Capture One 21 Livestream: Quick Live | Using Curves

good afternoon everyone welcome to today's light to today's quick live broadcast which uh is just going to be a quick little look at curves if you're unsure how curves work haven't used them before don't quite understand the mechanics then it is very straightforward and you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly so let's move on to capture one and see what we're working with so uh tell you what let's give ourselves a bit more real estate and let's bring out our curve tool first tip we're going to see in a second and let's also bring out the histogram we might need that i guess and let's hide our tools with the command t and hide our browser as well right first of all when you're using the curve tool you might find you know on your display or interface that it's a bit small to be precise uh with your movement so it is one of the tools which you can actually enlarge so when you are let's just reset it so when you are dropping curve points on changing the curve shape you could just be a little bit more accurate and let's just stick the histogram to it make them both bigger and then put them up here so that just gives us a bit more room so you can see what's going on so what we're going to do is we're going to look at a simple rgb curve or how the the curve dialog works we can compare that to luma curves so you know the difference between the two and a brief look at the different channels red green and blue and how that compares to using the color balance tool which the conclusion is it's generally easier to use the color mounts tool if you want to use the curves grading so first of all what is the curve actually showing us well the curve also has its own histogram which you can see here starting with shadow shadows on the bottom left moving all the way up to the highlights on the far right and then of course the height of the histogram dictates if you like the level of occurrence between all those different tones across the photo so we can see in this shot it's comprised of mostly you know mid-tones and shadows and there's not a great deal going on at the highlight end which is reflected in the histogram so that's the first thing now the second thing to note is that we've got this little orange line dancing around now it's static what does that actually mean well if i just hover my cursor over different areas of the shot so if i go on to the highlights you see it move over to the right hand side if we go into the shadows let's just pick a dark shadow you see it move over to the to the left so that line is just really dictating where your cursor is compared to the tonal range of the photo itself so how do we use the curve tool so we've got this straight diagonal line going from bottom left to top right and then we've got these two curious numbers down here input and output but it is super super straightforward so let's say we wanted to just change the brightness of a certain tonal range so let's say we wanted to give the mid tones a bit of a lift so the mid tones is obviously in the middle so that's an easy example to pick so i can click once on the curve itself and then if i move the curve in this direction that's going to brighten everything now the point of these numbers down here is to show you the effect of what your curve adjustment has just done so if i stick my cursor just on the dot as accurately as i can you see the input is 122 output is 136. what does that mean so before i moved that little point i was 122 on the rgb scale so the scale starts at zero which is for shadows and finishes at two five five which is the highlight so zero is black if you like two five five is white so 122 pretty much slap bang in the middle so what that little curve change has done is brightened that amount 122 to 136 so the mid tones which were ever at 122 are now brighter at 136 so that's why we have the input and output now of course because this curve is a nice graceful curve funnily enough it's also going to affect other tones in that range so if we just pick let's say we go right at the top here what was formerly 228 is now 233 so it does has actually brightened everything in the photo but the majority is happening on the midtones so if you want to be more critical with your curve then you can of course add more than one control point so if we stuck one up here and pulled that down that would reduce the effect on the highlights if we stuck one here and pulled that down that would reduce the effect on the shadow so now it is really more of a mid-tone bump if i pull that aggressively you'll see where it brightens or darkens like so now you can add as many of these control points as you like of course but with care because obviously you're always looking to make nice graceful curve shapes so if you have very abrupt changes that can lead to posterization weird effects and so on so something like this is probably not the kind of curve shape you're going to see all the time but you can be very detailed if you need to be now to stop you having to drop on loads of different curve points all of the time there is actually a handy preset going on up here so you'll find one called five point all channels so if we drop that that adds five points one two three four five top left bottom right across the curve so if you do want to start drawing different curve shapes or for example brightening or darkening mid-tones or brightening the highlights a little bit or darkening the shadows a little bit then that preset helps you quite nicely don't forget if you want to preview what's going on with your curve then you can of course hold your alt key down and click on the reset button then you can see before and after like so so let's reset that again now a common curve shape that you'll see if we bring back our 5.5 point all channels is an s shape and that simply means what we're doing is we're darkening the shadows to midtones to some extent midtones is locked here and we're brightening uh the brighter areas so that's essentially giving us a boost in contrast so again if i option click the reset you can see before and after like so so that's a very common curve shape that you would see obviously the stronger or more dramatic you make that s shape the bigger the contrast shift is going to be but it does give you lots and lots of control for sure now obviously if we went in the other direction brightening our shadows and darkening the highlights like a reverse s that's going to reduce contrast so really the contrast or the sorry the curve tool is really designed to play around with contrast or change the tonal levels in different areas but it shouldn't really be a tool that you use to you know fix exposure or something like that so what you should be doing is being in a good place with your general exposure and so on and then you could use the curve tool to move on to using contrast and so on okay so we're gonna look at the actual contrast slider in a minute because that's also a good tool for you to use the curve tool doesn't negate necessarily negate the contrast slider or vice versa it's different tools for different jobs and there's no reason why you can't combine the two things together as well so um let's just bring up a couple of shots and let's have a little discussion about luma range because sorry not luma range with a luma curve because that's a subject that does certainly come up a lot so i've got four shots here and you might have seen me do a similar demo to this before now let's just shrink our curve tool down tell you what let's get rid of the histogram so let's just remove that and let's try and tell you what let's just pop it back in the tool area so we've got more space to see all the pictures and we can hide our browser so four identical shots courtesy of innis who's in our development team top left we're going to leave alone top right we're going to leave alone for a minute bottom left we're going to put in a s-curve like you just saw with our rgb curves so let's drag in a fairly aggressive s-curve and let's pull the mid-tones down a little bit as well so pretty aggressive s-curve adding contrast to the shot darkening the shadows brightening the highlights a little bit pulling down the mid tone slightly as well which is probably if you look at that if i hover over the sky you can see that's pretty much bang on a mid tone so before and after like so now that let's move to this shot and then we're going to pull on our luma curve and we're going to do a very similar thing pretty aggressive let's pull the mid tones down as well so you can see quite a big difference between those two if i just hide my head for a second so you can see better so you see this one on the right to remind you as a luma curve this one on the left was our rgb curve straight away even if you uh aren't really looking that hard you can see a couple of things first of all similar levels of contrast i've tried to match the curve as best as i could but looking at the shot on the left so this one over here you can see the blue sky much deeper richer and so on and where the warmer light is popping underneath you can see that's you know warmed up a little bit as as well so adding contrast has also had an effect to the color as well which can be good can be bad over on the right hand side the luma curve this one here just type me for a second you can see similar change in contrast but what about the saturation so look at the blue sky compared to our rgb curve you can see it's actually it looks desaturated almost it isn't but what it actually is is exactly the same saturation as our control one in the top left so what luma curves do is then separate out uh the relationship to color so it's a purely contrast adjustment if we go up to the right here let's just throw in good old few points of contrast i'll try and match the contrast to something like that so relatively i was you know more heavy-handed than what i normally be so what do we notice about this one it's not as saturated as our rgb curve definitely not but it does have a stronger blue tone stronger warmer tones compared to our luma curve so really this contrast slider is kind of a good mix in between these two which actually makes it a very useful tool for adding or removing contrast however of course what curves gives you is the additional precision to place the contrast where you want when you're dragging the contrast slider if you like in the exposure panel up here what you're doing is just creating an s-curve on or reducing the s-curve so by if i drag it in that direction you can see a similar result to what i did with the reverse s-curve if i go in this direction you can see similar result if i did an s-curve but you can't obviously control you know any of those kind of finer points if i wanted to lift up the blue a bit i could do so i could play around with the shadows it just gives you that extra level of position precision if you need it it also means if you're working with the luma curve which has decoupled that relationship to color you can then treat saturation separately and dial in or dial out or as little as much saturation as you wish but that doesn't mean the contrast slider doesn't have a good place in your editing workflow question from mateo what's the difference in using levels and curves and is it good to use them together yeah definitely because levels is really giving you the base start point if you like so let's see if on any of whoops sorry wrong scene let me just bring that back wrong shortcut wrong application so let's just see if there's um a good example for one second let's just make a new variant of this one because this is probably a little bit of a bright slightly flat image so looking at our histogram let's just add our histogram tool back uh let's just stick it up here for a second so this is a little bit bright so i'd probably pull the exposure down warm it up slightly if we want more of a teal look and then now if we go to our levels tool down here essentially what we want to do with levels is really give ourselves the default if you like the start point from there after we want to control our contrast so looking at the levels we can now see that there's very little information here so not much shadow information going on and a tiny bit of highlight information going on and the net result of having the full tonal range on the levels tool means the photo looks a bit flat so you've got two choices so we can hit auto and that would just bring those shadow and highlight points in instantly we then get the correct tonal range or you can manually bring them in if you wish but auto generally does a good job now matteo you're at the point where you can move to your curves tool or use the contrast slider and then decide exactly what contrast you would like to add like so so levels isn't really about creating contrast to be honest because the only additional way to make more contrast with the levels tool would be to bring that shadow point in but then we're going to clip data and then we're going to get nasty effects like this so you can't really create or build contrast with the levels tool in the same way as the curves tool we can brighten our mid tones a little bit so on this shot i could potentially lift up those mid-tones a touch and then we could move to our curves tool and then decide exactly what contrast amount we wanted to add in so they definitely play nicely together uh billy says when the rgb color lines start out on the left side of the image and they are on top of one other does that indicate how good the white balance is it can do actually billy in this shot if we just reset it again that might be a reasonable uh example of this so if we just pull the see i feel that's a bit cool from the outset and if we warm it up with our white balance you can actually see those rgb levels converge but that's almost like the perfect scenario so if i had like a really dominant color in the shot like probably this one uh let's just reset our wacky curve that we did on there so like a dominant color so here we've got a bunch of blue sky so we're gonna see a dominance of blue in that part of the tonal range so it's not necessarily something you can rely on billy but it's something that you can use as well because if we try to make these converge you know we're just going to really mess up our white balance to some extent and the perfect white balance isn't necessarily the visual story that you want to tell as well okay um oh matthew's asked a question and paul's answered it what's the deal when either extremity of the curve is moved away from the corners is that called crushing the whites paul says yes you're effectively setting the overexposed underexposed point to be tighter so if we do that if we go back to our boats again and we pick up our curves and we pull this in look at the input numbers like so so we're darkening down we're saying okay the input value 36 make that zero oh let's do it rgb actually like so so as we pull that down we're making it darker if we go up this side we're basically saying look the darkest points make them brighter so 0 now becomes 32 or 40 50 60 which means that we're making our shadows brighter and brighter and brighter same kind of principles if you follow the logic with the out input and output numbers then you know exactly what's going on okay so we went a bit off track with levels but actually that's a really good conversation to have because often go away tool tip often the two get confused but they do different jobs and you can't add or remove contrast easily with the levels tool without you know messing it up and clipping highlights and shadows and ending up with a bad result okay um all right so what we're gonna talk about next uh channels i would say well just to finish that conclusion if we just bring these four up again go back to that was our loom one oh i've messed it up now with our other adjustments let's just go back to this one we're going to change this one to a luma curve turn you off we're going to change this one to a luma curve dial in our luma adjustment pull down our mid tone and now of course if i want to i can decide exactly how much or how little saturation i was so if you're a control freak then you can use luma and saturation in a really nice combination to give you the most control okay so let's uh go back to our nice foodie shot just check we don't have anything going on now for the channels i think since the advent let's bring out this guy the color balance tool i personally have much less use for single cut color channels if you like can we make curve a bit bigger there we go let's do that so we can see what's going on let's hide the tools let's bring this up let's hide the browser so with our individual channels you are effectively just doing that affecting the individual channel of the tonal range whether it's blue green or red so if we're in our blue channel and i go in this direction i'm adding a bunch more blue in if i go in this direction i'm doing the opposite and taking it out which is obviously giving me this cast so if we go to green then we can add more green or we can go to magenta and so on so it's the opposites of the color wheel if you like same we can add red or we can take red away which would give us sign so if you know how to mix colors not something i'm especially good at fully gonna open up to that then you can of course use this for color grading and blending so if you wanted to cool down the shadows we could put our 5.0 channels in and then we could give our blues a bit of a boost in the shadows i might want to move that mid-tone one down a bit and just have a little subtle lift like so so that would add some cool tones into the shadows if i do it more aggressively then you can see what's going on however color grading or playing around with the color channels in this way like the rgb curve is coupled to color by playing around with the different color channels here you're always going to be coupled to density as well so when i'm pulling around the curve here if i just do it ridiculously aggressively then it's also brightening that area as well so the two you can't separate with a curve so then you might have to go back into loom and think i need to pull my shadows down a bit and so on so you're kind of fighting at odds with each other a bit but if you like to work in curves if you're used to working with curves in photoshop then you can do the same thing in capture one however to give yourself a bit of an easier time if you want to color grade then it's much easier to use the color balance tool because like the luma range curve density is separated from color in this case so if i want to add a color tint into the shadows i can pick up central point move that to the color toning i want but the density will not shift why because there's an additional control here which is all about density so now i've got independent control of the color tone and the density as well and this way it's much easier to play around with color toning without fighting against each other with those individual channels ryan says can you give an example when we should use the luma curve rather than the rgb curve well really it's it's down to you if you're playing around with an rgb curve and you feel it's pushing the color away from uh you know a place that you would like so let's just reset the workspace for a second back to mine so if we take nev here as an example now this is pretty much straight out of camera it's got a bit of red skin reduction i think with on his nose just with the style brush um on the background we've just lifted the brightness a bit but it's pretty much out of deep you know default so i could then think well i'd love to add a bit of contrast so if i dial in my rgb curve like so pull down the mid tones a bit you know what's going to happen is by using an rgb curve it's actually going to affect its skin tone as well so that might be an unintended or undesirable consequence if you've of course spent a lot of time playing around with the skin tone getting it look good and so on so in that case you could think well i'd like to pump in some contrast so i'm going to use my luma curve but nev is now looking a little bit wishy-washy so i'm going to add in the amount of saturation where i think it looks good so essentially ryan you've got the control back for the decision making process now of course what you could do is also go to the contrast slider and do that but even then he's still looking a little bit wishy-washy so i'd add in you know a little bit of saturation as well so it's all about giving you the control element as well okay uh just checking on questions uh billy is off subject so can't help you there billy but i get your point um and i think we're pretty much good i mean david if you lined up the different rgb on a gray card would that ensure a good white balance the easiest way to ensure a good white balance is to use the gray balance picker on your grey reference if we had a grey reference then we could choose that and pick on it and that's the best way to do it but remember the correct white balance isn't necessarily the right white balance for the photo but it can be a good starting point okay i think and just looking at my examples and checking the time that's pretty much what i wanted to cover today so um very simple don't be intimidated by it also don't think you're not a good editor if you're using the contrast slider because the control slider does a pretty awesome job anyway but the the path to using curves is just to give you that ultimate control and there's nothing to stop you using an rgb curve and then putting a little bit bit of luma on top because let's say you've added in your rgb curve to where you think is pretty good but you're starting to feel that the saturation is maybe getting a bit too pushed like his skin tone looks pretty good there so now if i go to the loom and think i'd just like to have maybe a bit more contrast maybe just open up the shadow a tiny bit more or whatever then there's no reason why you can't combine the two together so don't be afraid to do that as well and there's also nothing to stop you then thinking actually my blacks are a bit crushed let's just open up the blacks a little bit using this slider all tools play very nicely together okay um let's see um just checking if there's any other questions uh jimmy watch him from singapore nice to have you jimmy it must be very early in the morning um i think that's it for questions bob says would be wonderful if we could have more than 16 layers uh i agree it could be nice to expand on that so of course we will always take these suggestions back great thanks for joining everybody there's no webinar this thursday but there will be one next week do make sure to sign up uh for our newsletter so you always uh are aware of when new live stuff is coming of course on our youtube channel you can always see upcoming lives on the playlist as well and the easiest way to be notified is when we add something remove something is subscribe to our youtube channel and if you press the little bell next to the subscribe box as you saw in that wonderful animation then you'll also be notified 30 minutes before we're going online and when we actually go live as well so please go ahead and do that on our youtube channel thanks for joining us today and hope to see you all again next week and in the forthcoming weeks have a good day everyone take care bye you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 10,143

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: JYbbZtew1-w

Length: 30min 14sec (1814 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021