Capture One 21 Live | Five Photos, Five Edits

good afternoon or good morning everybody thanks for joining today's webinar from all over the world it's so nice to see such an international group um for those of you on youtube hello as well and for those of you on facebook hello too so it is rather a busy collection of people today but we will do our best to answer as many questions as possible uh i've got some colleagues helping us out on youtube and facebook and also if you're directly inside the webinar room itself then there's people helping us out there so you might hear from me you might hear from diego you might hear from yulia so before we get to that just a couple of housekeeping things if you are inside the webinar room itself if you want to ask a question just pop it into the q a tab that will just keep it separated out from the the main chat and just help me and diego who's in that area uh keep an eye on those things if you're in facebook or youtube just pop your question in the comments and we do our best to uh keep track of those as well if you're in the webinar room and you want a bit more space then you can always hide the chat by clicking on the little uh down arrow on the right hand side and that will give you a bit more real estate as well all right so the purpose of today is as always to edit some photos um so the photos we're gonna tackle you can see on screen right now now i've failed this morning and that we didn't get to all five uh we managed to do four so we'll see how we get to today so i might have to speed up a tiny bit but four is still pretty good 15 minutes a shot going through the various techniques now don't worry if these aren't the kind of photos that you shoot or work with uh any of the techniques that you see today you can always apply to your own work as well so don't be too concerned if it's not your kind of photo and these photos are chosen because they highlight some particular technique or feature or process or thought process those kinds of things so without further ado let's steam into the first one which is all the way over to alaska very apt for those of you in texas this probably looks something similar to what you're seeing outside your windows at the moment so i hope you're all okay um and this is a shot from my buddy chris gibbs out there as well now this photo's interesting let's just hide the browser and talk about stage one if you like so a bit of the process so what i tend to do before anything else and you don't have to do this but is to grab the crop tool and i like to start off by visualizing the crop i just find that mentally easier to start in that respect so rather than trying to edit and then crop i tend to like to start off with my crop and then i know where i'm going after that quick tip if you right click with the crop tool selected then you can bring up your various different aspect ratios i tend to be always working on constrained but if you like to go to a particular format or exact size then you can do so that just saves you a long press on the crop tool itself a right click is faster okay so i'm going to start with that crop and again before i do anything else this shot looks a little bit off on the white balance which is totally common for shooting in the snow it often comes out too cold or too warm it's just there's not enough data for the camera to give you an accurate white balance now generally snow is white so i'm going to just white balance off the front down here and neutralize this now what's going to happen later is that i will probably mess around with the color anyway i think i'm going to warm it up a little bit because i can see in the top left hand corner that we've got the sunburst coming through we've got this lovely scientific effect which the name escapes me of the halo of the sun so it'd be nice to enhance that a little bit or at least be faithful to what was there at the scene at time of capture so even though i'm going to mess up the color i still want to start from a not mess up enhance the color i still want to start from a neutral standpoint and we'll come back to that later with the color balance tool now next thing that i want to do is this is backlit slightly exposure's pretty good if we're looking at the levels in the histogram if i auto the histogram not a great deal is going to happen the shadows are just going to tuck in a little bit but we don't want to really brighten our highlights much more because um we're just going to lose all this lovely detail in the snow and everything but as the light is coming from back left a little bit personally i just want to brighten up the front slightly and also we're going to throw a bit of light and detail on here a bit later as well but before anything else we're going to grab our gradient mask tool i'm going to draw up the gradient just from the bottom left hand corner to something like this just so it's roughly following that contour this way sorry that contour of the mountains and right now if we press m on our keyboard we can see the mask now the falloff by default is quite gradual so it's going from 100 to this line at the bottom to 50 to zero from the line at the top and i want to so that's symmetrical i want to make it asymmetric so if we grab on our keyboard the option key then i can just pull this down slightly and extend it up just so the fall off is a little bit harsher if you like not harsh but just not as soft as the default roll off so now i'm happy with that i just want to brighten this area a little bit now if we look at where this sits on the histogram it's roughly this spike here so i'm not overly concerned with it suddenly blowing out it's not like the brightest areas up here it's kind of sitting in the mid tones so what i will do is i'll just use a curve to bump it up a little bit i don't want to use exposure as as we talk about in um as we go through the session exposure will affect all tones in the photo by the same amount and sometimes that's great sometimes that's not what we want and in this case i just want to bump up those tones a bit so if i just set a point here and bring that curve up a bit we can just have a bit of subtle light in the front here but nothing's going off the charts nothing's getting too bright but it's just pushing up the mid tones a bit but much less on our highlights so that's why i wouldn't use exposure just to brighten that particular area so that's one little trick we're going to do in terms of contrast and so on um if we go back to our background again i want to be quite subtle so i'm just going to do a little gentle s curve like so just to get a touch of contrast again if we go too far then we're going to lose all that nice detail and i personally don't feel this shot needs to be a big beefy contrasty shot because we've got all these lovely tones in the snow and everything it would be a shame to lose that so a tiny bit of contrast again with a curve on the background layer and let's add without going crazy some clarity too so at this point uh i'm happy with my overall contrast just about i'm not happy with the color but we're going to come back to that later and the only other thing is our centerpiece here our shack is that it's sitting in shadow to some extent and it's also got if i go into 200 percent for you guys it's also got some great detail on it and everything and if we look at the aperture f56 our depth of field is shallow-ish so i don't necessarily want to put a whole dollop of structure and clarity over the whole shot because that's not going to really benefit anything going on the back here it would be nice to just make this pop or if i was going to print this i would want this to look really super sharp and nice on the print as well so again if we go in a little bit more this is nice and sharp even our mountains in the background here are sharp but it's just rolling off once we get over to infinity so it'd be nice to target the sharpening there okay [Music] so what we're going to do for this we're going to name our layer as i should have done in the first place so we know what the heck's going on and we're going to start with a new field adjustment layer and we're going to call that hut why am i filling this because i want to see what adjustments work best for the hut so by filling the layer this allows me to dial in a few different adjustments and then we can see exactly how it's going to going to pan out so m again to hide the mask so what are we going to do here um let's add some structure and i'll go to 200 so you guys can see better so i'm going to add a few points of structure but not go crazy and we're also going to add a little bit of sharpening as well and if i zoom back out we can add some additional clarity to this area and i'm only really worrying what's going on here i don't care what's going on in the rest of the shot and because it's a bit dark let's open up the shadows a bit as well now by opening up the shadows it's not looking flat or anything but it's just got a bit more life to it as it did before so let's stop there now right now this adjustment is going over the whole shot which i don't want it to so if we turn this off and back on so i only really want it to happen on this area so we're going to clear our mask with a right click so right click brings up those options i'm going to clear our mask like so and then now we can brush it back exactly where we want it so using our brush cursor tool i'm going to right click so you can see the settings now there are various shortcuts you can employ to change these we talk about those a bit later but for now i won't use them because it's very hard for you to know what i'm doing otherwise so a right click to bring up these settings you're going to have a bigger brush and nice and soft and relatively low flow and what we're going to do is brush in those adjustments we just set so that was a bit of the clarity a bit of structure and opening up the shadows a little bit as well so that's all going to get brushed in in one hit the important thing is our last slider flow is going to allow us to build this adjustment up nice and slowly so flow at 100 means we would get all of that adjustment in one hit flow of three or two or a single digit means it will come in gradually and the more brush strokes i make will build up that adjustment so then we can feel when it's best to stop so now we can brush around here i'll just zoom out a little bit and if i press m on the keyboard you can barely see the mask because it's coming in very softly so i can just brush around this area and if i feel it's not coming in fast enough then we can always bump up the flow i'm going to do a little bit over here because that area was relatively sharp and the snow as well and what we do is once i've finished brushing in we can turn this layer on and off and then you can see the exact effect so if we turn hut off as before and after so it's just opened it up a little bit if i want more i could just probably bump up the flow a bit more and then brush this in and then you can see in this area i might keep this area a bit darker and then it's a bit brighter like so so now if we zoom out turn off hut you can see before and after if we go all the way to 100 100 or 200 percent now it's hard for you to see watching on youtube sometimes if we turn hut off then you can see before and after so a bit sharper a bit more detail opened up shadows in front all combined in one adjustment okay quick pause for questions i do want my best to answer some uh jerome said wouldn't brightness do the same it would but remember brightness uh what was that that was our front grad wasn't it jerome i believe so brightness would do a roughly similar thing but it depends if we reset this and we go to brightness over here i imagine yeah it's doing a similar thing so i think either result could work quite nicely but for peace of mind if you want to know exactly what your adjustment is doing then you can physically see that on the curve as well ramon says is there a way to add points on the curve without moving it and not a dumb question uh you can there's a preset called five points which is kind of designed for that really so if you choose that preset it just adds five points to the curve and doesn't move it so maybe give that one a go okay um let's have a look over in webinar room oh my goodness lots of questions i'm sure diego's answering feverishly over there which i can see here is i'll just see if there's any common ones um if i want well that's quite a good question from fernando if i want to match colors manually among pictures can i place one next to it to use as a reference yes exactly you can do that so what you would want to do is if i just bring up the browser let's just pop this one that was what i was playing around with yesterday you can say um i can't actually remember what it's called now that's embarrassing um it's called the compare variant um i think i know let's just type it in here compare set as compare there we go if all else fails use the search tool so it's under image so set as compare and that will lock one shot permanently into the viewer and then whatever photo you bring up it will just stick there so that's a really handy little feature that's a great question because that's something which doesn't come up very often so it's good to know okay that'll do for questions i would think right now and let's move on so sorry we can't answer all your questions but i'm sure you'll help each other out and my colleagues will as well all right so it's a little bit flat a little bit lacking in color maybe we will do something with the sky but let's think about color so we're going to isolate all color things to a new filled adjustment layer so let's call this color grading so first of all we know there's a little bit of warm stuff going on in the background which would be nice to enhance so if we go to our advanced color editor and just pick somewhere in here that will just pick up a little bit of the warm stuff over here so that was my picked point that dot is exactly where i wanted to is is exactly where i picked if i increase saturation it's essentially going to move that point towards the edge of of the circle so if we increase saturation you can now see the sky gets warmer behind and we can see the halo of our unknown scientific effect i'm waiting for someone to tell me what that is in the chat um and just enhances that a bit more and we can even bring lightness down and then we can darken that off a bit again it's super subtle so it's not doing a great deal i personally would probably not even do it that much just a little hint in the background like so and just to enhance our unknown inhaler also in the color grading layer or color balance as i said right at the start i neutralized the shot which you could argue was a waste of time because if i was going to mess with the color anyway but it's always nice to start from a neutral start point and then we can use a tool like the color balance tool to push it in whatever direction i would like so if we pull out the color balance tool and go to master very simply with the master tab wherever i pick up this little circle and push it in whatever direction will tint the image to that color just like putting a filter in front of the lens so for this one i would feel if i was chris and stood there in the snow i personally would think i would have a warmer feeling about the shot as opposed to a colder feeling color wise probably freezing cold obviously but color wise i think it'd be nice to enhance some of that warmth so i would just push my color tint all the way towards just around here like so not by much just a little bit i probably wouldn't put anything individual in the shadows myself and the only thing i can think of is maybe if we look at the shadow down here if it's getting not really i mean it's it's fairly neutral and it's warming up a little bit now because of that master tint so i think i would personally not do a great deal more to that so just needs that little push over that way and that works quite nicely now looking back uh retrospectively to the shot am i happy with that the only thing i might do on the background is just increase my contrast a touch more we had a good discussion this morning about would it make sense to de-haze the picture because of the background my personal response is is no because that's quite natural to how it would look and if we did dehaze the shot if we put some dehaze in if you like that kind of sky great but you have to push it quite a long way and then you're going to lose shadow detail in the front so if you do prefer more dramatic skies then we could make ourselves uh let's just do a new layer and call that sky and then if your personal preference is to have a bit more wallop on the sky mine isn't but if we were to just do a similar trick as we did before then we could decide what tools might look nice for the sky so maybe a few little tweaks of dehaze or perhaps even just a bit more clarity i personally would prefer and just making sure our highlights aren't too bright so if you like i prefer the subtle sky but if you want a bit more oomph then again separate it out into a layer like so pascal says isn't that a sun halo it happens if there is ice crystals in the air um it is but i'm sure it has a really cool scientific name and no one knew what it was this morning either so uh are testing you guys all right um i think that deals with that photo quite nicely so if we hit before and after that's how it came out camera actually chris was smart because if we look at his metadata he had a plus one exposure comp which makes sense in the snow because that always tricks cameras when you've got bright snow to underexpose so good catch chris because exposure is actually spot on out of camera so that's how it looks and then a few tweaks afterwards quite a difference in the default white balance that's for sure melissa says sundog there we go i like that name thanks emily your photo's up next so let's move to emily's photos and have a look so sun dogs there we go you guys are smarter than the morning crowd because no one knew it was called a sun dog all right let's have a look at emily shot of her flatmate and also fellow photographer brandi nicole as well you can find them both on instagram too and all over social media so this is i think straight out of camera and then the previous one this is emily's edit so i'm probably not going to be able to replicate that because she did a really nice job i'm going to try and do my own take on it but we're going to look at the skin tone tool in particular just how to even those up and again looking at the color balance tool as well because if i remember correctly this was shot with a few gels so there was a tiny bit of color correcting to go on as well so first of all let's throw in a crop because emily was leaning over by the looks of it so let's go to something like that oh we're also going to do a nice trick with the hair as well as i remember exposure's pretty good doesn't need much of a change contrast brightness saturation all nicely lit in camera so i might just bump it up a tiny bit and also just a couple of points of brightness if you don't know the difference between exposure and brightness the next photo and probably the one after that is a really good illustration of that so uh hold that thought so but for now we're going to go for a little exposure bump and a slight brightness bump i'm not going to add any clarity because the lighting on brandy's face is pretty spot-on so adding clarity is just going to pull that too far apart in terms of well if we do it if we just whack in some clarity it's just going to be overly harsh and then we're going to lose the nice lighting effect where it does look nice is actually on brandy's hair so if we gradually pull up the clarity and back down again you can see the effect as it has it has on our hair so that could be something we can chuck in on a local adjustment later as well but first of all i'm going to go to the color editor and just pick on the background relatively well saturated background so that dot is the picked point so i might just want to play with the background a little bit but we don't want it to affect brandy or at least we want to limit the amount of effect there is on brandy's face so the handy thing about the advanced color editor is that we can shape exactly what the color range should be so if we turn on view selected color range here everything will go to monochrome which is not part of that selection now this is our picked color so if we cut out some of the lower saturated reds that's going to lose a bit on the face if we come away from the skin tone side of things that's going to limit it a bit more this direction not a great deal is going to happen but we don't want to cut out anything so let's do that and if we bring the smoothness down that affects this fuzzy area around our border our actual color range so the fuzzy area is the roll off into the neighboring colors so if we have a really hard roll off then we almost isolate the background completely but we actually lose a little bit the saturation so i'm going to compromise around there and then now i just want to darken the background down a touch and if we could pull the hue in that direction you see it starts heading towards more magenta if we go in that direction it gets orangier but that's probably about the right color tone just a little tweak like that i like okay um what we're going to do now is make ourselves a new filled adjustment layer and this is going to be for this is going to be for our color grading or not color grading as such because with the color gels that was on this shot it's maybe a little bit too warm here skin tone generally sits around mid-tone kind of areas so with our color grading layer if we go and grab our color balance tool which is right here and we go to our mid tones so looking at the curve just so we can see our bigger histogram so roughly a mid tone i think you'd agree so in the mid tones part of the color balance tool if we go the opposite of the tone then we can take some of that out so if we went all this way that would be too far but if we just go a little bit away from the center then we can take some of that warmth out of the skin if we wish now this doesn't only apply to people this could apply to landscape street or whatever so if you see a cast in the shadows mid-tones and highlights and want to just correct for that go to the opposite of the color wheel so this is just a very minor tweak but it's just a tiny bit as you can see now i think emily did the same oh there we go almost almost exactly the same so there we go we're not completely um too far apart from each other so let's pop that back in there out the way and then we can look at the skin tone side of things so i see brandy's watching so sorry brandi i'm going to zoom in on your nose at some point so i do apologize in advance so color editor let's do another new filled adjustment layer and we're going to call this skin tone why am i doing everything on fill adjustment layers partially out of habit partially because it gives you some flexibility because we can separate out the adjustments into different layers so if i suddenly decide you know what that color grading wasn't a good idea it's very easy to turn it off it's very easy to reduce the effect of it with the opacity slider it just gives you a bit more flexibility rather than having to unravel what you did just all on the background layer if you like so it's partly habit but it's part technique as well so on our skin tone layer which is a filled mask so pressing m on my keyboard m for mask just turns it on and off the reason why it's filled is that first of all we can dial in the kind of skin tone edit that we think might be good so first of all i'm going to grab the color picker and we're going to zoom in on brandy sorry brandi and we're going to pick the target skin tone which i'm going to say is around here none of us have perfectly even skin so i'm a good example if you look you know under here there's a variant in skin tone probably around here under the chin or these areas you know skin tone naturally varies of course so it helps if we can pull all those together to a target if we wish of course now it's really good for if you're shooting kids as well because they often have quite varying skin tones babies noses often come up really warm for some unknown reason so lots of reasons why we could do this so i'm going to click on our desirable skin tone around here and that's going to give me a suggested color range and the pick skin so the dot is the exact color that was picked on our skin tone i'm going to make sure we capture all of brandy's skin tones so i'm going to expand out this area so this is our capture net if you like of all the skin tones now as we bring hue across to the right anything that is in our net is going to get transformed to that pick point so if i drag you all the way across then you'll see the skin tones even out it's also affecting our lips which we don't want but it's done a nice job if we turn off skin tone on and off by taking out some of those redder spots now obviously we don't want to carpet bomb the whole photo with that this is really just to dial in what would look good lightness will ruin emily's lighting so we're not going to touch that we're just going to stick to hue and saturation now we can clear that mask and set to brushing it back in another technique you could do depending on what makes sense if i just fill the mask once more so that's a field mask so you could argue why don't you just erase the bits that you don't need and sometimes that's more efficient but in this case we only want to do a little bit here maybe something down here maybe something here so that's more work to erase everything than brush it back in so let's clear our mask again zip back up here and once again we can do the same thing we can have a nice low flow probably lower than that so we can build it up where we want it so let's turn the mask off so we do a little bit down here no zoom sorry brandy and a bit more over here like so remember my flow's fairly low so i'm going to be brushing over it a fair amount going to avoid the lips because of course we want them to be the color that we considered hands arms legs skin tone always varies you don't necessarily put makeup on your hands obviously so there is going to be a disparity especially if it's close to someone's face or whatever but we wouldn't want to go completely crazy and have it exactly the same color as their face so i'm just going to do a little bit down there where it was probably most off so more there than we're going to do here and just a tiny bit over there and then finally just over in the corner there where the color gel is actually probably correct me if i'm wrong emily just skewing the color off a little bit so like so um if we turn our skin tone layer off and i'll zoom in again sorry brandy and turn skin tone on then you can just see that small correction that it's made but that's super easy to do any of you can do that it's no problem really to manage to accomplish that in capture one would be a lot harder to do that in photoshop as an example why does sliding the hue to the right make the color shift to the left on the color wheel well i guess it's either going clockwise or counterclockwise so it's got to go in one direction so that's the direction we picked uh picked i would assume um let's just check for questions over in the q a panel um let's see if you pick a color jan is asking from the skin tone and use the uniform sliders does moving the dot from the pit color affect the uniform sliders no that's a really good question what it does is affect your target color so this is what everything has been if you like pulled towards so if we change that then it's going to change your target skin color so let's do something really drastic so you can see so if i go all the way over here you can see exactly what it's doing it's you can see where i've brushed because it's pulled all the colors to my pick color so if i go back up here to roughly where it was now it looks much better so you can drag that dot around to fine-tune the color you've also got the amount slider so if you wanted to have an overall effect on the picked color then you would use these sliders here if you want to create uniformity within the range then you can do that as well okay um i think we should move on otherwise i will run out of time like before so let's do a quick before and after this was you know a small edit but it was just a nice technique that we did with the color balance tool and the skin tone oh and the hair as well uh speed edit on the hair so i'm just going to make a new layer and we call this hair we're not going to do any fancy tricks we're going to grab a brush max out the flow probably make it a bit softer and then we're just going to do a rough mask on the hair you might spend a bit more time doing this um like so and a bit over here as well said you might want to finesse this a little bit more and now if we grab our clarity slider then you can see we can just get an enhancement in the lighter versus the darker areas of the hair strands as well so that's just a really nice simple way to get a bit more definition like so because we didn't want to put clarity over the whole shot that would have completely messed it up and one comment was a bit overall brightness maybe so let's push it up a little bit more there we go all right um just checking questions that's a good one it's so much fun trying to match skin tone on someone with a farmer's tan guilty uh face one tone arms are the tone and no shirt means yet another tone on the chest yep there are limits of course but i would like to think the skin tone tool would certainly help you move into that direction as well okay uh let's move on to another shot thanks for all the chat comments and so on and for helping each other out as well and yeah a comment from mike inside the webinar room the skin tone tool also works great on sky variants it's definitely i did an edit on tuesday as part of our green competition that we've been running and one of the entries and i used the skin tone tool to even out a range of green tones on one area which i felt looked better as more even tones so just because it's called skin tone doesn't mean you have to use it on skin tones uh ray pan what is exactly the right skin tone good question there is no right skin tone really that's a very philosophical question in terms of what's the color grade you want to put on it if we ask brandi to jump on camera now i'm sure her skin won't look exactly the same as this so it's the color grading it's the makeup it's the look you want to achieve um high key low-key and so on but there are no three rgb numbers that are a perfect skin tone that's for sure okay um let's do this one this is i think as it comes out of camera and the reason why i picked this it's a really good indication of the difference between exposure and brightness and why using exposure to dodge and burn often doesn't work that well uh it's also a good exercise and this is john's edit this is from a photographer my buddy john wild goose great name and he was really the inspiration for me to remember darkroom techniques that i'd forgotten about because i grew up in the dark room and was very used to dodging and burning making silly shapes with your hands under the enlarger all that kind of stuff and forgot about that really when digital editing started because laziness or it was less prevalent but now as it's so easy to do it's really nice to bring those techniques back and john was a good inspiration for me to do that because you can see all his layers here he really analyzes the picture and breaks it down quite nicely and changing the light and shade to to really enhance the photo and i'd say the difference between this edited one is that our subject here on our deserted railway station stands out really nicely compared to the unedited one where he's overall lost uh in the picture um just saw that comment imagine you making funny handshapes in the darkroom exactly it's no fun really i do not miss the darkroom um okay so first of all exposure's pretty good out the gate so nothing too much to worry about there so we need to compress down the photo a bit so we're focused on this gentleman and we've got some brighter areas down the front brighter areas at the top so we need to just really shrink those tonal ranges down so we're more focused on our subject i am going to crop it a tiny bit like so i am going to pull the highlights down just to darken off those areas a touch because they're a little bit on the hot side this is fine because that gives a nice edge to him where he's bathed in light maybe we can hot enhance that further but let's start by making a grad bottom for one of a better word and just pulling up our gradient mask down here now i'm going to align this roughly with the platform and again using our option key or alt key if you're on a pc just pull this down like so so if i press m on my keyboard then we can see what we're making let's do that so it's a little bit on the bright side so again exposure and brightness difference between the two here if we pull down the exposure this gets very black very quickly because exposure is going to affect all the tones in the photo at the same rate if we pull down brightness that's going to have more of an effect on the mid tone so it's almost compressing this a little bit so i personally feel if we take exposure down so you see we're almost if you look at our rgb numbers at the top we're almost running out of detail there and i don't think that would print very nice it doesn't necessarily look as nice on screen but if we bring the brightness down we can pull down some of those mid tones we can still see some detail but it's not getting as crunchy or as or as blocked up as it would with exposure if anything i would do a subtle bit of exposure and more brightness so now that's taken some exposure out the bottom of the shot so we're not distracted by that next thing is to do oh that says grand bottom my goodness grad sorry grand grad bottom let's do another one and we call that grad top similar thing grab the gradient tool and go to something like that but we're going to attack this in a second way as well so let's just bring the brightness down a touch and what we're going to do is that these little puddles of light are quite nice so i don't want to get rid of those so we're going to go to around here but i do want to darken down the tops a bit more so we're going to darken the top even more that was one of john's layer names actually so let's do that next so we're going to make a new field adjustment layer and again let's say darken even more we're going to look at the difference between exposure and brightness so if i pull the exposure down so this is again a field layer if i pull the exposure exposure down and imagine now what i want to do is just paint in or burn in some of the detail around here so just darken that that off but using exposure it's also going to darken these white uh struts to some extent as well whereas if we use brightness it's going to have less of an effect so when i brush this in it's already doing some kind of automatic work for me because it's brushing around if you want to think of it that way those lighter areas so it's going to have a more natural effect there's nothing worse than looking at the shot that's been selectively darkened or burned in and it's obvious because you'll almost see these splodges and then it goes flat and it doesn't look good it's like lacking in contrast so if we do it this way then it's going to be much more believable for full control you could also think about using a curve so again that's down in the three-quarter tone so we could think well let's do that and make sure our highlights don't darken as well and that looks a little bit aggressive but again we're going to brush it in with flow so let's try that and see if that works so let's clear that mask we're going to grab our brush once more and i'm looking to paint in little wells of light like so so once again if i had my flow 100 and i started brushing looks pretty terrible and very obvious so that's why we don't have flow at 100 so we're going to turn this right down probably going to make this softer and now what we're going to do is just brush in where we see fit now if it's not happening happening fast enough then there's nothing to stop you then bumping up the flow a little bit as well but what i'm going to do is just darken off these areas and as i said if i've been using the exposure these white struts would have been darkened down somewhat as well and then it becomes really obvious what's going on so let's just darken down those corners like so so now if we turn off dark and even more it's just doing a little bit to the top like that but we're in enhancing these little puddles of light which i think look quite nice if you want to make it more aggressive then of course you could play around with the curve a bit more you could introduce another adjustment like if we pull the brightness down you can see what's happening if we pull exposure down you can really see now how that's gone mucky because it's also darkening those so that's why i wouldn't use exposure on this but let's darken it off like so and if you've gone too far then we can always bring our opacity down or back up as well now this same brush that is almost like a darkened mid-tone brush or darken three-quarter tone brush to some extent we might find it useful elsewhere so if i just brush over here and enhance that triangle which is almost behind this guy to darken that off a bit more is it doing much let's turn yeah it's just doing a little bit like so and again i'd probably darken off the edge of this platform here and the edge of the platform there and just some of that in the background and if i wanted to make this a bit darker we could probably handle that i'm talking about this is a taxi ramp apparently i might just pull the blacks down a bit like so so the blacks is the very darkest tone so that will just richen up that paintwork a little bit now for our fella here he's nicely silhouetted around it but i might be tempted to brighten him a tiny bit just so he stands out so once again what i'll do is i'll make a new field adjustment layer and think about the kind of adjustments so they're going to brighten him so i won't do exposure because if i'm sloppy with my brushing that's going to brighten the already bright area behind him so i'm going to pick adjustments that are focused just on the kind of tones that he's wearing if you like so he's a mid-tone he's a shadow so if we lift up the shadows that does a pretty good job of brightening him up so i'll push it more than i would use clear the mask grab our brush gonna need a much tinier brush and then we can open up the shadows a little bit along the side like so so he's not disappearing into shadow completely if we turn this layer off and back on then we can see the difference and i'm not worried about being sloppy and brushing onto [Music] this area round here because the shadow slider is not really going to affect that so much so even though my mask is most likely all over the place to some extent it's not going to affect what's going on here because the adjustment is not targeted to that so don't get too obsessed with making your miles super perfect generally they don't have to be okay um let's look at the before and after so there's before and there's after again fairly subtle but now he's popping out from the background a little bit more than it was the only thing i might do is that i'm going to look at john's edit in a minute is perhaps even crop that off but maybe that's too severe what did john do actually if all else fails what did the photographer who's responsible do so he darkened it off even more so he stand so he stood out even more as well so we're fairly close but you can see the difference between our two okay let's have a look at a couple of questions and see where we see we're going to go for there um right uh great edit david oh thank you you've given the image dimension and taken away flatness i can't really take credit for it i was pretty much drawn inspiration from john over there okay um a couple of people have been asking about luminosity masks sometimes they're certainly useful um in this case i don't think i would really find use for it and generally the the process of painting in the adjustments where you see fit i find more enjoyable that's important and often faster than sometimes using a luminosity mask but if you have a situation where a luminosity mask will clearly define an area that you want to target that would be difficult to mask by hand then i would absolutely use a luminosity mask so again every tool for the job a couple of people asking about the difference between flow and opacity as well the main difference between those flow and opacity quite a big difference really is that opacity if you like sets the upper limit for the opacity of your mask flow is the rate at which you will arrive at that opacity so let's say we had an exposure of plus one on a layer and we had a flow of 100 as soon as i brushed that in like you saw when i did the first brush up here as soon as we brush that in you would hit one exposure sorry plus one stop change straight away if we had opacity down at 50-ish and flow at 100 when i started brushing we would be at half a stop immediately of adjustment that i've brushed in if we had a layer with a plus one stop adjustment if we put flow down to one or two or something like that this will limit the amount of adjustment that is laid down or painted onto the photo whatever analogy sits best within your mind per brush stroke so with flow at four as it is on screen right now every brush stroke would be four percent until we reached our maximum opacity of a hundred so that would gradually build in the adjustment with all those brush strokes until we hit our max opacity in this case at 100 which would then be plus one stop if opacity was now down at 50 we would never ever get to plus one stop because opacity would max it out at that point so flow just allows you to build up your adjustment slowly so you can then put the brakes on it nicely and decide at what point it makes sense to stop because very rarely like you saw with that ugly splodge i brushed in at the corner very rarely it looks good if you're firing all the adjustment on a layer like so there's no um finesse to it but david you forgot to name your layer yes i did what even was this the man there we go that was brandy's sneaky comment in the background the final layer which john did on this john is a really diligent cleaner-upper and i won't go through you can see all the points that he's cleaned up i won't go through all of those but this is a good case for using the brush shortcut so if we wanted to clean up some of these distractions down here i would grab my healing brush and instead of right clicking and changing the size i would use the keyboard shortcut now if you have a wacom sometimes it interferes with the little heads-up display so you see that heads-up display so i'm holding down let's just turn on overhead keyboard so we've got control option like so and if i click drag left and right then we can change the size of the cursor but with wacom for some reason their driver interferes with the little heads up display that you saw and sometimes it doesn't show up which is super annoying i do need to update the driver so maybe that's part of it but drag left and right i'm dragging on my trackpad if i do it on the wacom you can see it as well so if i drag left and right then it changes the brush size but it also moves the brush it's another weird thing with the driver but if we're using a mouse where is my mouse turned off if you're using mouse or trackpad oh there we go it's back then you get the heads-up display like so so if i drag left and right we can make the brush bigger if i go up and down we can change the hardness so as i was saying let's turn that off as i was saying if you're doing a clean up then it makes sense to use that shortcut because then it becomes nice and speedy if you need to use a bigger brush so if i wanted to do a bigger brush for this rubbish here then i could just use that shortcut so again for this mark down here like so i'm going to make my brush smaller paint this out let's paint that out let's paint that out as i said john is very observant about all the various different distractions and so on so there we go that's a really good use case of that so that question when to use the airbrush option no clue actually i've never used it in my life so i don't know to be perfectly honest uh airbrush builds up over time as opposed to flow is movement based so i guess if you wanted to paint an adjustment on one spot and hold the brush there gradually moving it maybe it would work but i don't find it useful so sorry about that all right we better go to this shot before i'm even slower than i was earlier geez so but you guys have asked lots of good questions so that's why let's look at this one so this is by robin cena a lovely photographer in the uk shot with a equally lovely liker now this has a little bit more work to do but nothing drastic at all it's just slightly underexposed and this is a case where i would use exposure because it does make sense to shift all the tones to a brighter level so let's pull the exposure up looking at our levels i would probably stop around here and hit auto levels and that's just going to set my shadow and highlight points nicely now this area is a bit bright and a bit distracting but we can pull that down with highlights no problem whatsoever and in terms of fixing the photo job done so we could stop there what i think would be nice would be to have some clarity but the issue on this photo with that in clarity is that it ruins the lovely out of focus soft background so i think it looks quite good on her but not so good on the background it's too much so we want to separate that out so we could start by drawing a mask on her or we do it my method which is somewhat backwards which is the new field adjustment layer and then dialing in the level of adjustment you would like so i'm going to have a bit of clarity i might also add some extra highlight recovery to see if it takes the face down a bit but it doesn't so there's not much point so we just stick with clarity and sharpness wise a little bit of structure as well but not too much so now that is globally applied that clarity but as i said i don't really like what it does to the background so we're going to clear that mask and we're going to call that clarity face and we're going to do a similar thing now i'll probably push flow up a bit stronger here because i don't mind if it comes in quickly because i want it to be fairly aggressive so then we can just brush in clarity where we want to have it could even go stronger like so and if we turn clarity off you can see what that's doing so just a little slight improvement on contrast but we still get the lovely nice out-of-focus pocket background and so on the only other thing or two other things that i want to do for this picture is a small radial mask and again the way we use the radial mask is is quite interesting here or the adjustments that we put in to change the exposure of a radial mask very often you think exposure is the right move but it's not on this case i'm just going to bump up clarity a touch more as well so if we turn that off and on that looks good so we're going to make our radial or vignette whatever you want to call it grab our radial cursor this one here and a good tip where you start drawing means the radial expands out from the center so it's not the edge you're drawing it from it's it will burst out from the center so if you want the center of your radial to be around here which i do then as you start drawing it will expand out from that point same with the linear gradient we can change our fall off we can move it around we can't make it asym asymmetric so it's always 150 0 in terms of fall off so now if i want to darken the edges a bit the common thing to do is just start playing with exposure because i want to make something darker so let's pull exposure down so if we pull exposure down probably not that much then what i don't like is that the darker areas so this little bit of shadow here this shadow just over her shoulder gets too dark because again exposure is going to bring all those tones down by the same amount and that vignette becomes it's almost too harsh it's too obvious something doesn't look right so if we bring brightness down instead or probably even better a curve which we'll look at in a minute that's just going to pull the midtones down and we're not getting such a harsh look as we did before and if you want to be even more critical or pedantic whatever you want to call it we could think well i just want to darken tones a touch but let's not kill all the shadow detail like so so this will give you much more control so if we turn our radial vignette off and back on again then you can do so now you can also put a loomer range on top of that vignette if you wanted to cut out some tonal ranges generally that's a bit overkill because the adjustment you can put on can be tailored to the tonal range that you want to adjust but you can slap a luminosity mask on top of a radial if you wish so i would stick with that now going back to the background i might just up the exposure a bit more if you make any post exposure changes just make sure you haven't messed anything up with the levels that you haven't clipped so if i click on auto once more just to make sure i haven't done anything now the only last thing to do is that eyes are disappearing into shadow i assume it's somewhat backlit so if we make a new eye layer eyes actually let's fill it and we want to open up this area a bit there's probably not much detail in there so if i lift the shadows you can see we can see a bit more in there but we don't want it to go flat and nasty so let's put some bit of clarity back in now that's obviously too much for the whole shot but if i clear the mask grab a brush and i would be very careful here with flow and just open it up a tiny bit the right eye left eye right eye left eye probably a touch more than this one which is another good use case for flow because we can apply the same adjustment stronger in one area compared to another and if you want to see the difference if we turn on our display grayscale mask you can see it's brighter here which means we're applying more of the adjustment the adjustment compared to the left hand side here so that's another benefit of using flow it makes an adjustment on the photo more flexible because it can be applied in varying strengths across the shop okay let's come out of that you can find your display grayscale mask here or the shortcut or m for mask as well so mark said can you desaturate for a second let's just turn the eyes on and off going a bit closer so that's without the adjustment and width just a little bit not too much it just opens it up ever so slightly and in fact i think it's too much again the benefit of opacity is that we can retrospectively tweak our adjustments uh mark wants to see it black and white so let's just turn on black and white not bad not bad i would probably just add not using um sorry wrong i would probably go for a more contrasty black and white but with a bit more finesse than that but actually looks quite nice in black and white as well good tip if i was being david i tend to go for prefer lower saturation so i'd probably even end up with something like that personal preference all right well we did actually i was not as efficient as i was this morning damn it so we got through oh no we did get through four photos there we go i thought i'd only done three but we managed four not five um this shot also from robin uh very similar if we just look at the layer stack out here same thing with the radial mask if we look at that's just brightness so if we turn the radial mask on and off if we done the same thing with exposure it gets way too dark up here too quickly so then that case i would rather pull the radial down with brightness or once again drop the mid tones a bit make sure the shadows aren't too dark we've got a little brighten slight just on the center of her face we've got a darken just on this area that was a tad too bright and then adding some detail that was just a bit more sharpening in this area so similar techniques to what you've seen or did see throughout the rest of the transmission okay let's finish off with a couple of questions um [Music] thanks for the tip i always use exposure for vignettes and sometimes it works like if you had a a relatively even background it can look fine but once you start dropping into the shadows because even here that's getting a bit strong for my liking i would just pull this up a bit more or that might even be a case where i would put a luminosity mask on just to avoid the darkest darkest shadows or we could pull up the black slider a bit as well so we still get our radial mask look but we're not doing anything nasty in crushing the blacks so don't be afraid to go positive with this slider the blacks even if you've gone negative or you've created a curve yes mark we did desaturate for a quick minute i think it would look uh quite nice um just checking for common questions hell rob says that photo would look great in black and white there we go um brandi didn't know something was an option hopefully it was useful oh the airbrush one yeah if anyone has a useful use for airbrush please let me know i'm sure there is it's just not something i've found personally to be useful that's all so looking over in the webinar room diego's done great answering a million questions thanks to yulia over on facebook as well um i think we are pretty good let's have a look is there any trick to make the a wacom tablet recognized and make it work in mac os um generally i have to say um even though i was a bit mean about the wacom there generally it works very well if it's not showing up and you can see you can see it here if it's not showing up then generally if you're on uh catalina or or later or big sur it's probably a permissions issue wacom needs to have access to certain things so just check on the security preferences in particular and then you'll probably find a whole bunch of stuff there that you need to activate all right so thanks for joining us today sorry we overran a little bit and sorry we can answer a whole bunch of questions then it wouldn't even have been four edits it would have been two edits uh probably so i hope you found that informative and interesting if you want to join us again we're back next week on a thursday i believe where we're editing landscapes so that will also be on youtube if you're watching us on youtube and want to come back there when you exit the webinar if you haven't left already then you'll also be presented with the sign up page for that so you can always sign up straight away or catch it same time next week on youtube you can already see it scheduled on youtube as well and yes mike is recorded any of these that we broadcast live go straight to youtube they live there for eternity i would say um they will have a relatively long countdown until it gets trimmed uh but you can always fast forward if need be but they will be there straight away thanks for joining everybody and see you all in the future i hope and enjoy your weekends take care everyone bye now you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 14,650

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: E2f8FvokZ0w

Length: 69min 43sec (4183 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021