Capture One 21 - Adding Definition to Portraits with the Dehaze Tool

[Music] hi everyone my name is walter rowe i'm a capture one affiliate today we're going to talk about a new feature in capture 121 called dehaze here i've got a portrait and i'm going to show you how i use the new dehaze tool for retouching portraits which i think is something certainly outside the box and unusual that you would not normally anticipate using dehaze on first let's go to the grid let's select a normal outdoor picture this is the kind of picture not necessarily this exact picture this kind of picture you would expect to use dehaze on if i hit the y key and show you the before and after you can see there is quite a bit of kind of fogginess haziness to this picture this is a little wren that was perched on a rail outside my window and i just stuck the camera up to the window and got the picture and it was kind of a foggy snowy day outside and this is what what i got and this is what i was able to do with it if i hold down the opt or alt key and hit the reset button on dehaze you can see what the picture looked like before applying dehaze and when i let go you can see how the haze has done a tremendous job of adding clarity and to this picture now this is kind of the traditional use of dehaze and this is what most people expect especially if you're doing outdoor landscapes uh it's a hazy afternoon uh you're taking a wide angle picture with broad distance and and things definitely always appear a bit hazier off in the distance just because you're looking through a lot of uh condensation in the air and things like that so this is kind of traditional things you would do with the haze and here you can see it really works and they've done a tremendous job of of implementing this tool one of the great benefits is they actually let you use the color picker most implementations of dehaze don't give you a color picker the application automatically picks a color in the frame and you apply the degree of dehaze but you don't have any control over which color tones are affected the application does everything for you capture one has gone one step further and that if you don't like the choice that it makes and it will initially make a choice for you it will do there is an auto setting and it will automatically try and pick a color to dehaze for you but if you don't like that color choice you can click on the picker the color picker pick a color in your image and then you can adjust away and here you can see the benefits of my doing so what i'm going to show you now is a is a non-traditional use of d haze you can see that i have some other portraits on the screen here and what i've learned is that you can use dehaze for doing portrait retouching traditional dodge and burn tools are typically levels and brightness and curves but what i have found is that in capture one when you apply those especially when you're using burn to darken areas sometimes you actually lose a bit of color and so the saturation goes away and it gets a little bit muddy and so you may end up having to do it on a layer paint it in with a mask and then maybe add a little saturation back or do a little color edit or something and that just uh you know it's more work and so what i've found is using dehaze i can actually use the color picker and pick the skin tone and i can still do it on a layer here i have a dehaze layer called definition where i've added definition to this face if i hit the m key you can see the red areas are where the mask is showing that i've applied adjustments and if i hit the m key again to hide it you can see you know and then i turn the layer off you can see just just a little difference and what you see is there's just a little bit of like darkening in some areas that um that i wanted to just use to just give a bit of more hint of um you know shadows and highlights and to me that adds more definition more dynamic image uh it's it's more beautiful and more attractive and by using the dehaze tool to do so i managed to retain the color as i did it so if i go and turn off the mask you can see that i've just you can see where areas just get a little bit darker and it just looks a little more attractive i'll zoom in to the gentleman's face you can just study where it's just just gives a little bit more the richness and depth and dimension to the uh to the portrait more pictures where i have even better examples here's a a portrait i did of a good friend of mine rob who's also a photographer we had gone on a little sunflower field outing that was on a farm and rob was standing in the in the shed of the farm at the door and had this wonderful light coming in shining on him and i had my flash on the camera so i did some flash illumination to ensure that we kind of filled in the shadows under the brim but when you have flash coming straight on to the front of the camera of course that tends to flatten the light and so it doesn't look all so pleasing even though he did have natural daylight uh and so we do have a little bit of so you know some shadows and highlights but not nearly what we would like to see and if i enable the mask on this layer you can see i've painted in quite a bit of areas where i wanted to do some darkening some burning to get more dark areas but i wanted to retain the color and here i actually have other layers which have the exact same mask on them but i've used different tools to demonstrate the effects so i've hidden the mask here this is the dehaze version of adding definition to the image and if i disable the layer you can see it's relatively flat if i enable the layer there's darkening in different areas i've contoured it and i've added much more dynamic dimension so i'm going to hide i'm going to disable that layer and let me go down to the next layer where i have the same mask applied but i'm using curves and what i want to illustrate in this version is specifically back in this area right here back in this area right here you're going to see how curves is kind of actually adding contrast in that area and i'm not really looking to do contrast and if i go back to the dehaze version i get some darkening but i don't get more contrast and so i've managed to to maintain the nice attractive blurred look and i'm not drawing attention to it by adding contrast i'm just darkening the area so curves actually can cannot apply the effect you want it can actually um add contrast in areas that you that you uh you don't want it to add and then i also said well let me try clarity well clarity is just another form of contrast and clarity works a little bit but clarity is really like a mid-tone contrast and it doesn't really darken darker areas so clarity is not very useful for for dodging i'm sorry for burning so when i go back to the using dehaze and i've applied just again negative eight brightness just a little bit and i can actually turn that off and then just see the effects of the dehaze alone without the brightness you can still see that it's applying a very nice uh darkening of the image here it's enabled here it's disabled uh and then just you know the the effects of of a little bit more brightness change to it just just enhances the the overall effect just a little bit more but the dehaze is the real power here because the haze is retaining that color as it darkens if i go back to the curves layer and i go back in here you can see where this is getting actually a little bit muddled back here and kind of losing some of its color in my opinion dehaze doesn't lose any of the color it retains the color because as dehaze darkens it also boosts saturation ever so slightly so as it darkens it's retaining that color so i think this is a really clever and interesting thing that i have discovered with with the haze here's another example where i have dehaze used same location this is my buddy rob again you know and i was just again just adding a little bit more dimension um i even did it on black and white it uh it works just as well on black and white uh yeah again i effectively copied this layer over from the color to the monochrome image and so you can see the effects it looks really nice it does a really wonderful job and then here's this lovely lady in a portrait by yourself and i can just see just slight darkening and where i've done here and you can see i've just now turned on the mask let's zoom in a little bit we're at 50 now and you can see the mask a little bit better i'll disable the mask i'll enable the mask disable a mask disable the layer you can see it just lightens up a little bit it's still a nice photo still a nice portrait but just just a touch more just gives it that extra little punch that i wanted and here the brightness i've only done to minus five instead of minus eight so it really doesn't take much combination of brightness with the d-haze to have this effect on portraits and i think this is just a really nice tool that i'm going to add to my arsenal for portrait retouching especially when i'm in conditions where i have a flash mounted on the camera and the uh the photograph may look a bit flat this particular setting for this photograph i did have a camera mounted flash so the image was a little flat this was inside of a barn but there was a big huge barn door that had some natural light in so you know there was a little side light that i had but the flash does flatten that out a bit so using de-haze and just painting in a mask and and adding a little negative brightness really um helped um add a little more definition and dimension that makes this uh just even better and uh this picture was taken in 2015. you can see the the date is actually in the file name this was five years ago uh and so i've been able to go back and look at some of my some of my early pictures and they were you know just make them even better and i'm really looking forward to being able to use this going forward when i uh when i do portrait retouching so that's uh that's dehaze for adding definition here's one more example i don't remember how well this one uh this was just a little bit this one's not such a great example but i think the others really really tell the story in particular my buddy rob here um you know you can you can clearly see the difference here you can use it anywhere the great thing about dehaze it is one of those tools you can use on a layer so you could pick different colors uh and apply it in different ways if a person had wardrobe things that you wanted to emphasize you could create another layer pick a color on the wardrobe and do things with the wardrobe so i mean there's just infinite possibilities with with this tool and i think it's going to be a really great addition i'm so glad that capture one has finally added this and not only will it be great for traditional uses such as landscape but i'm going to really enjoy using this in my portrait photography where i just need to do a little bit of of burning and i'm not as satisfied with what i can do with levels and dehaze and being able to use the color picker really just takes it to the next level thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this please use my links if you if you purchase things i am an affiliate i get a very small commission if you use my links i have no other affiliation with capture one other than getting a commission from you using my links i don't get paid by them to make these videos i don't i'm not an employee i'm not authorized to speak in any official capacity this is just me talking about why i love capture one and what they bring with each new update to the application thanks have a great day

Channel: Walter Rowe Photography

Views: 1,519

Keywords: Capture One, Photography, How-To, Raw Editor, Tutorial, Post Processing, Digital Asset Management, Capture One Sessions, Capture One Catalogs

Id: 96LIc2VlIe0

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020