Capture One 21 Livestream: Edits | From RAW to WOW!

good afternoon everybody oh good morning sorry for the uh slightly late start just a little technical hitch over on youtube with the live stream so had to restart that and do a lot of other stuff in the background whilst keeping an eye on the webinar so apologies for that um and welcome um so for those of you on youtube and facebook uh hello there please feel free to drop in your questions uh into the chat and we've got my colleagues uh yulia and i think victor helping us out on the live stream as well for those of you in the webinar room please feel free to pop your questions in there as well there are rather a lot of you so we try and get to as many people as possible if you are in the webinar room just pop your questions in the q a that just keeps them separate out from the chat makes it a little bit easier for me to follow as well if you want a bit more real estate so you can see what you're doing feel free to hit that button and then that will give you more space on screen to see capture one as well for those of you on facebook and youtube uh just pop your questions in the chat and then we'll be able to answer those as well so hopefully all of the technology has come together and we can now start our webinar so fingers crossed all right let's get started so the name of this webinar is from raw to raw to wow if we can say it and really the goal here is just to give you some simple techniques which have you know outstanding results which is always the goal uh in capture one of course so we won't necessarily do anything super complicated but the point being that with just a few small tweaks and some considered changes you can actually get really nice results uh from your photo editing we'll have a look at the magic brush as well a couple of times as that's a new fun toy that we have to play with and see a couple of useful scenarios where that works very well and the reason why it's not always but sometimes the better tool to choose over others so that is the plan for today as long as the technology keeps working all right so let's go to thailand first of all don't worry if the kind of pictures that you're looking at are not your chosen photographic genre the techniques that we're going to look at today is or can be applied to any kind of photographic work so if you shoot things or people or places don't worry about it hopefully you'll just be able to translate to your own photographic work first of all looking at this shot the one on screen in thailand my editing approach really is that we tend to try and fix uh compositional stuff first so like crop rotation before we get into the nitty gritty of the actual photo editing that's just my personal preference because i find it hard to edit if the crop isn't optimal or if the horizon isn't straight like in this case so that's what i tend to fix first now you don't have to follow that i just personally find it easier so we're going to straighten up this shot we've got our straighten cursor tool at the top here so i'm going to draw along my horizon and that will rotate about that point easy that's our first fix something that we're going to talk about a fair amount in this webinar is also looking at the levels tool because it's an often overlooked tool and we can tell from analytics that it doesn't always get used as much as it should but it's a very important step in your editing process now looking at this shot what can you tell me about it what you know what do you think about the kind of things that we want to fix now looking kind of around the rocks here and so on we can tell it's a little bit hazy it's ever so slightly too flat but it's only in this area so looking at the sky looking at the water in front that's actually got a fairly reasonable contrast and one that looks sympathetic to the shot itself if we have a look at our levels tool let's just bring this guy out we can see we've got a pretty nice even spread of tonal range from shadows to highlights but we do have some missing information in the shadows and the highlights like so i'd probably also want to warm it up a tiny bit so let's just pull our kelvin slider across like so so that's taking out some of the coolness in the shadows which was creeping in now at this point before thinking about adding contrast to doing any other things it's really a good idea to pay attention to your levels tool so if i hit auto here what's happening we bring essentially our shadow and highlight points into either end of that histogram and really if we compare that with the histogram at the top here the reason why we have two of them which might seem confusing this is your input histogram if you like and this is the output so this is quite this is what it's going to look like when we export it and deliver it into photoshop or something like that but this is the final result of the tonal range of the picture of what we see here so really by moving these shadow and highlight points in we're gripping either end of that histogram and then stretching it out so it covers from shadows to highlights perfectly now if you don't understand any of that doesn't matter because really what we can see the result of having a good setting on our levels is that we remove some of that flatness haziness and so on just by tucking that in so that's something you can do as an early step in your editing process and we're going to look at that a few more times as well so don't worry if that hasn't sunk in so without doing a great deal what have we done to this shot so far we have really only kind of played with the levels and straightened it but if we look at our before and after that's already a marked improvement and we could stop there personally i feel this area probably it's getting some flare off the lens because i'm guessing the sun is around here somewhere just above my head we've got still a bit of haze atmospheric haze slightly low contrast in the rocked area but the sky is fine i kind of like how that looks the water is fine that looks nice and punchy so it'd be nice just to dehaze this area a bit now we have some choices of selection so this is where we would then move into just targeting this area now i could draw a mask i could try and luminosity mask it but this kind of range is probably going to get muddled in with the c so a luminosity mask might not be the best thing but it will be a very simple job for the new magic brush so if you've upgraded to 14.3 which i hope you have then you'll find the magic brush over here in the layers tool and it's got just a little description about it and a handy tutorial if you want to refresh what's going on so we're going to grab the magic brush here we're going to make sure that our mask is visible so we can see what it's doing we're going to right click which is going to show us our magic brush settings now size is fairly obvious tolerance and refine edge are the two that you're going to play with the most now the difference with say the magic brush and using the color editor to make a selection is that the color editor will only pick out color whereas what the magic brush is doing is picking out areas of similar pixels now we could say white is a color but white is a color that the color editor can't pick up if you like and we see that on another shot so hold that thought whereas the magic brush is very can very easily pick up areas of similar pixels whether they're white black bright blue pink red etc doesn't matter now the tolerance is really based on your selection which you're going to see i'm going to make in a minute is how much of a net we want to cast out to those similar pixels so a low tolerance will focus on really just what i've selected a higher tolerance will cast the net a bit wider refine edge we'll look at in a different shot so let's not discuss that now so i'm going to bump up the tolerance a bit i'm going to just draw a squiggle on our rocks like so and then the magic brush will calculate now that little window you may have seen pop up which said calculating magic brush will appear once so for the first magic brush you do on a shot now depending how many megapixels you're working with it you might see it for a long time you might see it for a very short time now the magic brush is additive so let's just fill in those gaps i'm going to do that let's just grab in those darker areas and that's pretty good so three swipes we've got a nice selection like so and i'm going to find my d haze tool and just bring that up a few points as well i don't want the blacks to get too crushed so i can open up the blacks a little bit as well and finally i'll add a bit of extra clarity so if we turn this adjustment layer off and back on then it's doing a nice job of just clearing up some of that atmospheric haze but it's focusing it on that area and then we're not putting in too much contrast down the front which is already fairly contrasty as you can see there's no benefit to adding a bit more but here if we turn this layer off you can just see that film of haze over the top and now it's cleaned up really nicely so very little we did to this shot we straightened it we fixed our levels which we're going to talk about in other shots so you can see it here and we did a very simple magic brush and a bit of dehaze and now we've actually got a nice result one thing to keep in mind with the levels always have a look at the end of your editing just make sure you're not clipping any data because we wouldn't want to be in that situation because that would look super ugly we want to make sure we're not cutting off any parts of our our histogram and last but not least one thing i just might pull the highlights back a little bit not much just to get slightly more detail on the right hand side and that's it okay let's see if we can pull out a few questions from the lots of questions that we have um let's see oh dick says that's a good question why is the kelvin color warmer the higher the number and not blue as i've always known it to be well what you're telling capture one here because you're quite quite right you'd expect if we went down here like a super low kelvin that would be really warm uh super high kelvin would be really cool so what you're doing here you're telling capture one the color temperature at which it was shot at if that makes sense so i know maybe it looks a bit weird on first glance but if you think of it as i want to warm up the photo a bit i want to call the photo down obviously not that much then that's uh then that's what we're looking at so i agree it might sound a bit wacky at first prasad maybe you're not thinking about in quite the right way does magic brush use color alone for selection or both color and tone isn't that the same thing i mean think of pixel values so if i select these pixels over here so we've got what is it like 240 242 246 so if i'm magic brushed over here it's going to look for similar pixels based on that tolerance okay so depending how broad the tolerance is then it's going to seek out those similar pixel values or a much wider tolerance i think that's the easiest way to think of it if you get stuck in color and tone and so on then maybe it won't help you use the tool so much jeff says can you do an automatic level setting on import you can do an auto adjust on import um but if let's just check something one minute um if we bring up our sorry it's right it's already there see under auto adjust so you can tick on what you want auto adjust to do so you've got a choice who was that gf i think it was so what you can do jeff is uncheck everything else and just have levels and if i had multiple photos selected and then we hit auto adjust then it would just do auto levels on those things so that's that's one way to do it jeff that's good question actually and i'm going to pick out one more question and then we will move on ed says that's a good question can you adjust tolerance and refine edge after the mask is drawn you can but probably not in the way you're thinking ed but on another shot we're going to do you'll see how you can actually do that so if you remember the magic brush was additive so it would keep adding to the mask when i add to the mask you can then tweak the tolerance and refine edge if you wish so it doesn't have to be the same for each additive like if i wanted to try and fill this guy in let's just try that if i did it with my current settings let's see what happens let's just turn display mask is on so if i did it with my current settings what's going to happen it's actually filling in a bit of the c so if i undo that and then make this tolerance much much smaller and let's just see if that works now i've just filled that bit in really nicely without really affecting my seascape so you can adjust it in between fill fills in or brush strokes whatever you want to call it but if now i wanted to retrospectively change the refine edge there would be a different way to do that and we look at that on another shot not the stupid question virinar you need to update to capture one 14.3 so that's the latest version of 21 and then you will see the magic brush appear so it's an update which we brought out two weeks ago i think which added that functionality okay let's move on to another photo what should we do next uh let's move actually up over to this shot and i picked out this shot for a very specific reason let's make sure we are reset have a quick drink and go on to this one now this shot looks pretty good out camera i think you all agree um one thing that springs to mind or a couple of things too it's a little bit low in contrast overall that's fine it's better to have not enough contrast than too much out of camera because it's easy to add some more in terms of uh white balance he looks pretty good might warm it up a bit but on the right hand side if we actually look at our rgb values let's pin a uh a point i can't remember which menu it's in where is it is it this one yes add a color readout so if we just stick a color readout around here you can see it's biased quite a bit there's a lot of blue going on so it's much colder now looking at this shot i find this area quite distracting because it's brighter and it's cooler so it's taking me away from looking at the subject which is this gentleman in the front so we want to balance this up a little better on this shot i'm going to show you one method and then a later shot we'll look at a slightly different method so for this shot we're going to have two white balances essentially so we're going to have our global white balance which is pretty good as it is now i might warm it up a tad potentially but not by much and then we're going to have a white balance just for this area and we're going to keep this little guy pinned up here so we can see the effect of it i've got a couple of choices i could kind of brush in a white balance over on the right hand side just by hand drawing a mask but this [Music] webinar is about quick wins essentially so what's the fastest way we can do it so we're going to grab our gradient mask because really the light is just moving across from just where my hand is now to over there in actually a nice gradient fall-off so by using the gradient cursor tool this guy here we can start drawing that's where the gradient will be the strongest and where i've finished drawing that's where the gradient will have faded to zero so if we look at this by pressing m on the keyboard you can see that fall off of the gradient mask now right now it's probably not ideal because i i want my different white balance because we've got two different white balances we're going to have going on here to kind of finish roughly here in the middle of his face so if i did that then we're going to leave this area too untouched because this is a hundred percent in terms of the opacity of our mask which will be a hundred percent of the correction that we put in by here it's faded to 50 and by here it's zero so i want a stronger or a harder fall off so i don't want this gradual fall off i want it to fall off a little bit harder so if i hold down option on my keyboard or alt if you're on windows we can actually change the fall off as you can see so it could be incredibly harsh or we can probably try something like that so now we're going to have a fall off which just starts to roll off and then is done by this point so let's hide the mask we're on our white balance layer here so let's bump up the kelvin so it's a little bit more sympathetic so let's go something like that and now if we look at our rgb readout then there's a lot less of a bias of blue on it so if we turn that white balance layer off you can see blue value 206 turn the white balance layer on blue values reduced a bit so now it's a little bit more even across the whole shot so it's much less distracting but we're not done yet so now that i'm kind of happy now that the white balance is even across the shot that's much less distracting let's get rid of this guy now so if we right click we can say delete all readouts or delete that one so you can go away that's this color readout tool should you want to use that in your own editing [Music] just having to think so as i said at the start it's a little bit flat overall lots of different ways we can dial in contrast but let's use the contrast slider because it does a great job so let's bump that up i don't mind if this is relatively contrasty as it's getting a bit on the heavy side we could open up our shadow slightly and to stop it looking too flat or too boring quite a good tactic is to go the opposite direction with the blacks obviously not that much because it's going to block it up but that just gives us a bit of richer shadow tones if you like but gives us the ability to open it up a little more like so i think i would also pop in some vignetting just to focus on him a little bit more again not too much but just to focus on his face so in terms of basic edits that's actually taking us a pretty good way but there's two other things that i think we can improve on one it's probably still a bit bright over here so what we could do is pull our highlights back down that would probably be enough now how far we want to go is up to you i think doing it that much almost now makes it look unrealistic because i kind of know that this is brighter in the background but i don't want it too bright i just want to take the edge off it a little bit but i don't want to then get into this situation where it looks you know horribly hdr you know we see a lot of editing like this you know i'm sure you'll see photo edits online where just because you have the dynamic range in the camera doesn't mean you have to fully exercise that because right now yes we can be impressed that this sony camera has tons of dynamic range does it look natural at all uh not particularly no so we're going to bring that back down to something a bit more sensible and we're going to bring that back up to something a bit more realistic as well now we still have this bright area on his mask for one of a better word which we might be able to get some back now if we grab our exposure slider and this is a good technique that you can do yourself as well if we pull the exposure all the way down to -4 stops you can see that it's still actually pretty bright so i would say that is a fairly big specular highlight which someone was asking about um earlier so with this can we deal with this specular highlight no but the thing is specular highlights if you remove a specular highlight it tends to look quite unnatural now as it is now this is a bit bright and it's a bit distracting i don't want to move the highlights down anymore because it's going to make this area too dark fortunately we have a handy style brush so if we find our built-in style brushes we've got highlights recover so all i need to do is select this and then go over onto my shop let's make the brush a bit bigger and softer and we're going to do a few swipes over here just to take the edge of that down a little bit but i'm not going to hope to completely remove that because i personally think then it will look unrealistic i'm probably even gonna lessen the impact by bringing the opacity down somewhat and the last thing we're gonna do his eyes are really important in this shot i feel so if we bring up our dodge style brush and then just a few little brushes under here just to open up his eyes slightly not by much five ten percent just so they're not quite as dark and i reckon if we go back to our background layer we can probably even afford to push the clarity up a little bit as well and again as we've done kind of quite a lot of moving around i would want to check that we're not clipping anything on our levels and we're not i might even be tempted to bring up the brightness by a few points not by much uh zephaniah what a great name um i prefer auto levels because it works what impact does levels have on the image and any reason why you prefer auto levels all we're doing with levels and we have a look at it in closer detail on another shot is that if we say auto we're asking capture one go away we're asking capture one to pull in the shadow and highlight points to the ends of the histogram and all auto does is save you having to manually do this basically so it's just saving you a couple of mouse clicks you can moderate the behavior of levels in the preferences oops excuse me under exposure you can see we've got some thresholds here so the default is actually being slightly cautious so it says just back it off the edge a little bit if you want to be even more cautious then you can increase that value but the default is by default slightly cautious so auto just saves you a bit of a mouse click more than anything else okay let's put the levels tool back where it belongs if we look at our before and after you can see that's how it came out of camera good exposure nothing wrong that the photographer's done nothing better that they could have done just the fact that this area is much colder and we can even it up to the rest of the shot tone down the highlights a bit over here make it a bit more contrasty and then lift up the exposure in the eyes like so close in the vignette just so it's a little bit more interesting uh let's turn that off okay i'm going to ask a couple of questions i saw um a lot coming in so i'll do my best to answer some uh let's see judy that's a good topical question actually what is the difference between opening contrast up between uh the blacks and the shadows so the blacks and the shadows let's pull open this one so blacks and shadows essentially do the same thing they just target different areas of of the photo so those two sliders can brighten or darken the shadows or the blacks respectively so when we talk about the shadows if we just bring out this guy when we talk about the shadows we're talking about this area of the picture so from this line here roughly to the darkest tones so when we pull the slider around we're affecting this chunk of the histogram and we can probably see that just by wiggling it back and forwards like so so you can see we're having a relatively big change over this area what the blacks does is exactly the same thing but focus down the end here so it's much more targeted to the very darkest tones so if we reset these two for a second if we wiggle the black slider around you can see it's not quite as dramatic as wiggling the shadow slider around so by opening up shadows and then by pulling the blacks down then it simply means that we can just avoid having that flatness in the photo if you like so just a little tweak of the black slider can make a massive difference to the picture sometimes uh okay let's reset my workspace as i've messed that up so that will put everything back to normal which is a nice shortcut and let's take one more question oh that's a good one from john with the levels tool what does moving the center arrow to it's kind of like a going to mess up my workspace again john it's kind of like playing with the mid-tones to some extent so you'll see if i pull this one to this one let's bring our histogram out so again if we look at the result of what this is doing so you can see that the whole histogram either gets shoved one way or the other but also look at what's happening with the highlights notice that they're kind of stuck in that position so it's quite sympathetic to not blowing out the highlights not blocking up the shadows so it's taking the bulk of the middle of the the tonal range and moving that left and right which is kind of what the brightness slider does which i'm sure we'll talk about in an edit very shortly so in saying that let's find another photo to edit what one are we going to do next let's go icebergs and a noseblow before i sneeze at you um let's go icebergs because this is definitely a good example of of a quick win and a shot that you might disregard you know because you think oh i've fluffed the exposure god the horizon's wonky it's really dingy the colors don't look right uh what a terrible photographer i am but there's absolutely nothing wrong with this capture it was shot on a phase one camera but if you'd shot this on you know an equally modern camera you've still got loads of data in there to be able to pull it around to produce the photo that you need so if we grab the straighten tool first of all and draw along our horizon we're going to be roughly something like that if you're not sure if you've drawn it in the right spot you can bring up your guides you can pull the guides around like so so that's slightly to do squinty at the screen it's actually slightly off i think so if you need to tweak it a little bit i find the best thing to do is go to your rotation and flip tool click into the box over here use your arrow keys up and down and then we can just jog that by point one so i'm gonna go for something like that and you can add as many of these guides as you like and you can also delete them as well oh look we can change the color as well didn't even know that there we go that makes them nice and easy to see so the guides are really handy for just leveling up if you hadn't found those before so we fixed our wonky horizon let's just make the crop a little bit more interesting and dynamic something like that should be nice and again looking at our levels we've got a couple of clues uh in our levels tool first of all we can see it's all bunched over to the left hand side so we know that it's underexposed i mean we can tell that by looking at the picture but if we were just looking at the the levels tool first thing we can see is well it's definitely a little bit too dark the second thing we can see is that our blue channel is kind of prominent over to the right hand side it's not sitting nicely over the rest of the shots so that can be an indication that maybe the white balance is off now i didn't take this picture i've never been to anywhere that has icebergs sadly so i'm not personally aware of what color an iceberg should be but that's a good indication this probably isn't quite right what i do know is that clouds are most likely gray so i can figure if i just click up on the grey clouds here that this is a fair representation of how the scene should look and actually notice how the three channels have kind of almost sat perfectly on top of each other you won't always see that because if you had a very dominant color in the scene it would override that so if we just very quickly look at something with blue sky that's totally obvious because there's a bunch of blue in the shot but on this particular shot i would actually expect the color channels to sit quite nicely on top of each other but it's still underexposed so if we pull our exposure up that's gonna have a nice effect like so and i'd be looking to sit that roughly in the middle of course if you wanted to mean a moody shot there would be no reason why you couldn't keep it darker but if we're going for something that's maybe technically correct if you like i'm going to set it roughly in the middle like so and once again we're going to hit the auto and hey presto our picture looks much much better because now we've got a correct tonal range from the shadows to the highlights also if we look at our iceberg we can see if we look at the clouds the rgb numbers line up they're pretty much identical indicating a gray if we go onto our iceberg you can see that there's a higher proportion of blue so that gives me confidence that okay i expect icebergs probably to have a blue tinge so i reckon my white balance is is about right now the only thing we did on this shot is bump up the exposure and hit auto levels and did our white balance so that's three things that would take you 10 seconds to do that click white balance click auto levels bump up the exposure and we've gone from if we turn on before and after muddy lifeless wrong color to something which actually looks very nice without having to do much more now i personally think that this shot has a bit more to give let's put the levels away so we've got some nice dramatic clouds can we do something with that we've got you know pretty awesome structure in the iceberg can we do something with that so as this is fairly bright it would be worth the risk to try and pull the highlights down a bit because i think that gives us some of that mean and moody back a little bit to some extent can we do something with the clouds so a couple of choices if we bump up the clarity and if you don't know clarity is increasing our contrast but it's only in the mid tones so hopefully it won't have any bad effects to the brighter areas of the iceberg but it might give us some positive benefits to the mid tones that are sitting in the clouds so if we bump up the clarity it actually has definitely has pretty much a nice positive effect everywhere the only thing i would be mindful of is making sure we don't get a halo around this nice crisp edge so let's pull that back slightly if i wanted even more drama in the sky we could probably let's think if we bring up our curves and then just pull down the mid tones ever so slightly something like that so that's more contrast but mostly focused on the mid tones we can protect our shadows if we wish like so so that's just given us if we option click our reset button just a bit more guts or density to the the clouds itself got a couple of mucky patches here so let's grab our healing brush and just fix those and let's take rid of that one is that dirt on my monitor or is that dust it's actually dust good this potentially what i'm getting rid of here is dirt on my monitor nope that was dust as well that's good and we could spend a bit more time pulling out some of the muck excuse me in the water if we needed to but again not a huge amount done there but much much better result so i think also we could risk a little bit of on our background a bit of structure and what structure will do will just help to enhance any fine detail of which there is is a lot here as well but there's no point heaping in the structure if you don't have a lot of detail to start with it won't make detail from nowhere so it's good for architectural details icebergs animal fur animal feathers landscape details and so on but it won't improve on it if you don't have those good building blocks in the first place so let's see before like so and after as we swipe across again nothing massively complicated there not a huge stack of layers it's mostly down to fixing the exposure and fixing the levels and just tweaking our white balance a bit and you get a really nice result i thought that was a person there for a second but it's not and it actually stands out really nicely from the background and then our white balance is is really spot on okay um let's look at some questions let's pull out a few popular ones let's see uh hb says the blue is too blue now so i don't know which blue you're referring to maybe this one but as i said what is the actual color of this iceberg i don't know the the sky is correct but if we wanted to correct for the iceberg itself then we could probably easily if we go into the color balance tool if we pull out the highlights if you wanted to warm up see if you felt it was still too blue we could push it this way a little bit just on the highlights that takes a bit of the edge of the blueiness off or if you wanted to actually make it colder then we could go in this direction so i don't think there's really a right or wrong in that respect but maybe that is a better compromise okay checking the questions once more clarity instruction matthew is asking so in a nutshell clarity affects contrast but only in the midtones so the benefit being that your shadows aren't blocked up and your highlights aren't blown if you like so clarity effects contrast in the middle mid tones structure is almost doing a similar thing but it's a very very finite level so as i said it's good for improving details on icebergs architectural detail feathers fur landscape items grass anything that has you know a high density structure structure really helps to enhance that but if your picture is out of focus or noisy or whatever it can't you know make something out of nothing so just keep that in mind let's see one more question and then we shall move on and my colleagues are doing their best in the background to answer as much as possible but there is rather a lot of you um let's see ernst can't find his style brushes so style brushes normally sit in the exposure tool tab what i've done i've made my own custom tool tab which just has layers and style brushes because i find that my exposure tool tab gets a bit full up especially because i run this screen at a slightly lower resolution so it's easy for you guys to follow but it does mean i have less real estate to play with so making an additional tool tab with just my layers and style brush works for me so give that a try oh joe the iceberg expert and he looks like an expert because he's got a big camera and a warm coat so i'm pretty sure you've shot icebergs in the past can be blue or green depends on the temperature there we go so the nice thing is with a good start point of a neutral white balance we can make this pretty much or push it towards any tone we like by using the color balance tool we could use the color editor to push the cool tones in a different direction loads of different options okay let's edit another photo so let's have a look at how we doing for time 20 minutes good let's go to the great wall of china why not let's reset this so we're back to square one now the reason why i picked this one out is because one it's a great shot by julian julian you out in hong kong and china but secondly in terms of contrast is that the the wall itself and the the fortress or whatever this is um let's know great wall of china experts uh is pretty good contrast like we're gonna edit this in a second but contrast-wise this is quite nice also the hazy mountains in the distance are also pretty nice out of camera the only thing that's a little bit mir is the foliage which at 1 40th of a second i wonder if there's a little bit of movement like if it was a windy day and it's just a little bit muddy uh it just kind of lets the shot down but wouldn't it be nice if we could just tweak the contrast of those darker areas and not affect our building and not affect the highlights and not have to spend hours doing it as well so that's the challenge for this one first of all let's rotate a little so i'm gonna just boost my angle over here by point two and i'm doing that again by using the cursor keys and just eyeballing it so i'm gonna go for that exposure wise julian's got that pretty much spot on again if we look at our levels it's sitting nice and pretty in the middle uh of our tonal range i might be led to believe it's a bit muddy because there's a lot of data down here at the bottom end so if i pull up the brightness that will just help that slightly and now we're going to say auto levels like so so this looks pretty good like the the fortress and the wall itself look nice i'm quite happy with how the distance looks i don't mind the haziness that's quite natural but this area is a little bit lackluster if you like so what we're going to do is we are going to make a new filled adjustment layer so that's a layer over the whole shot so m on your keyboard to see the mask but we're going to restrict that mask just to those darker areas hopefully uh it was it's a bit of a gamble because i haven't really practiced doing this so it might not work but let's let's find out and the way we're going to do that is with a loomer range and to help us visualize what the luma range doing is doing we're going to display our grayscale mask like so so that's going to hide the photo and just show me the mask now right now it just looks white because everything is masked um black areas will mean there's no mask anything in between like grayscale tones will mean there is some mask so let's hit our loom range button like so and i said i wanted to just find the shadow areas so we're going to pull this down and then hopefully we can cut out the fortress and the wall but keep some of the shadows so if i keep squeezing this down we're probably compromised to about there good so if i press m on my keyboard now you can see where the mask in red is it's got some of the front of the fortress but i don't care we're avoiding the sky that's good and we're avoiding the wall but right now whoops wrong shortcut right now if we go back to grayscale mask and zoom in it's a bit of a chunky mask if you like or binary mask there's not much finesse to it fortunately we can always go back into the luma range and turn up our radius and play with the sensitivity and what sensitivity does is control how the edges work or how the edges are defined let's say so if we said zero sensitivity it's almost like the mask is feathered so we can't really see any edge definition if we go to 100 then it's going to sit tightly to the edges as much as possible and as we increase the radius that's going to increase how far the effect spreads out from the edges of the mask now that's too much so let's pull that back down and let's let's go for that so now if we zoom out oh there we go now if we zoom out we can see we've got pretty much a mask of those darker areas so is this going to work so you can see where the mask is like so so let's just try to keep it simple adding in some contrast actually works quite nice we can add a bit of clarity too without just being careful if i'm worried that the blacks are getting a bit on the heavy side let's just open those up a touch as well but there we go if we turn that layer on and off just pulled that area down a bit not quite so hazy bit rich a bit more contrasty but we haven't ruined what we've got here on the wall and we haven't ruined what we've got here on the highlights as well if we zoom in the fact that it darkens the front a little bit is actually quite nice it adds to it so i'm not worried about trying to fix that mask again with structure if we zoom into 100 this is super nice and sharp so i would afford to put in just a few points of structure as well especially if i was going to print this i would want to maybe even over sharpen it slightly to make sure that on my print i get all that detail because you can see all the detail here um adding structure hasn't made this look ugly it helps with the wall along here as well we're not enhancing any noise which is something that's worth looking for if structure is enhancing noise then you can also consider to put structure on a layer and just brush it in where you need it but for this shot that actually works quite nicely does it need to be a touch warmer maybe ever so slightly so again if we look at our before and after that's how it came out of camera again pretty good nothing to really complain about it's just a little bit flat on the hills as we spoke about whereas this area looks good so by isolating just the shadow areas and making those a bit more contrasty we can get a much more pleasing result overall okay um let's check our questions um just looking for youtube and facebook let's see let's see my colleagues are doing a fabulous job answering everything in the background uh jono says please show some de-hazing on the shot does it need it i think that again this is like one of those things to think about just because there is haze in a shot should you necessarily get rid of it because this is exactly how i would imagine it to be if we start dehazing like if we add just a quick let's do another layer and just add a gradient mask at the top here so it's just focusing on the top and then we add in some dehaze like so we can do so i might just pick a better shadow tone there we go but if we turn this off and on again i kind of think it takes a lot the atmosphere away we can do it but i i like personally i like the effect that it's hazy but that doesn't mean if you would prefer it not to be hazy quite easily with the dehaze tool we could do so right check in the q a tab um just for looking for something topical oh that's a good one from haze when would you adjust the top uh handles in the levels tool so if we get our levels tool over here for a second so what we're asking capture one to do again is when we set these points so these guys here left and right what we're really doing is we're pinching either side imagine that histogram is made of elastic or whatever and then we're pulling them across to the numbers set to the top so you'll see if i wiggle this back and forward we're essentially saying hey capture one take this number 231 and stretch it out to 255. so just think of you pinching either end of the the histogram and doing that so you're stretching it out over the full tonal range now this number here is your max limit if you like so this will limit how much of a stretch it does if that makes sense so if i back this off then you'll see the histogram also backs off like so so if i pulled this this way a little bit then it would limit if you like or it would say take two three five and map it to 238 if we do that that's going to be more of an extreme tug on the histogram why would you want to potentially set that generally you don't have to it can be a useful tactic in printing if you just want to make sure that you're not making your upper levels too bright so quite often what you might see if you were going to print this is just to put a little limit like so so this will just make sure that you don't have anything too dark in the shot and you don't have anything too bright as with all things printing you would always want to test what your outputs look like so if you were testing and you found that the prints were maybe coming out a bit heavy or a bit too contrasty it could be a useful tactic just to open up the top sliders a bit as well and that will just place a limit on either ends of the levels but generally if you're not being super aggressive and careless then i wouldn't worry about it too much okay let's fix my ruined workspace once more bill was saying on facebook would deep sky style brush be appropriate here i don't know let's try it i would think might be a bit too aggressive but let's give it a go so deep sky let's make this a bit bigger might just make it look a little bit too much well actually kind of on the mountains it's going a bit ott but maybe if we just took back the opacity a bit it's actually all right because now we can compromise between getting quite rid of a lot of the haze to nothing at all but somewhere in between actually not bad if we added in d haze as well then it's super aggressive but everyone has different editing style i'm a bit more hands off a bit more subtle but if you prefer to you know have deeper contrast bit less of the haziness then you could go exactly in that direction as well okay let's do another reddit we've got time for one more okay we're going to put this one up on screen this one because it's not edited let's just reset it and the reason why we're going to edit this one is because coming back to ed's question about refining the edges of the magic brush also this is a good exercise in white balance and it also shows why the color editor is not the right tool to use in this case so first of all what do we know about the shot well it was probably shot at late afternoon or sunrise and my colleague innis shot this so i don't know if she's an early morning person i'm gonna guess this is um sunset late afternoon because all the curtains are open so i don't think everyone is a super early riser in this apartment block so we've got some nice warm light coming hopefully we've also where's my cursor being a pest oops wrong shortcut sorry we've also got some slight underexposure i would guess let's have a look at the levels loads of you know big bunch of blue over here on the right hand side so again i'm pretty sure that my white balance is off so if i warm this up heavily and at the same time bring up the exposure but this time i'm going to be a lot more cautious with exposure because look what's happening up here now everything is falling off the edge of the histogram so we're losing any of the detail that we had in the sky so i would be very careful not to touch exposure i might not even actually brightness works you see if i open up the brightness look at the end of the histogram here so if we're aggressive with exposure it falls off the edge quite quickly and we lose that nice subtle tones in the sky if we open up our brightness we can actually afford to be quite aggressive with that and open up what's going on down here and if we open up the shadows too we can get more life into the the bottom of the shot so even though it is underexposed touching exposure doesn't make sense in this particular shot as i've opened up the shadows a lot as i said earlier if we go back this way with the blacks we're not going to clip anything because if you look at the histogram see what's happening when we pull the blacks down we're just pushing those very darker tones back in the direction that they came from so now the contrast and so on looks much better in these darker areas but we're not blocking anything up if we look at our rgb values down here 17 15 14 you know we've still got some data going on in the shot there so it's not blocking up and looking ugly if we look at our levels and we just hit auto for a second that once more improves the contrast and i might even be able to warm it up a tad more so we've had a bit of a dance between exposure and high dynamic range and levels but really that's what we've done so if we look at the before so white balance way off exposure not great but plenty of guts in the raw file i'm not sure what camera this is let's have a look it is a nikon something d780 so loads of dynamic range in that camera as well that we can pull around with even when we're starting with something like this so there's so much flexibility in the raw files [Music] don't shoot jpeg basically martin says bring the whites back yeah so as we've boosted up the shadows and the brightness a little bit we can pull down the highlights to some extent but i quite like the fact that it's brighter here as well we can see the sun is just bouncing off the top here so i would expect it to be relatively bright now let's say for argument's sake we want to select the sky maybe we want to make it more saturated or brighter or darker or you know any other case that you could think of so this is where the color editor would do you know a pretty bad job of trying to achieve that so if we grab our advanced color editor grab our picker and click somewhere up here that little dot you can just hopefully see close to the center that's the color tone that we selected now what we can do is ask capture one to create a mask from that selection so if we do that and say create mask layer from selection let's see what happens so if we look at our grayscale mask not great so it's got a little bit of the sky it's got loads of windows going on can we do with that nothing really i'd have to spend ages trying to clean that up and make something useful out of it so that's that's not a good tactic if we tried what we did earlier which was luminosity masking i could do a new field adjustment layer so that's grayscale let's turn on our luma range and let's go and find where is the sky so roughly we want the brighter areas so we could do almost so if i wanted to get all the sky in then i'm roughly around here but now it would mean i'd have to clean up all this bit of the mask as well so i'd have to go on a little deleting spring and try and do that my other option is to auto mask around the edge but that's a bit boring and cumbersome so let's try the magic brush so we're going to grab our magic brush we're going to make sure that our mask is visible so we can see what's happening tolerance let's bump this up a little bit and refine edge we're going to talk about in a second so let's keep this relatively low and we do a little doodle up here and see what happens so that's one click that's not bad let's increase it and let's go here job done so three clicks and we've got a really nice mask around the edge now to ed's question much earlier on can i now refine the edge so if i've decided that this is a bit too strong or a bit too binary it's actually probably about right to be honest can i now change it now let's try actually what we did in thailand let's make our tolerance really low and let's make the size smaller can we fill in the veranda here i wonder yes nice oh and you can just see if i zoom into a crazy amount this is what the refine edge is doing so you see it's not perfectly adhered to the edge it's got a slight bit of roll-off in there now if afterwards you wanted to tweak your refine edge to some extent as ed was asking you can treat this mask as any other mask let's say you've drawn this by hand so there's nothing to stop you right clicking on it and using feather mask and refine mask so if we look at how this mask looks with our grayscale that's your shortcut option for grayscale it's actually pretty good but if we right click and say refine mask then we've got all the ability to refine that from zero to extra i don't think i actually need to in this case but if you wanted to post refine a mask that you've done with the magic brush then you can do so we could also feather it if we wanted to so let's just chuck a big value in so you can see what's happening so that will feather the mask so whilst you don't do it within the magic brush tool itself the mask that you've created is you know exactly the same as if i drawn it by hand my feather mask tool is stuck oh there we go i was just being impatient so now we've got this lovely mask which took us three brush strokes to make so now in this layer i could bump up the saturation if i wanted we could make it darker we could make it we could blow it out we can make it brighter all the things that we could do you know easily but by using the magic brush that just saves us a whole bunch of time good question from anthony and this has come up since the launch of 14 3 to have a magic brush but as an eraser i think that's a really great suggestion so i should um make that case as well because i i have come across a situation like with the veranda if we wanted to uh you know fill that part in if perhaps it had spilled over into the windows down here it would be then super nice to switch to an erase brush and just take those bits away in a raised magic brush sorry but like you saw with the thailand short if you think you're going to get into a situation like that was down here where oh it's going to spill into the sky or the sea then before you magic brush it then bring the tolerance down a little bit whoops so like so so if i just undo that for a second and sorry right click and then let's say i had a big tolerance and i tried to fill this area in now it's filled in the sea down here because it's you know found a way to wiggle its way through all of that so before doing this area i'd pull my tolerance right down and then that way we can fill that in so yes an erase magic brush would be nice but if you think you've got a tricky bit to fill in remember you can make adjustments between each dab of the magic brush there we go let's take uh one or two last questions and then we shall let you guys get on with your um thursday uh johan says that's a great question melissa i wonder what melissa's question was so um there's rather a lot of questions so i'm afraid it's been you know almost impossible to get to every single one um but let me try and find one that is topical to the rest of it uh andreas andrea or andreas sorry i don't know if you're on andrea or andrea what do you mean don't shoot jpeg also is it worth shooting both d and g raw and jpeg at once well you can shoot jpeg but personally i never do i mean you can shoot jpeg and raw so i would say never just shoot jpeg because you don't have that flexibility of adjustment i think shooting jpeg and raw can make sense if you like how your camera you said you've got a leica q2 so if the q2 is doing a great job of spitting out jpegs excellent but for me if i want a jpeg i know i can produce that from capture one super fast i can just select all and export them all out as jpegs i don't necessarily want a jpeg of every single shot i personally only bother shooting raw but if you want to shoot jpeg and raw that makes sense but only jpeg i think you're restricting what you can potentially do with your shots okay one last question let's scroll and pick something from random we answered that we answered that we answered that last one from christoph actually what's the difference between adjusting contrast and dehaze what d haze is doing a lot of stuff at the same time it's doing some levels tweaks it's adding some clarity it's adding some contrast all kind of mashed together with a bit of an intelligence and the ability to tweak the shadow tone so it's heaping on a lot of adjustments in one slider basically contrast isn't doing that so contrast is literally just adjusting the contrast clarity is only doing a clarity adjustment which is midtone contrast and so on so dehaze is like an all-in-one tool which does a lot at the same time so that is a good question to end on i would think so thanks for joining me today i hope that was useful i'm really sorry if we couldn't uh answer all of your questions but there was rather a lot of you but feel free to hit us up on social media to ask any questions you want we've got our instagram accounts of course our facebook account please subscribe to youtube i'm going to play my little bell because if you do that then you'll know when we're going live and you'll also get a reminder beforehand as well that we're going to be live so if you can subscribe to youtube that would be super awesome as well thanks for joining me today uh i hope that was useful as i said already i believe so have a good thursday evening and enjoy the weekend when it comes take care everybody and see you soon bye now you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 22,075

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Id: fpVN-hudeVs

Length: 69min 6sec (4146 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 05 2021