Capture One 20 | Quick Live : Get the most out of Layers

good afternoon everybody welcome to today's a short quick live session where we're going to be looking at a great shot from photographer chris van riel in the netherlands uh you can see his instagram link in the description of this on facebook and youtube but i found his shot just while i was browsing instagram the other day actually let's put it on screen so you know what the heck i'm talking about um so i found some of his work on instagram really liked it and i thought uh i wonder how he does his editing so he had a chat and he's using a combination of capture one and photoshop and so on but i wanted to see if i could kind of get close to his final result just using um capture one itself so what i'm aiming to get is something probably along the lines of one of these that's an edit from a few days ago that's an edit from this morning i think and that's the original so fantastic accent shot uses a bit of cloning bit of healing all kinds of stuff going on in layers and so on and so forth so um i was working on this you know over a number of days chatting backs and forwards with chris getting his input as well so i'm setting myself up for a slight uh fall trying to do it in 30 minutes flat but let's see you've just got to turn down my monitor over here because i can hear myself twice and that's going to be annoying and possibly for you uh so let's get started right so let's go back to this one i'm going to hide my browser just so that we've got a bit more space you can see um the shot that i'm going to work with this is straight at a camera i think yep because the reset button is is grayed out uh good advert for tracking autofocus definitely if you're interested i think this was a sony a9 which would make sense yep for the animal tracking um and a 135 mil lens so as i said i want to get to to try and get close to the kind of result chris was getting on his instagram pages so i've got notes which is rare for me because i'd kind of normally do it from memory but there's quite a lot of steps in this edit so let's go right so the first thing that i want to do let's just make my layers panel a bit bigger because we're going to end up with lots of layers is that i want to fill in a bit of area just above the dog here so that we have a uniform background so first thing i'm going to do is just grab the clone tool like so go over to my shot excuse me right click and i'm going to make my brush nice and soft and relatively big excuse me again and just pick a spot where i can start cloning from so a clone's just going to be a direct copy of pixels from one spot to another now to choose the spot i have to hold down my alt key and i'm going to go somewhere around here and then roughly kind of draw in a little bit of the background like so now i'm going to get to the point where i'm seeing a bit of dog so i'm just going to move my spot a little bit like so and that's probably going to be enough and now if i go any more more this way then i'm going to end up with even more paws and dogs and things like that so i'm going to choose myself another source point by option clicking and then just fill in a little bit over here as well now it's a little bit darker obviously than it was before so i could just bring the opacity down a little bit as well but once i darken that area and play around with it a little bit more then i don't think we're going to notice that that line too much but if i had more time i might spend a bit more care just kind of cloning around those trees but you don't want to watch me nitpick i'm sure now the next thing we're going to do we're going to see a bit of his head so i just need to heal that out i think would make more sense than cloning let's just name this layer adding trees and if you have any questions along the way don't forget to ask so now i'm going to grab my heel brush and make this a little bit bigger with a right click and let's just take out his head down here like so so that's pretty good let's just add a bit more and bring this one up so that's done a good job of hiding that area so now i'm happy to crop and then start the rest of it so that's the first stage so i'm going to grab my crop tool i want to square crop so i'm going to right click and just choose square here in the drop down window so that means capture one will just keep the aspect ratio one to one and let's start a crop something like this like so so that's gonna be good i think so now that's the shot that we're gonna be working with fantastic so we've got rid of a bit of the sky and we've got rid of our dude down the bottom here because i think you can just see his head popping in like so so we don't want that and looking at my notes the next thing we want to do is to kind of isolate the dog because if we isolate the dog then i've got a separate layer for my background or i can also use that to create a layer from my background so i can kind of play with those two independently as well so what's the best way to mask the dog i tried a few different techniques i tried to auto mask i'd sort of tried the color editor but at the end of the day i found just doing a kind of a rough mask and refining it kind of did the best job so i'm going to make a new layer and we're going to call this just dog like so grab my brush and we're going to go in relatively smaller and closer so let's zoom in a little bit on the pop maybe not that much let's come out a bit and just sort of outline it so we're not going to do anything fancy i'm just going to draw around the outside so if i right click i want to make sure my flow is at 100 and press m on my keyboard to see the mask so i'm just going to go roughly around the edge of our guy here so let's just do that and again i'm not being super critical because what i'm gonna do to the background is just darken it add a bit of a color tint and soften it as well that's the plan at least anyway so let's just do that so we've got an outline of our dog now to fill it in easiest way to do that right click and say fill mask and then that will just fill it in like so so we've got a rough mask of the dog now as i said that's pretty rough let's just fill in his chops around there that is pretty rough and i might be able to get away with that but i don't think i will because there's no finesse between you know his fur and the background so what we can do is if we zoom out a bit more the best way to examine this is to turn on something called the grayscale mask so what the grayscale mask will do will just show me the mask either in black or white or steps of gray so as soon as i say display grayscale mask we can now see the areas that i've masked not particularly finessed of course but what we can do is use a function called refine mask that will examine the underlying image if you like and help to hug the edges a little bit more so if i right click and say refine mask then we get a window pop up and then we can go from anything to sort of no change and then as i bring this up you see it gradually pops in like so so i want it to be don't want it to be too accurate but probably something like that is a good compromise so that's just improved on my sort of rough work so let's say apply and press m on my keyboard and then now you can see where i've got my mask so what this will do for me is just allow me to control the dog separately now he's a bit flat at the moment and a bit lacking in contrast so what i want to do just for the dog is to crank up the clarity a little bit so you see if i drag the slider it's just happening on him so i'm going to bring up the clarity a bit and also the contrast and as it's nice and sharp we can add a little bit of structure as well now the color of his fur isn't quite right and it's not going to match the background that i want to achieve but we worry about that at the end that's step nine looking on my notes so right now i'm just going to bump up the clarity and contrast a bit so if we turn off just dog layer that's before and that's after so that's just crisping him up a little bit and seeing all that fantastic detail and everything so that's good enough for now i just saw a question uh flashbuy from uh luigi how can i go from brush and hand tool so fast so all the cursor tools along the top here they all have keyboard shortcuts so h for hand tool b for brush sorry helps if you're on capture one h for hand tool b for brush and so on if you want to look up any shortcuts just go to edit edit keyboard shortcuts and you can see exactly what does what so if i type in brush for example i can see various different brush commands there if i type in mask then you can see clear mask draw masks cursor tools draw mask and and so on so very easy to find those different things but good question great uh david you must be looking at my notes which are on the left of me if i copy the mask on a new layer inverted it then i'd have the background absolutely so that is what we are going to do next so we're going to make a new layer and we're going to call this background soften and color grade like so now we've already got the dog so as david says who's peaking at my notes um we can already use that and just flip it so if we right click and say copy mask from just dog like so so that's just giving me the same mask again now if i say right click and say invert mask that's just going to flip it so now we've got our background like so so what i want to do on this background first of all is to darken it a little bit and also throw in a bit of a color grade um as well so to darken it i'm just going to bring down the brightness somewhat like so so that's just now if we go all the way down and if we bring exposure down then we can obviously see what our mask looks like so it's not perfect but it doesn't need to be because we're not actually cutting something out so i'm going to bring that down and then we're going to use the color balance tool to just put in a bit of a caller tint i was trying to kind of reference off if you look at the uh the edit chris has done on um on his instagram then you'll see what i was trying to get to i mean chris is far more talented than me uh in photoshop so he was doing a lot of photoshop to get to this but my challenge was to try and do the same in capture one so we want a bit of a cooler tint uh in shadows and mid-tones as well something like that now to soften it because we've got all the water spray which you could agree you might like or may not like um but i'd noticed chris had softened it a little bit as well so i wanted to see how i could do that and there really is only kind of one way to do that in capture one is with clarity and structure there is no blur at all but i thought how would clarity if i just put these both to minus 100 how it works and it actually does not a bad job now we could decide how much how far you wanted to go with that like do you like seeing the uh the water droplets or do you not but the benefit of splitting this all up on a different layer you could vary that exactly how you want it but i've gone for maybe not that much let's just back it off a little bit like so so if we turn this layer off then you can see the effect like so so we're color grading it and softening it a little bit at the same time so david uh well spotted um now at the moment it looks a little bit kind of um dog is kind of in front of a fake background somewhat and again chatting to chris he said he likes to try and make it so that the animal is leaping sort of i guess from dark to light so we kind of want to create a vignette but make it look a little bit more believable um as well so my next plan is to kind of brighten this area a little bit if we can and kind of darken the bottom corner and sort of do a radial at the same time as well said this was a bit challenging so i'm going to make another new layer and we're going to call this bright spot and what i'm going to do actually i'm going to fill this layer so i'm going to right click and fill it if i press m on the keyboard then you can see that's a mask on the whole photo itself so what i want to do is use a tool to just kind of brighten that area now on the layer below i had background soften and color grade so you could say why don't you just punch a hole in that but i kind of want to separate my bright spot out in case you want to vary the opacity later so keeping all the edits separate means that i can go back through this and play around with the opacity a little bit as well if i wish so for my bright spot i'm going to do the opposite of what i did on the layer below and just brighten it somewhat as well so probably that's as bright as i want to go so now what i'm going to do is right click and say clear mask like so grab my brush make this nice and big and super soft and a nice low flow and by lowering the flow it's going to let me brush in gradually so now what i want to do is just kind of brush loosely over here a bit more up in the top right hand corner just to kind of brighten this area a little bit as well now if i do too much i can just bring the opacity down a touch and if i turn this on and off you can see what it's doing like so so i think i'd leave that what i might do is grab my eraser right click and make that a bit smaller and i just don't want to brighten him too much i'm just going to erase a bit of the mask i did so if we do the same trick we did with the uh grayscale mask and say display grayscale mask then you can see the little bright spot i've made in the corner that was the dog's head because i don't want his fur to get too bright as someone rightly said you know the detail is pretty amazing uh what we can see i mean it's a cracking action shot for sure focus dog love it um so if we turn that layer on and off that's giving us like a little brighten bit in the corner but he still looks a little bit like he's floating against this background so my next action point on my notes is to make uh a radial mask that's just going to kind of darken this corner down a little bit as well and then this corner down as well just to give kind of a creative um vignette so let's make a new layer and i'm going to call this radial mask mask grab our radial mask brush which is this guy over here and then draw from the center this will give us a circle but i want to kind of rotate it just by grabbing the middle line and then making sure it's roughly over the dog and then feathering it a bit nicer as well and if you grab the handles then you can change the shape of it so i say if i press m now you can see the kind of radio i'm going to get which i think i'm pretty happy with so again i'll use brightness i won't use exposure because it will make the darker areas even darker whereas brightness is going to bring the mid tones down as you can see like so so just peering at my monitor there's a reflection depending how far we want to go with that i'm going to go with something like that which i think isolates him nicely so if i turn the radial mask on and off you can see the change like so uh yes oxy you can get to the hand tool just by pressing spacebar so if you want to just use the hand tool spacebar same as photoshop that's actually a really handy shortcut but i forget it as well okay now checking my notes he still looks like a little bit floating i want him to go from dark to light so i want to darken just this corner a bit so what we're going to make with another adjustment layer is a bottom grad so grab the gradient tool and i'm going to drag up from the corner to something like that if i press m on the keyboard you can see the mask might not be feathered enough let's see so now if i take my brightness down that's just going to darken that corner a bit more so he's kind of bursting out of the shadows let's just fix my crop a little bit so he's bursting out of the shadows into the light kind of thing now the last thing that we have to do or almost the last thing is just play with the color a little bit and i had long chats with chris about this and i haven't quite nailed uh his technique as as well as i could but um in some of the discussions you know when we talked about high-end pet photography which is a thing and again look at chris's instagram it's got some fantastic shots on there um now color grading the sort of cinematic feel is really important so right now his fur doesn't really kind of match what's going on with the background or that look and feel so what we want to do is just make a layer that deals with the dog dug dog color tone now we could go anyway with the color tone to be honest and so i'm going to make another new layer and we call this dog color like so and we've already got that mask so we can right click and say copy mask from just dog now you might ask why just don't i use that layer because on this layer this was our clarity and contrast so if i want to go back and just play with opacity a bit or a few other things it's just nice to keep it separated so if we press m on our keyboard that's just this guy again so i'll go to the advanced color editor and try and mimic what chris taught me so if i go to the advanced tab and use my color picker and i'm just gonna pick kind of let's just go it's not really quite the right color tone in here so if i pick that let's just expand that out so that's gonna grab all of uh pretty much the greenish tone i guess that we're seeing here so now if i take the saturation down a touch and then pull the hue more in this direction then we can kind of correct it a little better as well so we do that again let's reset those sliders so if we pull the saturation down a bit and take the hue in this direction it just cleans it up a little bit more as well now i also experimented with the color balance tool so we could say well in the mid tones we could pretty much push you know the color in any direction so if you have got a color cast that's been picked up just go to the opposite direction in the color wheel but i think what hopefully what i've done with the color editor just kind of takes it out a bit fits with the background a little bit better um as well you've got all the sort of tunability uh in the world there uh to to fix it how however you want um nearly we're kind of there actually so now what we can do is just go back through the various different layers and think have we overdone anything or not so that was our adding trees if you remember we could fill that bit in if you like um i did a slightly better job on the other edits but spending a little bit more time getting it in nicely our heel layer was this guy down in the bottom corner who we've almost got rid of we could always bring yeah doesn't work changing the opacity this is just our dog that was clarity clarity just so we remember so if we zoom in to a hundred percent i'm actually going a bit closer so this was just adding a bit of clarity and contrast so that's before and after just so we can see all that frozen motion if you like looks really super good so again let's turn that on and off uh next one this was our color grading on the background so background soften and color grade so that was our negative clarity and structure to soften that up a bit or you could go the other way if you wanted to see more of the water droplets and and so on then we had our bright spot which was to just kind of lighten this corner a bit which again i might actually bring it up to the max so if i think i could do a bit more i could grab my brush again right click let's make it a bit smaller so i don't get his nose and then we could just brighten up these areas a little bit as well like so so that was our bright spot just so he's like got a bit forward motion not just vignetted the radial mask was to darken off the background so that looked like this and then a further bottom grad down here just to kind of darken this corner a little bit more so he's going from dark to light again and finally a little color editor tweak just to take out that tinge and reduce the saturation a bit so it's more in line with the background as well um andreas yes is color adjustment working only on the mask on the selected layer yeah exactly now there's a chance that we could have done it on the background but i think it would have interfered with the color grade that we already had with the tree line uh so on uh and so forth so it wasn't worth the risk doing it and we already had the mask anyway so it was easy just to copy the mask from something else and then just play around with the color editor for example um let's have a look at your other questions um [Music] after the layers mask if i change the crop of the mask following the crop keeping the proportions well remember i've only masked inside this area so if we change the crop like if we look at our masks for example so let's if you we do option m so you can see what the masks look like so there's in grayscale mask bottom grad radial mask and so on so i could change the crop a little bit but obviously if i went outside of what i've done with my bright spot then i'd probably need to add to it but you can see how the masks look as we flip through that's that guy in there and there's our adding of trees like so so yes and no so you might have to do a little bit of mask fiddling if you dramatically change your crop afterwards as well um let's see tom says blending layers would be awesome photoshop killer for sure well who knows what comes in the future um i think uh um adding the cloning and heal and things like the refine mask which doesn't get a great deal of use but it's really super useful so all those kinds of things can work really really nicely together to do more complex tasks like this as well and complete all of that in capture one and again if you wanted to heal out some of the little water spots or whatever then you could also do that on a healing layer but i think they look pretty cool as they're like over the rest of his body so personally that's not something i would do what i might do on the background is because we've muted the frisbee a bit on our background layer i could pick this color and then we could just give that maybe a bit more saturation we could lighten it darken it whatever but i think it just lost its saturation a tiny bit like so so not too bad i thought i was going to struggle today if i'm honest to do that off the cuff so that's the one i kind of did a few days ago but without there's without the color correction on the dog so a little bit different that's one i did this morning a little bit different again and that's the one we did just now so it's really hard to to match and edit day to day but but the process and and what i did for each layer is uh is much the same which one is is the favorite i don't know i think i quite like this one actually but it's exactly uh the same process but i think the background looks uh a little bit nicer on this one but there we go let's just have a look at a few more questions can we watch this again yes of course so as soon as the live broadcast is is cut uh you can just go back and rewind it on facebook on youtube uh wherever you are that works fine um so yeah and it will stay there as well it's in a playlist on youtube uh you'll find them under the quick live playlist too uh let's see jeff could you subtract the mask from the dog to his bright spot layer so the dog is cut out of the mask you subtract them more uh no you couldn't i'm not quite sure what you want to achieve with that jeff but no so so you can't add different layers together i think that's probably what you know what you're looking for so there is no way to combine two different layers together items that we didn't use were feather mask which just softens the edges if you're looking for extra options here copy mask you saw as well but there's no way to say blend two layers together subtract or something like that but it's a good good question anyway um i think that was pretty good question question wise um let's say the shot with the crop make the dog look like it's flowing in space yeah yeah when you see uh when you see the crop like this it looks kind of wacky for sure um but i hope you found that interesting today uh if any questions come up uh afterwards then we can always answer them on social media as well okay thanks for joining again today so do check out chris's instagram thanks to chris for lending me some photos to work with there was a few others that i was going to have a try with uh as well again super awesome quality uh straight out of the camera but that's as far as i got with that one i think i had a little play with this guy so that's a different edit as well with us you know similar kind of principle of separating out the dog playing with the background as well trying to brighten a little bit but i didn't get as far with that one as i did with this one this guy was my focus to try and nail it for sure okay thanks for joining us today on another quick live uh be sure to join us again in the future thursday uh we have a webinar you'll find it on our learning hub learn.catch1.com it's also scheduled on youtube if you prefer to watch there and that's with our ambassador guest tina eisen and she's going to talk about her self-portraiture workflow um certainly over the past few months we've only been able to capture ourselves so she spoke about how she's managed to do that thanks everyone and see you all again soon take care bye now you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 11,605

Keywords:

Id: LSqed4SYegg

Length: 35min 55sec (2155 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020