Capture One 20 Highlights | Layers workflow with Pratik Naik

hi everyone my name is Prateek mica my editorial and commercial retoucher and capture one is something that I use on a pretty much regular and daily basis especially when I work on RAW files which is pretty much all the time and what I wanted to show you guys today is an actual workflow of something that I would typically do before retouching an image now this image is one that I shot of my wife Bella Kotak she's a fine art fantasy photographer and many of you have seen her here featured before and she's another capture one in phase one a user who actually is someone who I admire personally because she really incorporates a lot of colors and textures in her images and I wanted to photograph her in her element now that I have this picture here in front of me I wanted to show you all a layers baked based workflow that I always use especially because when you have a raw file like this you really want to make sure that you're able to actually bring out as much detail as possible before retouching and you know sometimes it's a big shame when you bring the file into Photoshop or so you start retouching and you just don't have the information there and you're just pulling your file in ways that shouldn't really be pulled so I think this is a huge advantage RAW files have tons of information and let me show you how I'm gonna be using that so when I shoot a portrait like this I always gravitate towards the eyes the eyes are always a central focus this photo is composed accordingly and what I do want to do is bring out some more of the eyes and this is a really good example because the raw files themselves have a lot of information present and being able to bring that out is gonna be really easy with layers if you haven't used layers before I want to go and make sure that you have them located if you don't have it located where it is on mine you might also see it on any other tab as well and layers are there in conjunction with all the functionality that capture one has by itself and if you don't see it you simply need to go to right-click add tool and then you come down to layers you'll see it right there now that you've located layers what we really want to do first is start and add a new layer so I'm gonna go over here to the bottom left you'll see this plus icon with a drop-down menu when I click on it it says layer 1 I'm gonna go ahead and rename that to eyes now that I have my eyes layer there I'm actually using this to bring out exposure so I'm gonna increase the exposure tab say about 2 and once I have that set you should notice that nothing happens at this current moment that's just because I'm currently loading my brush to ensure that anything that I do start painting is gonna be increased with the same exposure another thing that you want to make sure before you actually begin working is that over here you'll see brush settings now the settings themselves control a few things number one is size which you can also do by the bracket keys on your keyboard if you have them next is opacity and flow now opacity and flow for me is really huge because I want to start seeing these changes come in incrementally and not so abrupt and fast so I'm gonna keep my flow say around 5% for this one and I'm gonna make sure that nothing else is on at the moment I'm turning off pen pressure and airbrush I'm just going to be using it as simple as possible okay now that we have that set I'm gonna zoom in here I'm hitting command + and I want to use my bracket keys to change the actual shape of my brush and I'll actually do it in a way where the outer ring itself which shows the softness is gonna be touching the ends of the colors in the iris now that I have that done I'll start brushing a little and I'm only gonna be brushing where the color of the eye is don't worry if it goes a little bit too much it's okay I'm only doing about three or four strokes and I'll come over to this eye and I'll do the same but what I also want to make sure of is that the bottom part here is getting a little bit more exposure than the ends just to keep things looking more realistic let's zoom out here for a second let's say we analyze this image and we think that this head has gone too far we can come over here to the erase tool function making sure that the brush settings are the same as well because they will be different for each tool that you use now that I have that done I'll do the same thing I'll come back here and I'm just gonna one or two strokes just reduce that just a little bit so that it's both balanced on both eyes now that I have my exposure there I can toggle the layer on and off to see what the exposure looks like and you can see what a difference that made it brought out the catch light a little bit more it add a little bit more color in the eye just got more presence there now with this layer itself it's meant to be just for the eyes however you can use it in other parts if you so choose to so for instance if I decide that I actually want to increase the exposure of the dress on this side I can do a couple of strokes here just to kind of fill that in but I'm gonna hit command Z and not do that because I do want a little bit of shape coming into the dress to show some dimension oh it becomes too flat speaking of being too flat you notice that the background itself has a very similar ish exposure to the subject and sometimes I like to increase or decrease the exposure of the background just because I want more separation from the subject and accordingly with layers I can do that I'm going to do the same thing as well I'm going to say plus I'm going to decrease the exposure by two as well and I'm not going to change anything on my brush settings since we already have that changed and what I'll go ahead and do is now I'm going to start brushing and what you'll notice is I'm gonna go by how it looks I'm not gonna be super precise if I do want to be precise I can come back here to my brush settings and decrease my flow to say 1% and then really come in here to the edges where the mask is and the hair is in case I want to get a little bit smaller here with my brush and kind of just really target specific areas so I like to start with a large brush with a little bit of higher flow and then really start tackling the smaller areas with the smaller brush and a lower flow so that way I have more control over what it looks like and I hope you notice the difference where now that the background is a little bit darker I can actually see the subject separation a little bit more if I want to actually change that some people think that they need to erase and erase everything but the opacity function allows me to really fine-tune that in a hurry I don't really need to redo anything I can just change my opacity like this and be good another thing that I like to do for separation enhancement when it comes to to the visual image is I'm going to change the white balance as well now the white balance is very similar in that I already want to use the same mask that I've done for the exposure and of course you can always just go to white balance and change it there right now and it will work however I want to do that in a separate layer so what I'll actually do is add another layer I'm gonna rename this to background and let's rename the first one as well to background exposure and I'll rename this to background color and I'm gonna go ahead and right click on this I'm gonna say copy mask from background exposure this is awesome because I don't have to re mask the layer again it's automatically done and now I can come down to my white bounds function now again if you don't see it here it might be placed on another tool for you like it is here or if I go back to this tool tab I can right click and make sure I say add tool and then white balance which is already there but just to make sure that you know where it's located now that I have my background color selected I can go ahead and change the white balance and you can see how much of a difference it makes another thing to note and one that is really important is there's a few different masking options so you prefer like me not to have a mask visible at all when you're drawing or not you'll notice that on my masking options I have it set to never display mask you can always say always display mask in which case you'll see these red splotches across the image and that gives you an idea of where the mask is you can also say only display mask while drawing so then when you do draw something it starts displaying the mask like this only when you're drawing and then it turns it off when you stop trying so for me personally I pick never display masks normally there's also never sorry there's also display grayscale mask which shows you what the grayscale mess looks like and one of the reasons I like to draw without having the mask visible is sometimes for me areas that are dark don't need to be masks further and so this gives me a good visual idea of how things are looking in terms of balance exposure wise you'll notice with a lot of composite photographers that the exposure itself and it doesn't really match the masking or the masking may not look precise but the exposure and how it looks visually looks very precise so you have to sometimes be very aware of that when you're working so aside from that we can also use masks for global adjustments so say that you want to make an adjustment to the color grading right now instead of actually using the background layer we can start with a mask that doesn't have any thing apparent on the actual image so for example currently what we've done is we've put our settings in place every time we've masked and then we started brushing things in however when we actually make adjustments right now to say one of these layers you can't physically see it unless you start brushing it in so what we need to do this time is I want to click and hold down on the plus icon I'm not going to click and tap I'm going to hold down on it and say new filled layer what this allows us to do now is if I make any other adjustments say on any of these tabs it kind of works like you'd expect it to on a background layer where it makes it across a sweeping change and you see it placed on the entire image so now what I like to do with this one is if I actually want to color grade I could do so on this particular layer I can go into say my color tab here come down to my color balance tool which I love to use actually quite often and I'm gonna start playing around with some of the color tool options that I have and because the highlights themselves are actually quite warm I'm going to be changing the color to be a little bit cooler so I basically I'm going down to my blues here and dragging the point in the middle and the further I go towards blue the more it actually applies to it so I'll go ahead and keep a little bit of blue tone like this and then turn my layer on and off so you can see the interpretation already I'm gonna change this slider here which is kind of what brightness would be so I can change the slider here and make the shadows a little bit darker if I want to to compensate for the Blues that are kind of injecting in there and kind of fading out a little bit more also we have curves as well and curves themselves are really great because for me I actually like using curves in Photoshop so it's a very understandable tool so I can easily also go in and target say adding more blues into my shadows etc and setting different points one thing I like about the curve feature here is when I go to say RGB or my independant color channels it shows me where the Reds are on the image and where it kind of isn't so for instance on the way in total right hand side of the image there's not a ton of Reds here where the highlights should be because we've kind of made the exposure a little bit darker to bring out some more color the same thing with the blues a lot of the changes in the brightest parts of the image actually start around here and then the mid-tones are kind of like around here and then I have the shadows in the darkest parts at the end here so if I want to I can adjust them independently and I can boost more of the yellows in the highlights if I want to and increase more of the Blues in my shadows if I want and obviously now I have a pretty interesting color grade here and you can see how it kind of adds punch an impact to it I can now also add a little bit of clarity now clarity is something that I often like using two different intensities and I use different methods as well for clarity because each of these methods actually have a completely different effect so for instance natural when I boost it up like this almost adds more of a specular look it adds more contrast as well because it's applying it more globally you can see the more three-dimensional look that it adds when I adjust the slider up and down now the difference between natural and say classic which is a little bit different is that classic is very similar to how capture one used to operate with its clarity slider where if I start boosting it up it starts working at more of a pixel level more of a fine detail level so when I turn it on and off and bring my slider up and reset it again you'll notice that the clarity actually boosts a lot of details so I could use as clarity say on another layer I'll say new filled layer and then I'm going to increase my clarity here for a second to see what it's doing and you can see the metallic shine here and this piece was made by Lauri Sun a really great designer who made the dress and the headpiece and then if I don't want it on the face for instance I'll simply click on the eraser button here quickly just changed my flow to a hundred because I want to just take that out really quickly and then go ahead and just erase it from the face so the face stays nice and smooth while the details on this particular image have a really nice clarity to it and I'll go ahead and rename this to clarity for a second so there you go this was my process when I actually work on a raw file typically I start with the eyes I always like to boost color in the eyes which you'll see from my work a lot then work with different exposure levels where I want to you know bring separation to the image this can also be used for things like adding or amplifying light coming from one direction and bringing in light to the shadows all kinds of things finally I had one layer here just for color which I cool down the background a little bit more then finally I added this nice little color grade here which not only you know added cool tones to the shadows but a little bit warmth and golden tones in the highlights and I think this also kind of blended the background foreground to get a little bit more - to make them you know relatable finally here I added some clarity on this layer and then all of them together here gives you this particular look that I'm pretty happy with and now I'm excited to actually take this into the retouching and see what can we make from this so there you go I hope this guy I hope this really gives you an idea into not only how to use layers but a really good workflow in terms of using capture one for the creative process

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 14,110

Keywords: capture one, Capture One Pro, raw converter, photo editing software, capture pilot, captureone, Lightroom alternative, aperture alternative, studio software, Switching from Lightroom, Capture One vs Lightroom, Tethered, Shoot tethered, Image capture, Capture One Styles, Captureone styles, capture one pro 20, capture one 20, color editor

Id: S0al3G4tmQ0

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020