i brought those highlights all the way down i wanted to kind of match the look of this wall over here and not be as bright it's also a little bit cool and temperature uh so how we're going to fix that well what we're going to do is we're going to use a an adjustment layer now capture one has layers um lightroom does not and that's one of the cool things about capture one in my opinion so i'm gonna use the um the gradient mask tool here now lightroom has this as well it's just you know kind of designed a little bit differently i'm gonna bring this in uh kind of mimicking the direction of the light coming down at an angle like this so it looks somewhat natural and uh bring it in right about there and then i'm gonna bring down the exposure so as you can see right i mean it's bringing down that right side and now tonally it's getting in the ballpark of what we have over here on the left side don't don't want to go too dark with it but that looks about right right there now the other thing i noticed is that because of how the light was hitting it it doesn't have like the same kind of contrast or kind of crunchiness that the left side of the image does over here and what we can do then is just bring up the contrast slider there and i think right around there is looking good see how like this area of the wall here is now looking kind of similar to this over here now notice how the tone of yellow here is different than the tone of yellow over here it's a little more orange a little more a little bit warmer over here because of the light so i'm going to do is now use uh color temperature bring up the color temperature some gonna keep pushing it keep pushing it now the the stairs and the right side of the image is looking closer to the left and there we go okay so i can turn that adjustment layer on and off right i mean it's one of these things that you don't really notice while you're editing and then you then you turn it on off and you're like oh man wow yeah that that really did help a lot now this is now just while i'm here i want to point something out that one of the cool things about layers in capture one is that you can pop this into a layer and then you have an opacity slider just like uh photoshop so you can pull this up and down and like if you went too hot with it and you just want to pull this back you can absolutely do that just like you do in in photoshop so again we're editing exposure here this isn't a dodging and burning step i actually may have gone a little too hot with the contrast um i mean we're still just trying to equalize some of the light is the main goal here and i think we're looking pretty good okay now when you make these edits in a layer you have to remember to click back to background in order to get back to where you were before sometimes i forget and i start making edits in the adjustment layer oh this actually reminds me i should name this thing so we're gonna name it uh burn top right so that i know what it is and what's going on there okay now there is definitely some additional uh dodging and burning that i would like to do uh but i'm going to save that for a little bit later because there's some other you know because right now with exposure you're just trying to equalize it and balance things out you're not going crazy with it so next we're going to focus on color so let's switch over to the color here what i typically like to start with um in capture one i like to i like to split tone this is one of the nice interfaces in capture one that is coming actually to lightroom in a in an update soon it's these very like video centric kind of color wheels which are great because then you can see the relationships between colors i'm gonna warm up the highlights a little bit just bring some extra warmth into there and then i'm going to contrast that with some blue some like some cyan blue in the shadows now let's go to the color editor panel another really nice editor here now what i'm going to do here is bring yellow closer to orange so that it just feels a little bit warmer and so that we are kind of collapsing the the yellows and the reds together a little bit yellows oranges and reds i'm gonna bring up the saturation i think that looks about right now one of the things you can do to see your edits is just within a particular panel is to hold down the option key and then uh click on the reset icon and it just says a temporary reset of what you did it doesn't reset the panel all the way back as you can see we created a little more warmth a little more life in that yellow all right let's take a look at blue now blue there is some definite blue here in this tire here now i also think i'm going to bring down its saturation some too just so that it's not uh too prominent all right so overall i am pretty happy with uh the color and the exposure and if we take a look at the before and after i mean this is this is where we are i think we're looking pretty good okay so now this is where um you can really start to dial in some of that mood and atmosphere that you're looking for dodging and burning i think is such an important step but before i just start drawing gradient maps on top of here i want to explain what the goal here is so one of the things i want to do is just help shape and give some direction to the light because light right now the light's just kind of bouncing all over the place in here everything is kind of on an even plane what i want is to bring out the subject i want to bring out the center of the image want to bring out the bike a little bit burn left so we're going to burn the left side over here and i'm just kind of you know trying to go along with the with the contour of the of the wall here and see what's happening see the value now of that left wall is very much it's going down it's definitely getting darker and it's looking better see that's that's the after before after before may have gone a little too hot with it so i'll bring that up some now what i want to do is um well one of the things is definitely this floor down here this floor has been driving me crazy so let's just go ahead and take care of that so i'm going to burn and this is this is something that you will find oftentimes is that the ground because it's flat in relation to the sun that the ground will be brighter than your subject and if you go too dark with it i think it looks unnatural but you you typically don't want it to be the brightest thing in your image because it's not the subject it's not what you want people to see so i'm just going to bring this down a little bit i think that is looking a lot better see that's the before after before after again right now i mean we can finish this we can make some additional edits to it but i just want to bring the values down a little bit just for now because we can keep creating layers um all right i'm going to do one in the top right now i'm going to burn top right and what i'm doing here see how you have this angle of the stairs that's coming down this way there's kind of this this implied diagonal i feel like that's that's you know being created here because the lights coming from the top right let's just see what happens so i'm going to bring this down a little bit and let's turn this on and off and take a look at it yeah right i think this area over here may be a little too dark now because now we have overlapping gradients so i'm just going to bring that up some okay so now that we've pretty well equalized um some of the dodging and burning what i want to do is bring a little more attention to my subject here in the in the center to do that i mean we could either use the um the vignette tool and we could bring in a little bit of vignette and that's entirely doable and i'll probably end up doing that here in a minute because remember we removed it right from the edges and it could use a little bit more so what i'm going to do here is uh let's just add a little bit of punch in the center of the image so i'm going to call this dodge center and obviously you know in the center of the circle this is where the effect will be most pronounced and then it'll fade off out here towards the edges and the more feather you have the more natural it looks so now that we have the the mask in the middle our radial i'm just going to bring up the exposure slider i'm actually brightening the the outside of the circle so i need to right click on the mask invert it and boom and now it's in the middle let's just do a gut check here let me see where we're at before after before after all right before i move on there's something i noticed in here that's starting to make me a little starting to make my eye twitch a little bit and that is the fact that see how this light over here on the right side is just a little there's like a little bit of magenta in it compared to the left side it's like greener on the left and it is on the right and yeah that's looking that definitely looks better all right before we move on from dodging and burning there's one more i want to do here i want to burn the top left maybe rotate it up some so let's go back to our background layer here now the next thing i want to do is uh because i kind of skipped the step earlier but i think this is a really good step to save for later and that is to add in a little bit of clarity and a little bit of structure now structure is structure is now something well i guess it's called texture in lightroom it's more of a recent tool but this is something that i'm going to zoom in here so that you can see what it does this is something that brings out some of those fine details in the image if i just start turning this thing up you can see see what's happening i mean it's applying like micro contrast it's like very i mean you can really see those edges of like the darkening and the and the brightening that's going on now clarity is uh is targeted contrast towards the mid tones in the image which we have a fair amount of so we're going to stretch out the mid-tone some don't want to go too crazy with this because then it just starts getting kind of crunchy but i think i think right around there looks good now i think it's a good time to be applying some vignette on top of it because now we've cropped the image we've done everything and now i just want to bring a little less attention to these corners down here all right now that i'm looking at the vignette i'm just going to pop up the contrast maybe a little bit just to give it some little more life and the lights yep okay so now we have clarity we have structure we have uh vignette things are looking good now that you have your image pretty well uh finalized you have things where you want them your color and your exposure and and all of that now is a really good time to be thinking about what is it about the image that bugs you is there anything in here that is distracting that's been making you crazy let me just make a clean up layer here just to demonstrate this one of the things that's been bugging me this entire video is this little clump down here in the lower right um it's it's just kind of distracting to the eye i don't particularly like it so just trying to make this look as natural as possible this is also a good time to be looking around the edges of the image is there anything that's kind of hanging towards the edge which is making your your eye twitch a little bit like i'm looking at this now and now i see this over here and i'm like it's a little close to the edge and when something like that is close to the edge of the frame it kind of pulls your eye over there and you start to you start to notice little abnormality abnormalities like that okay so i think that does a good job now obviously you spent all day doing this but the point here is that clean up this is the time you do it right here at the end all right now the next step is sharpening this is the final step of the image now sharpening uh i mean you there's kind of like two ways of thinking about it i mean you can sharpen your baseline image if you want to you know you can come in here and apply um i think i have some presets in here for sharpening i like the pre-sharpening ones i think they're pretty good so you can either apply sharpening you know at the raw level or you can open the image in photoshop be it to be applying sharpening on export which i think is a little more precise just for the sake of completing the image i will go ahead and apply some sharpening here so i think we are pretty much done with this image uh this is the perform i mean it's hard to believe that's where we started isn't it that's where we started a long time ago and now that's the after before after all right everyone i hope you enjoyed the video i apologize if it went on uh a bit longer than what you expected but you know i mean i'm editing i'm literally editing this you know step by step incrementally and second guessing myself and the decisions i'm making so um hopefully it didn't uh drag on too long but i hope in general that you learn something new from it that perhaps you have a better understanding of what i'm talking about when i talk about editing in a series of incremental steps progressively over time starting with one thing starting with like you know starting with the foundation layer of your house and then slowly building levels on top of that start broad and then almost like almost like the shape of a triangle you start broad and then you just slowly get more specific more granular more granular as you go and you are incrementally and progressively enhancing that image and improving it and making it better over time and then every now and then if you need to backtrack and and fix a little something that's totally cool too but the idea here in general is just to get in this habit and uh and develop some type of framework for yourself whether it's the one that i'm recommending or one that works for you then you will get more consistent results with your photography more consistent results with your editing and you'll get a little less kind of stuck in the weeds a little less lost and which can happen sometimes if you're not exactly sure what to do next and where it is that you're going hope you enjoyed the video if you did please give it a thumbs up if you would like to see more editing videos like this in the future please leave me a comment please let me know if you haven't already subscribed to this channel also do that if you are into photography if you're into this topic you want to see more videos from me and uh then you know what to do then hit the subscribe button and we'll keep in touch with each other in the future thanks so much everyone for hanging out with me i appreciate it had a good time hope you enjoyed it see you next week you

Channel: Todd Dominey

Views: 57,991

Keywords: photography, todd dominey, raw editing, raw processing, capture one, capture one editing, capture one tutorial, capture one raw, photo editing, photo processing, photo edit tutorial, Leica M-P, pitigliano

Id: gsNFQZKX5So

Length: 30min 43sec (1843 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020