Capture One 20 | Quick Live : Focus on Color Grading

good after gonna say morning them but it point me morning for some of you so good morning or afternoon wherever you are welcome to today's quick live broadcast where we're going to be looking at the color balance tool and color grading so that's the idea behind today's transmission before we get to that let's just bring up my screen and myself this is what we're going to be looking at today a few shots that you can see on the screen and one on the right-hand side as well what we're going to be looking at is using the color balance to in a couple of different ways for color correction and also a creative color grade as well before we get to that what we'd love to know is that we're going to throw a purple on screen on the moment so it can it can just load up as and when my colleague pops it up on Wednesday we're going to do another quick live so we'd actually love to know what you'd like to see so we've done quite a few variations of different photos recently but what we'd like to know is do you want to see architecture or Wildlife so that's the two choices we have for Wednesday apologies if you're watching on YouTube and it's not streaming too great I think the Internet is busy on a Friday afternoon so we do our best and make sure it can get through okay so hopefully it will stabilize and figure out as well the stream size is just turned down a little bit as well just to hope cope with that as well so hopefully it was settled all right um okay so the poll will go up on screen shortly so I think bandwidth wise it's actually looking a little bit better now from my screen so we should be alright okay so what are we going to look at first of all we're gonna look at this guy the color balance tool I'm going to bring it out and make it a little bit larger it's a super simple tool to use doesn't require any scientific knowledge or any of those kinds of things it's just a real simple what you see is what you get into now perhaps the best way to demonstrate how this works is just with a quick nerdy color chart so the way the color balanced all is is divided is split up into shadows mid-tones and highlights like so now on this grenade tigre dated scale if that's even a word you can see we've just got shadow going through two highlights so how does the color balance to work well we have a color wheel for the shadows mid-tones and highlights there's a master as well but we're come back to that and essentially you pick up the little point in the middle and drag it towards the color tone that you want to tint and you can see the shadows only affects this end of the tonal range mid-tones let's just go to opposite colors and highlights like so so you can see it targets those three different areas of tonal range now this kind of control you see quite common in programs that do video color grading for example but there's no reason why we can't use it nicely in single or sorry still photography as well so that's really all there is to it obviously we need to apply this in a practical way but it's a very simple tool to use now on the side there are some sliders on the right and they those just control density so they can brighten or darken those two different zones so in summary shadows mid-tones highlights just effects those particular areas and wherever you drag the little circle applies that tint to the shot so let's try and use this in a couple of different ways so I'm going to go back to our original shot and the first thing we're going to use it for is like a minor color correction tweak so let's just hide me for a second and get the browser out of the way now if we look at this shot it's got a few adjustments on nothing major a little bit of contrast change really that's it it's kind of one of those shots that just looks nice out of camera but if we look kind of in the background you see we've got cool tones in the mountains so I'm kind of looking in these areas in fact let's just stick a little color read out like so we can just tap the couple so you can see it's biased towards the blue a little bit wherever we kind of put this guy so let's drop it over there now of course if we wanted to warm that up a bit we could have a couple of different choices or I could for example bring up the kelvin slider but to be honest that affects the whole shot and it's now making the skin tones too warm and so on so I don't want to do that so let's double click and reset that but if I just wanted to neutralize the shadows a little bit right now they're too blue they're too cold so in our shadow wheel let's make this bigger so it's easier for you guys to see in our shadow wheel oops we don't need that one let's get rid of you in our shadow we'll we can just go to the opposite of blue which is kind of in the warmer tones and then now our kind of blue level has reduced now depending how far we want to go with that we could really neutralize it or we could just take the edge off it to something like that so it just balances in a small amount but we've still got some of the nuance there so if I alt click my reset button you can see before and after like so so just taking that cornice out so it's not only as you're going to see it's a good tool for creative color grading it's also good for just correcting those minor shifts in color that you might see in the shadows mid-tones and highlights so one simple application let me just see if there's any question seems that I was streaming has stabilized now so that's good JD said how did I do the color scale or numbers they are it's actually a cursor tool so if we go up here you can find all the different Pickers that you want to have and this one was add a color readout like so or X on your keyboard and if I want to move it around I can do so or I can alt click to delete it like so so it's not something I use a great deal but it's quite handy just for picking it up let's have a MFG said I think you could choose a flatter preset and the white balance as I said we could change the white balance preset but that's going to affect the whole image the beauty of the color balance tool is that we can you know determine where we want to kind of push our colors around alright and Barry we've answered you had the same question or was that the other Barry I can't remember anyway let's have a look okay perfect let's move on to kind of doing it a bit more creatively and what we're gonna do is incorporate it into layers so let's grab this shot as well I think I'd mist around with it earlier you can see we've got a layer here called color grade and this is the edited shot but without any specific color grading so let's see how we can do that now what we could do of course is forget layers and we could go to our color balance tool and we could move these around and then we could play with the kind of tones that we want to have and then as I said it's not scientific at all it's just literally what-you-see-is-what-you-get calibrated monitor helps of course so we can just tweak our color balance tool like that hold down our Alt key and see before and after but what I like to do is put it on a layer because it gives us a bit more control we can dial in some other Corrections or adjustments too and then have that as our color grading layer so let's reset that and we're going to make a new field layer like so now a field layer let's just call this color grade grade like so now a field layer is pretty much like an adjustment layer so it's going to affect the whole photo so if I press M on my keyboard then you'll see the mask is representing where our adjustment is going to be so that's over the whole shot so let's press M again to hide that and I'll do a similar thing as before so let's say we're just gonna have some cooler shadows let's warm up our mid-tones and maybe our highlights just to lesser extent a bit as well and also I'd like to drop the saturation down so it's more kind of muted tones like so now the benefit of doing it this way is that we've got a combination of the color balance tool and we've also dropped the saturation down a bit as well so that's those two things working and play together we could go further I could grab my color editor for example let's just go basic grab my picker here and say I want to just maybe turn the greens down a bit so if I click and hold with my mouse then if I move my cursor downwards then we can change the saturation just in the greens or I could make it more saturated like so if I click then we can change the hue a little bit as well so let's just drop that down slightly as well so now we've got a combination of different adjustments working together now the nice thing is and mega tee that's a great name has a really good tip which I'll put on screen in a second is that now we can moderate how much of this color grade we want so if I think it's a bit too much we can go anything from zero so that's no grading all the way to the max or I could settle somewhere in between now mega tees great little tip let's put it on screen says let's just move it down a bit I would suggest setting the opacity of that layer to 70% at the start so then you can go either way so what mega tees suggestion was was when we make our field layer and before we do our color grading is to start at 70 and then that way you can say well actually I want a bit more or a bit less so 70 is a good place to start so well done for suggesting that okay let's have a look at a couple of other questions house color grading different than saturation that was a Danann that was asking that came via my colleague Christine so I can't find it to put it up on screen the difference between well color grading is like an overall color look so that's putting a grade on it as we say so we've affected the shadows mid-tones highlights and the saturation and a color of it so that's kind of put all those things in combination saturation is really just fixing or changing the saturation to be less or more for example there's great resources on color grading especially for motion and 4tb so there's really good blogs and all kinds of documentation on different looks that were achieved in different movie productions and so on and they're really good to draw inspiration from okay let's have a look and just check a few other questions otherwise we shall have a look Sarah says oMG I like that the click and hold to reduce saturation is amazing glad that was useful for you fantastic alright let's try another example so we're gonna go to this one so this has already had quite a few edits on it one I prepared earlier so just to look at the layers we've got a radial just for some vignetting and then we've got a little bit of brightening going on in the shop interior just so we can see what's going on here so let's do a similar thing again we start with our filled layer like so click and hold new filled layer and we call this CG for color grade if you like let's do C grade and again a similar thing how do we want this to look and again the nice thing about putting it on a layer if you decide you've made a you know a terrible job then you can just turn it off and on delete it and start again without having to undo a bunch of other stuff so what should we do with this one again I think I'd like some more muted tones so he can bring saturation down go over to our color balance tool and as I said this is one of the tools we can make a bit bigger so that helps let's have a look we're going to go to let's say they don't need to see the photo a bit more so what if we had kind of let's go for warmer tones in this respect and then in our mid-tones I might just go warmer overall maybe we can have slightly colder highlights like so now there's also a master tab which is kind of just like putting a filter in front of your lens so a colored filter so if we drastically push this in either direction so that can put an overall tint to the shot but it's over the whole image so it's good for just chucking a color grade in that affects everything so all might just overall boost everything a bit as well so we've got our shadows mid-tones and highlights and if you want to you can see them separately as well just so they're a bit easier to manage so if you're working on a small screen and you can't necessarily have the space to float the tool out you can look at them separately as well or in the 3-way view like so now on my color grades I'm also gonna be saturate a bit more and let's also throw in a bit of a color at it we go advanced this time grab my color picker I just want to tone down just the paintwork here a little bit so it's kind of a teal II color almost so I just want to mute that slightly as well so I'm kind of a bit more monotone and once again like negati said I didn't follow their advice but we can always go back from no grading to full grading like so so it's really a simple tool to use and very much enjoyable as well as I said you don't need any color mixing knowledge it's no RGB numbers involved or any of that kind of stuff it's just what you see is what you get so traditionally the way to color grade would be to use curves channels sorry different channels in the curves for just affecting you know various areas and so on but then the problem with using curves is that you can't separate luminosity from color so it's always intermingled unfortunately also if you want to create and colors you know you have to know how to mix red green and blue together which I don't unfortunately so the nice thing about the color balance tool is that you can see it exactly as it is now one last tip if any of you kind of work across video editors and also still image editors there's two ways that you can look at the wheels now standard is kind of how we've always orientated it in capture one now if you're used to using like da Vinci for example or other grading applications if you click vectorscope it rotates everything 90 degrees I think or 180 degrees which is the layout you expect to see if you're used to video editing apps so in that preference you can always switch that if you're having to turn your head on the side every time you use capture one cool let's have a look at a few last questions and then we can continue on our Friday apart from highlights and shadows this was Luca who was asking see if I can find your comment Luca here we go it's add that apart from highlights and shadows how different is color grading compared to white balance well you've kind of hit the nail on the head really is that white balance will affect the whole photo whereas the color grading will affect those individual tones and also we can control the density as well so if I wanted to lift my shadows or darken them and I do drastic changes so you can see that's also part of the ability of the color balance tool so what I would suggest is white balance you kind of set to be correct for the photo and then the color balance tool is like a separate adjustment that you can do to color great if you wish of course you don't have to color great every single image that comes in but it's a really nice thing to experiment with and of course if you've made a color grade that you particularly like you can also save it as a preset so you can always return to it let's see mmm-hmm Jason saying I hope we can see more about product photography yeah we could do some product editing that's also a really nice idea definitely and mega T the most helpful person we have here what does smoothness do in the advanced color editor that's a good question actually and seeing as we use the advanced color editor lets answer that so you see around the outside of our color range selection so if we turn this on we can see exactly which colors we have selected that's how it rolls off into the neighboring colors so it's either a hard stop where that color selection is or we have a nice smooth roll off into the neighboring colors and it stops posterization so this isn't probably the best example but on a few color editor tutorials you can see it if we had like a really hard smoothness and we change this so let's change our smoothness so you can see here we get a hard edge around that paint work whereas now we bleed into those neighboring colors much better so you can see it here as well we've got like posterization or hard edge going on and smoothness we'll just roll it off nicely into those other areas like so so I hope that satisfies your explanation what are the curve lines on each side of the color wheel so with the color wheels I use them just by dragging the balls around like so now if you want to let's say you settle on on your ideal color grade if you grab this one that will just move it in and out from the outside to the center so it will kind of stick on that color and then that's the way just to moderate the strength and then this one you can actually move it around like so as well if you've got a scrolling Mouse or a trackpad you can use two finger scroll if you change your preference and capture one so if you prefer to have where as it's scroll wheel changes slider value should change it and like so so if I'm in the center here and I scroll then we can actually move it around with the trackpad as well so there's a few different ways that you can manipulate the tool as well so it works really nice okay just checking questions and then we give you a few other links to talk about John says never understood smoothness until now that's good I mean it's easy to confuse with like making the color smooth but it's always relates to the selection so those you know sliders at the top here this one here sorry I guess the wheel and the top slider relates to the selection that you're creating and the three under it is then the adjustment so that's the best way to differentiate those of course excellent oh hi Neal nice to see you good buddy of mine from way back so good to see you Neal great photographer is Neal you should check him out and last but not least let's see what Becky had to say I'm struggling matching skin tones from image to image probably best advice for that don't have the right images but of course don't forget you can cue up more than one shot into the viewer like so one two three four or more than that and then what you can do is also in the color editor tool itself you've got the skin tone picker so you can pick on your subjects skin tone and then you can use hue saturation lightness sliders just to fine-tune that particular skin tone so I'd work with three or four images up and then you've got you know a comparison to work off as well so hopefully that helps also check out I think we did a live broadcast and skin tone and actually remember we've done so many of them now but there's plenty of tutorials on editing skin as well we did do one on skin tone last week or the week before and we also talked about using the uniformity sliders in skin as well how to normalize kind of you know differences in tone that kind of stuff as well okay so I think thanks for joining us a day today so I hope that was another little useful tip bit on working with capture one don't be afraid to use the color balance tool and the color editor tools as I've shown you it's super easy to use stick it on the layer just because it kind of gives you that get out of free jail card to always go back and edit use mega tease great tip of starting at 70% because then you can go either way that's really nice and just having that additional flexibility really really helps as well last little poll question that we want to ask you which I can't remember what it was all that was it after seeing this today sorry if Christine my colleague in the background I can't remember if we said we were going to do this one have you used the color balance tool before yes no I'll know but I'm going to try it now that's what will be good to hear based on the poll architecture seems to be winning so I think that's probably what we're going to show on Wednesday as well so we can look at like keystone correction a few other bits as well one of our ambassadors Paul Rifa is a great architecture photographer so I might pinch an image or two of him to edit as well so there we go thanks for joining us again today and let us know in the comments as well what you found useful and also what you're up to and also if you're going to give color balance editing and try as well this recording will be straight up on to Facebook and YouTube pretty quickly so if you didn't get a chance to catch all of it you can just rewind and take it all in so thanks for joining us and see you all again soon take care you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 18,263

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Id: 2Wp0w47z6qY

Length: 25min 6sec (1506 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020