Capture One 21 Live | Advancing your Landscape Edits

there we go sorry for the uh late start everybody and there was just a slight issue with the stream that was going out to youtube as well so that should uh now be fixed and then we should be okay so i'm just keeping my on youtube yes we're good to go so sorry about that everybody it was just uh a little mistake oh let me just turn off the sound on this one and then we won't get double sound all right so now we can start very sorry about that it was um just problem with the person sitting in the chair in front of you sending it to the wrong stream so i do apologize so we are all back in business now okay so to the case in point today we are talking about advancing uh your landscape edit so we've got a bit of theory to do as well which is slightly different to how i normally do it but what i did was look back through the q a log of the last time we did such an event talking about landscapes and pulled out some of the most questions so rather than you guys having to ask the top five questions which we'll look at in a second we can cover those beforehand so a little bit less editing today as usual but hopefully you will still find it useful okay before we get to that just a couple of housekeeping things if you're on youtube welcome again sorry for the delay feel free to put your questions uh comments in the chat and we shall respond to those uh we've got colleagues helping us across youtube facebook and if you're in the webinar room the same as well so you might see a mysterious reply from diego or one of our other fantastic colleagues as well if you are in the webinar room if you want to ask a question try to pop it into the q a tab because it's just easier to separate separate it out from the main chat because it is rather busy today but do feel free to chat amongst yourselves there and help each other out and keep questions into the q a tab as well which i can see some of you have already found as well if you want a bit more space in the webinar room feel free to hide the chat just by clicking that little down arrow and that will expand out the window and give you a bit more space as well so let's get started as we're already five minutes late and talk about the top five things which tend to come up so exposure versus brightness what's the difference between those two contrast versus clarity rgb versus luma curves blacks versus shadows whites versus highlights so they all play a similar role in image editing but with some very subtle differences and it's nice to know the difference between those two so i've got that list in front of me on my piece of paper so let's start off by going to capture one and looking at exposure versus brightness so what we're going to do we're going to use this photo for this one and i've got let's hide our browser so we have a bit more space on screen i'll hide the tools at some point as well so the photos are a little bit larger but for the purpose of this demo it works quite nicely so these shots if we just turn on before and after the only thing i've done is just play with the white balance a bit and straighten them up but they are pretty much as they came out of camera nice shot from russell ord shot i think with the gfx 100 actually so if we grab exposure and we're going to look at our histogram as we do this so if we grab exposure and we're looking at the left hand photo and we're going to bump that up to whatever a reasonable amount so let's go to somewhere around here i'm not going to overcook it but to put it to what you and i would consider to be a reasonable exposure without getting it too bright now on this one we're going to do similar but what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring up the brightness and try and roughly match not super scientifically but roughly match the tone of the c in front of us like so so if we bring up the brightness squinty eye probably something around there i would say maybe a bit more let's go with that so what's the difference between the two so let's just zoom in a touch so we can see a bit better what i'm looking at is the highlights essentially so again if we flick between these two they don't look massively different but if we turn on our exposure warnings and let's go back to this guy on the side you can see on the one with it the exposure we've had more of a an impact on our highlights so again if we be even a little bit more aggressive and i push brightness up a little bit more again you can see we've got more of an aggressive hit on our highlights why is that well essentially what exposure does when you increase that it's the closest analogy if you like to changing the exposure in your camera so in capture one when you boost the exposure you're lifting all the tones in the photo at roughly the same rate when we're playing with the brightness again we're looking at the right hand side we are affecting the mid tones to a greater amount than the highlights and shadows so there's a little bit of protection built into those brighter tones you can even see it down the front here so if you look at the density down at the front here it's a little bit darker than it is on the one where we boosted the exposure so it's a good strategy if you want to brighten a photo but you want some protection on the highlights is to use brightness instead of exposure there's also no reason why you can't use a combination of the two which we will do so probably in a couple of other edits as we get to it as well and again you can see it's pretty clear there as well so exposure brightens everything by the same amount bright brightness more of a focus on the mid-tones easy all right let's have a look at contrast versus clarity i think was the next one on our list let's actually use the same photo why not this time though we don't need to look at two per se we're just going to look at one let's fix our exposure turn off our exposure warnings we don't need those let's just brighten this photo up a little bit and as i said there's nothing wrong with using a combination so as this is fairly dark just looking at oh that's interesting let's reset our levels just looking at our levels there which had disappeared momentarily i would probably bring this up to something like that just being mindful of our highlights okay so contrast versus clarity what's the difference well the common thing is they're both contrast adjustments but again they affect the photo in different ways now when we pull the contrast slider it's very easy to see what's going on so if we yank the contrast slider to the right let's do that you can pretty much see what's going on so keep in mind that these are our shadows on the left these are our highlights on the right as we drag that contrast slider to the right we're essentially pinching each side of our histogram and we're making all the blacks darker and we're making all the whites brighter so you see that histogram then spreads across the tonal range which is perfectly fine nothing wrong with that but of course if we push it too hard then we're in danger of the darker areas getting too dark and the brighter areas if we tap on our exposure warnings getting too bright so it's something that we just need to be a little bit mindful of so let's reset contrast back to the bottom and remember as we pulled this what the histogram was doing so hold that thought if you like if we go to clarity and we drag our clarity slider and let's be quite aggressive so as we pull that back and forth like so notice how the endpoints of the histogram are relatively static so there's not a huge amount of change going on on the shadows and the highlights so very minimal in that respect so what is happening well the bulk of the contrast change is now happening to the midtones so if we just drop clarity back down for a second you can see the histogram really if i do it nice and slowly really isn't changing a huge amount so we're getting again some protection to the shadows and highlights in the same way that using the brightness slider had some protection to our highlights but it's still a contrast adjustment just in the mid tones now one thing i forgot to chat about earlier this morning when we spoke about this is what is structure doing again that's a similar thing i'm just going to pull up this shot for a second it's a little bit we're going to edit this later but if we just zoom in to this area of detail over here imagine the same thing happening but just on a much smaller scale in terms of of a pixel scale so let's go to 200 because you might be able to see it easier and if we pull up the structure again we wouldn't just to emphasize we wouldn't pull it this much if we were doing a nice proper edit but just to show you what's going on so structure the clues in the name improves the structure of areas that have fine details so grass foliage fur on animals feather architectural details interior details those kinds of things now structure won't magic up detail which isn't there so if you have a soft image or one that perhaps has a bit of camera shake let's just fix that over the top structure so if i go to a photo that's a little bit on the softer side so you can see the focus is or its camera shake is not quite there it might be some diffraction of as its f22 if we bring up the structure yes we can liberate a bit more detail but again that's something we'd have to be using with care so it's still a kind of contrast adjustment but just happening on a very very small contrast like level okay let's just go back to this photo to check in to make sure we don't have millions of questions piling up let's see let's see let's check our q a tab [Music] david for contrast is it similar with curves that's a good question to tackle actually and we will talk about curves very shortly when we talk about rgb versus luma curves so that's a good question uh to segue into that as well any other questions then please let me know regards to today's subject but i think diego's answering like a boss and picking up most things okay curves let's just pick up we can go back to this shot again i'm just going to open up something else which you don't need to know about just in the background cool all right let's find our curves and let's kick that off right let's get rid of our histogram for a second and we've got our shot here and we're going to do a quick edit on this handy little landscape tip going to grab our straighten tool here and just draw along the horizon we do this for real on a shot we're going to edit in a second but that would just rotate the photo about that point and i'll just bring up the exposure a tiny bit and then we're going to clone this a few times so let's just lift the exposure a touch and then we're going to clone this four times or three times to look at the difference between rgb and luma curve so let's do a clone variant a clone variant that's a virtual copy using the same adjustments and let's lay these up in a nice grid so just with the shift select like so so four photos here what are we going to do with them we're going to look at the difference between rgb luma curves and the control slider now the reason why i picked this photo is that it's got obviously some nice saturated sky foreground and also some saturated foliage over on the left here which is important for our experiment so the first one i'm going to leave alone the second one we're going to put a dose of capture one's contrast slider in tell you what i just brighten them up they're a little bit on the dark side still so let's brighten these all up by the same amount so the first one we leave at zero this one we're going to throw in a good old bit of normal contrast slider not heavy amount let's just go for 20 25 points i'll push it a bit more than we normally would in the edit again just to show the reason why let's go to our curves and we're going to throw in an rgb curve now going back to uh the question sorry i can't remember who asked that was john maybe uh miguel miguel sorry that was miguel our curves creating contrast well they are affecting the tonal range of the photo which could of course create contrast so if we wanted to make this shot more contrasty using the curve it's as simple as grabbing a point on the curve again we've got shadows bottom left highlights top right and changing the tone of that so down here if we want to make our shadows darker then we would just pull this down if we wanted to make the highlights lighter then we would pull this up mid-tones we could go again either way if i reset that let's turn you off sorry if i reset that and we went in the other way then we could reduce contrast so simple as that but for this experiment we're going to draw an s curve and pump in a fair amount of contrast again going a bit over the top than what we normally would and for this one we're going to go to our luma curve and throw in a similar amount of contrast i'll try to match the contrast roughly with the luma one on the left thereabouts but already i hope you can see a difference let's just hide my face for a second so you can see what's going on so if you remember to recap top left was our control so no change on that top right was just with a bit of contrast on the slider we're going to come back to that bottom left was our rgb curve bottom right was the luma curve so let's look at the two at the bottom first of all so what can you tell me about the image on the left well it's more contrasty but what's happened to the colors so saturation has gone blowing up pretty high so the blue sky is bluer the lake is bluer the foliage on the left hand side if we zoom into that that's got an increase in saturation and so on so a consequence of using an rgb curve as well as the contrast going up because we've drawn that s-curve then our saturation goes up as well now if we look at our luma curve let's just hide me again for a second so you can see what's going on switch to the luma tab you can see the contrast has gone up but the color is completely stable so there's no change in our color saturation certainly if you just look at the bottom two now you can see on the left it's super saturated on the right actually very similar to the original so what the luma curve does separates out changing the color information so you can manipulate contrast or manipulate your curve without affecting your colors so it's a very powerful tool if you want to dial in some contrast but keep your colors nice and stable so what was the point of doing this one which just used the humble old slider at the top so the contrast slider sits somewhere in between these two which why it is a great tool for adjusting contrast some other time curves always give you the most power and precision but the contrast slider is not to be seen as a completely useless dumb slider because it's actually quite sophisticated so it sits somewhere in between an rgb curve and a luma curve so it's almost the best of both worlds you can push it quite hard without it going bananas and completely over saturating but always curves will give you the most precision so like everything it's uh use the right tool for the job that's a great question what are the advantages of using curves over levels it's two different things really i would say you're using the levels tool to set the base contrast and we do that right in a in a moment and then you're using a contrast tool like clarity or the curves or the contrast slider to dial in the amount of contrast that you would like so let's do that when we come to edit more photos we do that once we've covered off our last two things blacks versus shadows whites versus highlights that's a good comment from christian for skin the contrast slider in capture one is king for sure it works especially when on skin without completely ruining ruining skin tones if you do an rgb curve on a skin tone it's really not desirable at all so blacks versus shadows let's open up this shot and we're gonna have a look at that um let's look in the q a tab again good good question from david actually the luma curve seems to desaturate slightly it doesn't actually desaturate slightly it's almost a trick of the eye so david if you think of positioning yourself next to these lovely cyclists on screen we've got a nice bright sunshine it's probably earlier in the day or later in the day the colors of the trees are going to look nice and vibrant and saturated blue skies will look fantastic and so on it's what your brain visually expects if we go to a super dull miserable day color saturation drops grasses blur you know we don't have a nice blue sky and so on so when you add contrast with the luma curve your brain is actually expecting color saturation to go up so it's a bit of a trick of the eye the saturation is actually totally stable it doesn't go down doesn't go up it's just luminosity values which are changing so it's not desaturating but it can look a bit weird to the eye because it's not what we expect okay blacks versus shadows so looking at this photo i'm pretty sure there's no editing on this so which is great look at this photo and tell yourself what do you think are the darkest areas of this photo so i'm going to say probably down here is pretty dark if i just hide me for a second over here and kind of this bit these are all like the darkest areas of the photo agreed good just bring me back so those are the darkest areas of the photo so if we bring out our high dynamic range tool highlight shadows whites and blacks let's lift the shadows so increase the shadows further first of all and see what's going on we could also bring out our histogram let's stick these two together so we've got a little double floating tool so let's lift our shadows and watch what's happening with the histogram first so you can see that's quite a big change in those lower three-quarter tones watch watch watch watch what is happening to the photo so you can see the trees are getting brighter the trees over here are lifting the ground in front is getting brighter it's quite a dramatic change so again remember what the histogram was doing let's go to blacks let's open up the blacks like so and look at what the histogram is doing so it's a much less dramatic change really this area here some of the deepest blacks are getting pushed to the right to some extent but it's nowhere near as dramatic as this shadow boost like so so the shadows affect a relatively broad range of the lower three-quarter tones the blacks are really focused just on the darkest parts now there's no reason why you can't use these in combination which we will also do on another edit as well now in terms of highlights versus whites you can probably guess that's a similar kind of thing going on so let's bring up this photo let's use our handy annotations once more so what do you consider are the brightest parts of this photo now this photo's got a little bit of editing on it let's just pull that out so the brightest part of the photo is probably in the center here maybe to some extent i don't know over here a little bit bit as well but that is the brightest area of the picture so let's see what happens when we pull highlights have a look at the histogram see it's a relatively drastic change in the top three quarter tones those tones get pushed over to the left therefore lowering their density what happens to the photo so you can see pretty much all this zone all of the brighter parts of the sea foam get dropped in tone as we would expect what happens with the whites see how it's just the tail end of the histogram experiencing the change not that bigger chunk on the right hand side and the effect on the photo it's really just affecting this central part once more so when we pull the whites down it's more targeted into that area so the those four sliders give you loads of control on the end points of your photo so blacks and whites very critical shadows and highlights less critical broader range no reason why you can't use them in combination as well now the last thing was to talk about levels to some extent so let's do it with this photo so let's reset the levels so far this photo just has a little exposure boost let's bring that back so that's given us a good start point in terms of exposure let's put these away get off high dynamic range put you back there and put you let's just put you under there for a second and bring the levels up so we've got a good start point for exposure now the question was when should you use curves and levels you should actually use both of them or you should use levels in combination with the contrast adjustment of your choice so with levels on this photo there's no information on this side of the photo so there's nothing going on between here on the scale and here and there's nothing really going on shadow wise so what that gives us visually is a photo which is potentially a bit flat or low in contrast so there's two things that you can do in the levels tool you can press auto which is the magic wand up here and hey presto or you can gradually set these yourself now under the auto adjustment for this photo i feel that's a bit too strong because this photo actually lends itself to being a little bit softer and not you know not quite so contrasty so i would personally pull those back out a bit especially the shadow slider because i don't want those areas to be too dark otherwise it's dominating the photo what's actually happening to the shot let's pull these two back and reset this so we've got a number at the bottom 255 and a number at the top remember zero is black 255 is pure white so what we're asking capture one to do is take the number at the bottom and re-map it to the number at the top which sounds horribly scientific but i guess the best explanation we can give is that imagine you're pinching either end of the histogram and then you're stretching it out across the full tonal range so right now if you look on my screen the number at the bottom is 238 being remapped to 255. so we're stretching out the histogram like so giving us a nice correct histogram or tonal range now obviously the further i push this in the more we're stretching out the histogram at the top to the point where it starts to look really ugly because we're cutting off or clipping that data so we don't want to do that so often auto is a good policy but if it's a little bit too aggressive you can just pull that back so now we have the base setting in terms of contrast if we wanted to add more contrast we could play around with our curves or we could use our contrast slider and so on all i would say is if you then at some point play with contrast after setting your levels just make sure you're not clipping off any data because it may affect the histogram to some point okay i hope that was a helpful uh explanation let's check our q a tab uh let's see would the rgb slider booster to bring out the greens in the water good question alistair he was asking about the best way to bring out the greens in the water we're going to edit this photo later so let's think about that how about going into each color instead of rgb well if you did that patsy then you're actually starting to influence the color on the shot so having single singular channel curves is a way to color grade if you want to know a bit about how to use these then a few quick lives ago we had zoe noble come on and did some color grading comparing the curves uh to the color balance tool so slightly different tasks but if i just went to blue and pull this down then you can see what's going on so if you want to mess around with the colors then you can play with the individual color channels but it's a different result okay uh which one that's also a good question wrong mouse david we've got two computers and i'm going between both of them which one do you suggest we should use first use contrast tools or adjusting levels i would adjust the levels first okay so let's actually now we're dispensed with our theory you had enough boring theory now people let's actually edit some photos so let's um edit this one as we're on there so let's go back to the beginning i'm going to reset my workspace as i've made a mess of that and we're going to reset the photo so it's as is out of camera first thing i want to do is rotate it a little bit as i can't really see a horizon i'm not going to use the straighten tool i'm going to go into my lens tool tab go to rotation and flip and just use the cursor keys up and down which i find is a nice way just to nudge the rotation a little bit so if you look at my keyboard all i need to do is just bump up the cursor keys a bit if i hold down shift and use up and down then that gives me 0.1 of a degree rotation without the shift key then it's 0.001 so it's a nice way just to jog rotation without using the slider or alternatively hovering on the outside of the crop tool which can obviously move the photo quite fast so let's crop this down to something like that how's that looking for rotation again i've probably gone a bit too far so let's pull that back slightly okay so before we get to playing around with levels contrast and all that kind of thing white balance for me i personally would just warm this up a little bit so we get a bit more of the color of the wave showing through i prefer that exposure wise just bringing up the levels tool for a second it's not bad it's sitting to the left-hand side of the histogram so it's probably a little bit under so to bring up the brightness then we could either use exposure but i'm mindful of not losing too much detail there so personally i would bring up the exposure a tad and then also the brightness a little bit as well and we can bring back the highlights if we need to this is the point where i would think about playing with the levels before i get to playing with anything else so i'd also level it and personally i think that's too much it's now looking a little bit harsh so i would bring those more the blacks out a bit because i don't want that to get that to be too dark and then highlight-wise how are we doing for highlight retention everything's in range but if i did want to pull those back a bit i wouldn't bring the highlights down because it then starts to make it a bit muddy it's nice to have that brightness if anything i might bring the the whites down a small amount because we're not looking to flatten the image off even if you have the best camera in the world and it has this you know massive of dynamic range it doesn't mean we have to show that all it doesn't mean we have to look into the darkest shadows see everything in the brightest highlights because we don't experience the world like that so why do we necessarily want to do that in a photo so it's also a case of keeping it real now we've got a good start point of exposure setting the levels we can think about contrast do i actually want to have a bit more contrast or clarity i'm guessing probably not what i might like is a bit of extra clarity so if we pull up the clarity i like what it's doing in the middle but i don't so much like what it's doing around the sky so what i would prefer to do is focus my clarity on the central subject and that's totally acceptable to do that now the way i personally would do that obviously is using a layer but i always like to visualize the adjustments that's coming in so if we make a new filled adjustment layer and we're going to call that clarity and i'm going to dial in the amount of clarity which i think looks nice and all i'm looking at is the middle bit here i don't care that it's messing up the sky right now i'm seeing the impact that it has on the part of the photo i'm interested in so if we turn the layer off and back on then we can see what it's doing i've probably pushed it harder than i need because we're going to brush it in nice and gradually just to clarify this was a filled layer so if i press m on my keyboard you can see the layer is masking the whole shot so anything i do on that layer is going to affect the whole photo but what i'm going to do now is right click on it and clear the mask so that will get rid of the mask but still leave my underlying adjustments now i can grab my brush which is going to be nice and big and a nice low flow and what a low flow means is that it allows us to build up that clarity adjustment gradually so it's not going to slam in in one brush stroke it's going to build up in slower increments so now by brushing then we can just dial in this clarity where i feel it looks the nicest and it's happening super slowly so to you probably doesn't look like much is going on but if we turn clarity off and back on just giving that little bit of extra definition in the middle like so but kept the rest of our photo as it was before the last thing i want to do is something to do with the sky so if we pull out our color editor i generally go to advanced because i'm more used to that tool doesn't mean that basic doesn't work but i just like the comfort of having the maximum control over the color range that i'm going to edit so with our advanced color editor we click on the color we want to edit capture one gives me an indication of what that color pick is which is the little dot in the middle and it's over here in the teal scale so now i have a decision to make do i want to push the color in this direction or do i want to go in this direction so if i go over here we're getting closer to the teal range if i go this way then it's going to push it more towards blue i actually which is surprising prefer to knock the color out of it a bit and actually make it a little bit brighter like so so i'm happy with that if we turn that off and back on then you can see the edit that we've done with the color so simple as that if we turn on before you can see as we came out of camera and as we did with a few simple adjustments not a lot going on there in terms of edits but quite a big impact to the the photo and really a lot of this is is a juggling act between those different sliders curves adjustment so it's always a good sanity check that once you're done if you have played with your levels just make sure that you're not clipping any data very important i did see an earlier question sorry i can't remember who asked it what's the middle thing for in the levels it's similar to brightness if we want to say in the most simplistic way so if i push it this way you notice how the histogram will start walking its way towards the shadows so darkening the mid tones down pushing them towards the shadows if we go in this direction it's doing the opposite it's pushing those mid-tones towards the highlights but it's not as sophisticated as the brightness slider in a way because you see if i just wrap this back and forward if we wanted to brighten the mid tones you see it's having quite a large effect on the shadows as well but it's a good slider to play with once you've set your exposure roughly in the right spot and you've set your levels then do have a play with it and think actually everything looks good push towards the brighter end to some extent so it's still it's not redundant slider just appreciate the difference between the brightness slider okay um let's check some questions lots from david lots of david's i know it is a very uh common name good one from sirdal should we always obey exposure warnings when we edit our photos yes and no i mean if you let's just turn exposure warnings on so we can just see a few little warnings popping up there what's my preferences set to those are fairly aggressive i'd probably have it more sat around here i don't personally use the exposure warnings a lot it probably depends on the quality of display you have if you don't trust your display then it could be a good idea to have exposure warnings on but pretty much on the displays i'm working with it becomes very obvious visually if you're going out of range either way so i tend to find it distracting having the exposure warnings on because i can't see what's going on half of the time and also if you get into the habit of editing to the exposure warnings sometimes you can end up with two flat photos because that as i said in the real world we don't see into every deep shadow we don't see into every highlight so if you're always going by exposure warnings i personally feel you lose the creative element of what a realistic photo looks like so it's potentially a good sanity check but i don't like to edit with them on now for exposure warnings and printing yes there's a couple of people asked about that i think it's good to know if you're anywhere out of range which would be a good sanity check to do at the end just to make sure but again if you've got a specular highlight let's say you've got a chrome chair with the sun blasting off it you're never going to get any detail in that so trying to pull highlight sliders back to fill in a specular highlight will just end up ruining the shot so specular highlights are not necessarily a bad thing so just really keep keep that in mind okay um sorry that we can't get to all your questions we are dealing with a couple of thousand people so if we answered all the questions you'd just be listening to me answer questions so i'm just picking out as many things as possible um okay i think that that answers some common ones and we do our best to answer other ones by text on the threads and so on moving on let's do another edit how we doing for time 15 minutes gosh time flies when you're having fun let's grab paul's photo i know paul was watching earlier so he can abuse me if i make a complete hash of his image so this is a great shot um shot with a phase one camera 28 millimeter lens i believe uh the first thing i'm going to do is just switch the bass characteristics to pro standard pro standards are new way of profiling cameras you see the default here is try chromatic flash flash doesn't really make sense for this shot so let's switch that to pro standard pool being pool it's pretty good exposure as i would expect white balance wise i think paul edited this cooler but i actually don't mind it as shot so we can argue about that later on i quite like it with a bit of warmth as i said exposure-wise is pretty good i would be hesitant to push the exposure too much because we're going to lose these lovely warm tones in the background so if anything that would be a gradual push and then brightness i would put up a tiny bit as well and then at this point i'd hit my auto levels and see what the effect that had and again be mindful that i don't want to clip anything so if anything you could always check your exposure warnings so we are losing some highlights at the top but remember my exposure warnings are set quite aggressively if we look at the numbers up here nothing is out of range so that doesn't bother me at all now if i was editing to those exposure warnings i'd be doing that and potentially making the photo too flat as well so just be a bit mindful of editing always blindly to the exposure warnings nothing's out of range it's all happy as far as i'm concerned let's throw in a crop so i'm just going to crop the bottom a little bit and in terms of straightness if you want if you customize your toolbar if this is something you think you're going to use a lot is grab the guides icon if we turn on our guides then we get some lines we can see on screen use your pointy cursor cursor tool and then we can just drag it on and check our horizon now i don't know if that's just the shape of the lake or if it's a little bit wonky so i'm going to compromise and go halfway and just give that a little bit of a spin like so if you want to add more grids and guides go under view customize guides add horizontal add vertical you can change the guide color if it's a little bit easier to see and so on so lots of customization there going back to paul's edit contrast wise i'm pretty much sold on how the colors are looking so i don't really want to introduce any more saturation i think it's lovely nice subtle tones so i'd be mindful of using an rgb curve we'd probably be fine with a contrast curve but for extra pedancy in this case i would pick a luminosity curve a good tip here in the preset if you find that you're always adding several points on your curves there is a preset called the five point all channels which just stamps on five points for you so if we choose that preset then we get one two three four five points which allows us to pull the shadows a little bit and i'm just gonna lift those ever so slightly like so so just a little tickle of contrast it really doesn't need much as it was shot a great time of day so it doesn't really need me messing with it a great deal now as i said i play with the shadow and black sliders in combination why would i want to do that so if i lifted let's bring this tool out if we lifted the shadows a touch so we can see a bit more over here then quite a good place to pull the blacks down i'm doing it aggressively i won't do it that much because it just makes sure that our lower shadows don't get too flat if you remember when we did our scientific experiment when we lift up the shadows it affects quite a big chunk of the the tonal range so if you want to keep your darkest tones a bit richer there's no reason why you can't counteract that with by pulling the black slider down like so so let's pull that back do we need a bit of clarity i saw paul is still here so he's probably crying into his computer about what i'm doing with this shot but in terms of the different clarity methods this shot looks nice with a little dollop of of clarity natural punch neutral and classic it's generally if you like a slight history of capture one so classic is a very old method from capture one six use it with care some people like using it i don't personally if you push it too hard let's ramp it up you end up with the old classic uh halos around high contrast areas like this so you can see what it it's doing and around the rocks so you have to be really careful with it and generally can do that neutral was the improved method that arrived with capture one seven or eight i think natural is the most up-to-date one if you like allows you to push it the hardest gives you the most natural results clues in the name and punch is a slight variation of that which boosts up the saturation as well so if we go let's just push it more aggressively if we go natural watch the sky or watch the cloud if we go punch so it's just picking up a bit more of that color tone there but again natural generally is the way forward so let's pop that back something i've done is a bit on the aggressive side so let's just fix that okay it's a little bit too harsh now what i did this morning with this photo was um i thought there was a bit of a rock imbalance in terms that this one is quite nice and contrasty this one's got a bit more light on it and it's a bit brighter so i tend to be focused on this one more than the overall scene so what we can do is if we just zoom in a little bit tons of detail so we might throw a bit of clarity in sorry structure in shortly but before we do that i'm going to make a new field adjustment layer and think about what we could do for rock number one to make it a little bit closer in contrast to rock number two so again if we play with our luma curve now this is affecting the whole shot but i'm only really looking at what it's doing to this guy so that's as aggressive i would make it so if we turn that layer on and off to see what it's doing i'm going to call this rock one and then right click and clear that mask grab our brush nice small brush nice soft brush nice low flow and then if i zoom in ever so slightly we can just put a bit of that additional contrast into this point now again it's happening very slowly so for you watching at home you might wonder is anything happening if we turn this off and back on just a little subtle change which brings it brings it closer in contrast to the one on the left hand side and as i said overall as this is super super sharp let's put in a little tickle of structure as well but not too much because if you overcook it then it's just going to look unpleasant to the eye so let's just do a few points of structure like so because we've got all that detail it's nice to liberate it would look fantastic on a print as well now the last thing uh let's just crop in a little bit tighter the last thing that i would possibly do um looking at the sky what do we want to do with that let's pick out the tones in the sky as well with the other one we kicked it towards a more tealy tone by going in that direction or we could go in this direction and make it more blue i think i actually like it a bit more blue in this case can we do anything with the warm tones in the cloud if i pick that up if i saturate that does it start to look a bit ridiculous possibly so if anything that would be a very subtle adjustment so there's a little bit more of a hint in it but nothing more than that so if we turn on before and after that's how we came out of camera and then that's after a few little bits is paul still talking to me yes i think he is that's good so let's have a look at your questions can we try black and white landscape michael says yes we're going to have a look at that in a minute black and white is lovely for sure so that's what we will end with i think as we're almost uh out of time let's just check questions over here uh let's see is there a different well that's a good one from sebastian and i can see a couple of people have asked that talking about saturation is there a difference between the saturation slider in the exposure tab and one with the color tab yes there absolutely is so let's turn off before and after so what sebastian's asking is is there a difference to this slider saturation so if we pull that up and down compared to uh this slider saturation so if we were to just go to our basic and choose the entire color range if we pull saturation here and let's ruin paul's photo by bringing that all the way to the right what this saturation slider does is look at every single color range and boost it by the same amount regardless so it's just uh whatever you are red pink blue purple orange whether you're very saturated or not saturated you get more saturation so by pushing that up we saturate everything the one over here in the exposure tab if we increase this one colors that are more saturated receive less treatment than those that are not so it has a bit of care taking going on there as well you can also do this in the advanced color editor if we make a new where's my plus button if we make a new one then we end up with this range and if we pull up saturation then that's doing a similar thing but there's you know there's no hand holding we can go to 200 and completely ruin a photo as well so it's entirely possible to mess up your shot by using saturation in the color editor but if you need to boost everything then it's a good valid valid tool okay let's finish with because we talk about dehaze and also black and white so where's my nice black not my nice black and white shot correction this is a lovely black and white photo from steve gosling of the river nid uh in knitterdale up in the north of england now let's just reset this so it's colour shot obviously we will make it black and white again exposure spot on we could pretty much say i'm done just by looking at this photo now the tempting thing is is to say oh this is a great candidate for d haze which it is because d haze works really nicely on this photo so if we pull up the haze then we can remove a lot of that fogginess i feel the shadows get a bit too dark but we could just open up the shadows and the blacks a touch and then say job done um i think for myself just because we have a tool that can dehaze doesn't mean you always have to use it because the whole beauty and purpose of this shot was the foggy aspect um the reason why i'm talking about d haze here is because it is a very powerful tool and is great for removing atmospheric haze that is an unintended consequence of your photo uh but to remove you know something that was there uh as part of the scene i think it's it's less valid for from personal experience how is it different to clarity contrast levels those questions always come up as as well d-haze is a combination of many different things going under the hood so it's adding some contrast it's adding a bit of clarity it's tweaking the color slightly it's a whole combination of different things which is great because it can be a big time saver but of course it takes the pedancy if you like away from you or the full control away from you so use it use it with care it's a great shortcut for some of those shots but of course just because you can remove haze doesn't mean you need to in actual fact this shot actually looks nice with a bit of extra haze so let's come back to that so if i was to edit this and there was a question i think from bob um the order of adjustments hopefully bob you've been seeing that i've been doing things in relatively similar ways so first of all we look at the shop we decide what the exposure is like steve's pretty much nailed this i'd give it a tiny boost of brightness if i was being pedantic hit auto on the levels decide what that's doing again this photograph looks really quite nice as a low contrast so i don't mind that it's flat to be honest and then at this point i would probably stop with this photo because it looks so good as it is in terms of high dynamic range then that was what i tweaked earlier so as i said this one almost looks better by flattening it off or the opposite actually because it's nice to have that brighter impression there's probably some sun sneaking in the background so we could boost up our highlights as well and give us a little bit of contrast and almost do that as well so it's a bit of an anti-thesis to what we would normally edit because if we were not looking at the photo and we were looking at our histogram we'd say eek we have some missing information here i must bring my shadow slider all the way to the left so that's not always the case cropping wise i'm just going to bring that crop up like so um and if we wanted to do this as a black and white that's what we were doing lost myself for a second it's a always nice to use the variant functionality if you're playing with black and whites so we've got our color version so under the image menu we can say new variant or clone variant so i'm going to clone this which is going to give me variant number three an exact virtual copy of this edit here so there's no difference to that doesn't duplicate the raw file it's just um a virtual copy so it's another photo that capture one can work with without having to duplicate the raw file so now this one we're going to turn on black and white enable black and white let's just collapse the color editor so it's easier for you guys to see now these sliders control the density of those color tones in the photo now this photo is almost devoid of all color tones because well as you could see if we turn enable black and white off there's not a whole heap of color going on here so i don't expect these with the exception of the yellows and greens maybe tiny bit down here to change much density in the photo maybe a little bit of blue in the river perhaps probably nothing for magenta so depending on the content of your photo these will have a dramatic effect or they will not have a great deal of effect so they're not broken uh if nothing is is happening so i'm kind of happy we've reached the limit really of what we can do with that tool and then generally when i'm playing with contrast on a black and white i always like to go with the curves it's very rare i pull around the contrast slider with the black and white because i don't get any choice about exactly where i want to place those tones or what which tones i want to darken and so on so if anything with our subtle edit i personally would like to make this area a bit brighter because i like the idea that the sun is trying to burst its way through our clouds in the background even though if we pull the highlights all the way down there's actually a tree back there doesn't mean that i feel i need to represent it so i'm going to pull this back in the opposite direction because i like that brightness again just because your camera has this fabulous dynamic range doesn't necessarily mean you have to display it so i think that makes quite a nice edit as well um someone asked that was um increasing haze mr manjo great name yes we can so if i do a new field adjustment layer where's our haze tool dehaze so we can go negatively and that will add more haze which can be might be quite nice on this picture so i wouldn't do it over the whole shot i would let's just call this haze let's clear that hazy mask grab myself a big brush big big big big big and if anything i would put a bit more haze in this v around here so if we gradually paint that v in so relatively slowly and then stop where i think it's kind of about right that's probably a bit too much but the beauty of doing it on our layer is that we can just rack this opacity back and stop around i'm gonna go for that now if we turn the haze off and back on again it's just a little bit more missed if you like in this area at the front so adding haze is actually a really nice treatment that you can do to a photograph as well so there we go that was um just over an hour actually so there's tons of things more that we could have spoken about unfortunately an hour isn't really long enough for this subject of landscape editing because we didn't look at the gradient filter which i might have done on paul's shot but if you go back to last week's webinar we use gradient and radials quite a lot so you can always watch that recording but fortunately there is another resource who just happened to be hanging around on this webinar which is paul reefer one of our ambassadors uh paul has a pretty lively youtube channel so let's bring up this shot and paul's editing is generally focused around landscape editing as well so if you are not a member of paul's channel youtube.com paul reefer easy to remember and the unique thing about paul's channel is that of course he not only edits his photos but it's gener generally centered around editing your photos so you can submit your photos say paul i'm struggling with this how would you edit my shot and then on paul's youtube live broadcasts one was just before this one hello to anyone who joined from that uh you get the opportunity to see what would paul do and there's a lovely shot of paul in mid pose talking something very specific about the histogram pretty much what we spoke about earlier so not only do you get editing but you also get some technical insight as well so do check out paul he's also a great resource for this and if you're into landscapes you can watch landscapes every week something else i'd encourage you to do as well is sign up for our various social media channels we've just finished up a competition on our green challenge that we were running and we had some nice prizes for the red challenge that was running earlier so that was red and green no prizes for guessing what's coming next so i would encourage you to sign up to our social media media channels we'll put them in the chat but if you look for capture one pro on youtube if you look for capture one pro on instagram if you look for capture one pro on facebook they're pretty easy to find so do sign up so that you can get involved with the competition and win some nice prizes we had three fujifilm cameras to give away as an example so it's well worth giving us a follow on those channels and there we go they're just coming in now so i'm just going to copy paste this link so that i can add that over on the webinar engine as well so let's just have a last few little look at any questions oh it's already there so our instagram link is up in the webinar room as well if you didn't miss it scroll up if you didn't um sorry for not being able to answer everyone's questions but when we've got a couple of thousand people if not more asking them all it's just a case of of having to pick and choose but do go and bother paul uh next week sometime come back and bother me on tuesday where we have another quick live session most likely um i'll be putting up new webinars over the next few days so look on our youtube channel look on our learning hub learn.capture1.com there's lots of different ways to find out what's going on and any event we do that's live also goes up on our facebook events as well so you will be able to find us thanks for joining uh today everybody again sorry we couldn't answer everybody's questions um but i hope you understand and i hope you come back again and we do this all again another time so enjoy your weekend when it comes and see you all soon bye now you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 14,393

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: VOasKqmV0tw

Length: 64min 2sec (3842 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021