Capture One 21: PORTRAIT Editing Workflow (Start to Finish)

have you ever heard about the base characteristics in capture one if not you should because it can be truly a game changer when it comes to heavily under exposed images like this one so watch this video and learn how to turn an image like this into final artwork like this one coming up in today's video we'll be editing this portrait of marvin so this is old image i have taken this portrait in 2015 in berlin so this was before all the lockdown before the masks before covet so really nice memories so i've had this photo shoot in berlin i had mervyn posing for me in his beautiful outfit i'm not an expert here but i believe this is aikido the martial art so i had the possibility of photographing him in the middle of a super busy city and i decided to go to a park i was taking these images during the sunset so to put the whole emphasis on him on the silhouette on the beautiful elements of his outfit of the sword if this is the correct word so i've decided to go with my camera really low and has as few distractions as possible so i had just some of these branches framing the shot which works quite well but i have the sky against the subject and this creates very demanding photographic situation because we have really hard contrast really harsh contrast so let me just show you the original image let's just switch this off and we'll have the full view so this is the original raw file before applying any adjustments and even when i have the sky completely blown out i have overexposed the sky i have almost no detail still the subject is very very dark so this shot was not as much about the face about the feature i wanted to showcase the silhouette i wanted to show the beautiful shape so in this case i'm not that worried about the subject i can still push a little bit more with the hdr tool to reveal to recover the details that are still present still visible in the shadow area but the situation with the sky looks a bit worse so let's just take a look at our histogram and first i'm just going to create a new variant of this image so let's just show the browser okay this is our original photo so this is the histogram of our image before an adjustment so nothing is applied here at all the graph clearly reflects all the issues that we have in this image it is super contrasty image we are blowing highlights so the graph is crashing towards the right edge so this indicates that we have super strong highlights we have lost detail i can switch on the exposure warning so the red overlay shows the area where we are over exposing so we have really some serious issues here so let's switch it off and here if i just take a look at the gray line so here it's quite difficult to notice because the gray line this indicates luma values the other lines indicate the blue one the blue channel the green one indicates the data for the green channel and the red line indicates the data for the red channel so they are overlapping the gray one is visible a bit here and it is going down here so i'm not clipping any detail in the shadows when i have switched on the exposure warning i had no overlay in blue only the red so red indicates clipping highlights so let's go back to our histogram it shows that i'm clipping a bit of the blue channel but this is fine so i don't need to worry about this so when it comes to the shadows i'm okay the problem is here in the highlights and if i go back to the image i still would like to have a bit more detail visible in the face i would like to push the subject a little bit towards the brighter side and this typically would cause issues in form of excessive noise so looking back to the histogram it is usually a way better idea to expose to the right so we have way more data in the highlights and then we can check if there is the possibility of recovering these highlights so i'm talking about the situation when you still have the data recorded on your memory card and you can try to recover the details with hdr tool or with the base characteristics the linear response curve so this is what we are going to be talking about this is very often overlooked and i would say many people getting a shot like this would decide okay this is just wrong i have to ditch it even checking the image at the back of the camera after just pressing the shutter we would decide okay this is looking really wrong i need to change the exposure when in fact it would be really hard to get better exposure here if i would expose a little bit more to the left if i would like to have more detail here in the mid tones then i would definitely push even more towards the right i would lose more detail in the highlights and in this case probably i would have no possibility of recovering these highlights okay so first of all we need to have this data so this rule this technique doesn't apply to every single image that is overexposed because sometimes it is clearly not possible if you have really pure white and if the camera didn't record anything but let's check so first of all i would go here to the exposure tab and you can try to apply the highlights in the hdr tool towards the negative value so simply by pushing this slider to the left we can see that we have the data recorded and we can recover the detail and now if i just switch on the exposure warning i can see that in one second just by operating with this super powerful tool i've been able to fix this so why i have mentioned linear response if this can be fixed with the hdr2 let's compare the results i'm just going to create another new variant i'm just going to display this to one beside another let's zoom in and let's just see so on this one we just applied the negative 100 value on the highlights and on this one i'm just going to move over and jump to the color tab and here in the base characteristics i'm just going to go for different curve so by default capture one will always apply the auto curve so this means that to the data that you have recorded in your camera capture one already applies some adjustments it applies a bit of contrast so the image looks typically more attractive there is a bit more pop the colors are a bit more saturated and it works in most of the cases but when you have a really demanding situation in terms of lighting like in this one when there is very dynamic very strong contrast we have very deep black so we have very bright highlights and i said highlights but actually this is a whole background here so i don't want to leave the image flat like this if i can guess the beautiful sky that i've seen when i was taking those pictures so you can try to manually check the other curve options so i've taken this image with nikon d700 with nikon i have these other choices so i can go for film extra shadow this reveals a bit more detail in the shadow this softens the shadows i'm not interested in this at all i want to go straight to linear response and this option gives me the image that was captured in the camera with as few modifications applied by the software automatically so let's now compare if i just zoom in and let's just see them one beside the other so the image to the left is after applying our negative 100 value on the highlights and this one is after changing the curve to linear response so on the image that i have displayed to the right i can still apply the hdr tools so let's try let's try to combine these two tools so i'm just going to pull the slider to the left and this gives me even more detail visible in the sky so in case of the first image let's zoom out on both of them on the background layer i have applied hdr with highlight negative 100 only on one layer let's try to add another one into the mix and see if we can get more so if i just push further to the left i'm not really getting satisfying results so these are really nuances but i'm a big fan of the linear response tool and i love the natural result that i got here with the linear response curve and this will be my choice to take this image to take this version and edit it further so on the image to the left capture one already pushed contrast it pushed saturation of those colors and i don't really like it i want to have manual control over all these details so this is now just shouting it is way too strong so the the hdr tool may look it's easier to use and more straightforward but i would always recommend starting off with the linear response curve and then you have way more neutral colors you can take them to the place where you want you can make your own decisions so i'm going to delete this one and we will continue working on this image where i have changed on my background layer my curve from auto setting to linear response before we move further i have a quick announcement for you very recently i have released a free master class in which i cover my workflow basically i'm talking in detail about the three steps of my workflow in capture one so if you want to learn more about capture one if you want to know how to structure your work check out the link down below under this video the master class is completely free to join no strings attached okay so let's jump back to our image so we have applied the linear response we've been able to recover some detail in the highlights we have applied as well the negative value on the highlights i can go still a little bit further to the right so now the image looks way way better compared to the original stage so now let's zoom in and i would like to take a look at this image and check for purple fringing and for chromatic aberration because typically when you have very strong contrast when you have either bright background or when you have bright object against the dark background you might have issues like this visible here so i have definitely the purple fringing here and this can be fixed here in the land stop so let's jump over here and let's first of all switch on chromatic aberration and let's recalculate so let's hit analyze so now capture one is analyzing the data and it is trying to fix the problem so far no luck so let's try and apply purple fringing so what i'm going to do is to just get rid of this purple edge visible here along the kimono so it is not visible around the face but it is very very strong here and it's distracting so let's just try to manipulate with this slider let's try to go all the way to the right so this gave us actually amazing result we got a bit of halo here so now we have the brighter edge but let's try to fine tune this so i'm just pushing the slider to the left and if we go a bit more now now it starts showing up again so i would go for something around 72 so now i'm zoomed in at the magnification level of 300 percent if i zoom out this is not bothering that much take a note that when the image is just set to fit into the screen the purple fringing correction is not applied so if i just go a little bit closer it was still visible before capture one actually refreshed so if you want to judge if this is fixed if you want to prepare the image for a medium like print you have to be really careful and assess your image and make sure that all these artifacts are fixed let's now take a look at the edges around those leaves so here we have really tricky situation normally the chromatic aberration should fix this if i switch it off these edges are even more visible so unfortunately in case of this picture this is all we can do so we have still those greenish and purple edges visible around if we zoom out this is not visible that much we have this strong subject visible in the middle of the image but i want you to remember about artifacts like this specifically when you want to print your image at a large size because right now on the screen i can just focus on the subject and i can ignore these artifacts they are not even visible at this magnification level but if you print the image then this will be really a problem so this is what could be done in the land stop let's now jump over to our exposure tab and let's continue working on our image i'm going to hide the browser and i'm going to pull our histogram back so on our background layer we have already applied the negative 100 for the highlights on hdr tool i'm going to create new field adjustment layer and rename it hdr and let's see if we can take it a little bit further so first of all i want to still experiment with the hdr to see if i can still get a little bit more detail maybe this is too much but i would say that something around negative 60 still brings more mode to this image and it starts linking everything together we no longer have just dark silhouette cut off from white background now it starts working together nicely so i've done operation again on the highlight slider so now let's see what can be done in terms of opening those shadows and getting a little bit more detail here so i'm going to touch the shadow slider and push it to the right so i don't want to go too far because this is going to flatten the subject let's go maybe around 30 so let's see this is before and this is d after so i would say the value around 30 is just fine i can go a little bit more i will be further fine-tuning contrast with curves so for now i can leave it like this and since i'm working in a non-destructive way i can always jump back to this layer and fine tune this okay let's take the next step and here after opening up those shadows i can see some imperfections in the skin and this can be really quickly fixed with the heel brush so let's zoom in now let's check the brush settings so the size i can adjust dynamically hardness 0 opacity 100 flow 100 so all i want to do is to just quickly paint over those little imperfections just to smoothen up the skin a little bit more if you want to see the arrows you can right click and you can tick the last option here display arrows so first of all i'm painting over the area i'm covering the blemish that i want to remove and then the algorithm is doing the rest so it is automatically deciding on the other place from the pixels will be copied to cover the blemish so this can be switched on i find it a bit annoying so i will typically switch it off and only in a situation where the decision will be simply wrong when it won't be fixing the place in the skin then i will switch on the arrows and i will reposition the source pixels manually so we can now jump over to the next step and we are going to work with curves so we are going to create new field adjustment layer and let's rename it let's call it curves okay let's zoom out let's grab our curves and let's make the tool way larger so we'll have more precision when adjusting the control points as the very first step i'm going to use this very helpful preset so i'm going to hit this one five point all channels so that way i don't have to create these control points manually they were created with one click on every single channel and in this video i'm going to do some color grading with the curves i'm going to combine it with the advanced color editor but in the color editor i will be just fine tuning selected colors here i will create the mode that i'm after but before we start talking about color let's first take care of the luminosity ranges let's get the luminosity values right so here i would still want to make those clouds more prominent i would like to have them way stronger visible so i want the sky to be really strong factor in this image i feel that there is a lot of potential and i want to check what can be done so those values here if i just hover over with my cursor you can see this vertical orange line here inside the curves in the graph so it is moving and this is indicating which luminosity range i'm actually targeting so starting from here up to here i can see that this is the middle so i will be using this control point that capture one created for me automatically i'm just going to pull it downwards since i want to make my mid tones darker we need to be careful here because if i go too low i will be creating artifacts here so the steeper the curve gets the more contrast you will have in the image but when you have subject as the sky here you have to be really careful and you should be after really smooth seamless transition so this is going to be quite demanding but i believe it will give us good results so let's push this point maybe somewhere around here and let's create more contrast now i'm going to be pulling this point a little bit higher so let's go for something like this and let's try to push this one a bit higher as well so now i'm brightening the dark mid-tones and let's just push this one a little bit lower okay something like this and let's now jump over to the luma curve so i'm going to be working jumping between these two until i get to the point when i will be happy with the luminosity adjustment so for now this is obviously wrong the transition is visible and i want to go for a really smooth final result so let's see what can be done with luma curve so i would like to make those highlights a little bit more dimmed i would like to darken them a bit so let's go for something like this and when it comes to the blacks i want to lift them here very very slightly as you can see i'm departing quite strongly from the initial image but this is what really can be done quite well with curves you can really change light pattern in your images you can make the light way softer or way more contrasty of course it has to be done precisely but the possibilities are out there so let's zoom in this is looking quite good let's take a look at the face and let's just switch off the layer so this is before this is the after i'm not affecting the face as much now i'm adjusting the sky so let's go back to our rgb curve and here on this one the contrast here is a little bit too strong so i'm just going to hover over with my cursor if i hit v this will give me the neutral course or i had the hand before for panning around so now i'm here on the histogram so this i will just push this point a little bit higher up to make the contrast a bit softer okay i believe this is a good place to start so let's now jump over to the red channel and here i would like to introduce some more red color into the sky into those highlights so the sky is a little bit bluish then we have these sort of pinkish peachy tones around here and i want to add more warmth to this image so by manipulating with curves i can color grade the image so to speak so on the red channel if i take this control point this is positioned in my highlights if i push it upwards i will be adding red to my highlights and this is what i want for this image so let's go somewhere around here not too much when it comes to the middle point i want to add some warmer attached to my mid tones as well and when it comes to the last control point i will leave it as it is i don't want to inject any science into my shadows maybe this is a bit too much let's go a bit lower and let's now jump over to the next channel so on the green channel let's see let's start with the highlights if i push it a little bit upwards this will be adding green to the highlights which gives me this really nice creamy yellowy tone if i go the other way i will be adding magenta so this is definitely not working let's go for very subtle adjustment here let's say something like this and let's add a bit of magenta to the shadows to make them a little bit on the warmer side this is too much something really really subtle let's say something like this so that's why i always make my curve tool as large as possible and this is really a really good idea when you are applying these corrections you really need this level of precision let's now jump back to the blue channel so here i can add either blue or yellow so let's now again start with the highlights let's see if i go upwards i will be adding a little bit more blue to my highlights so the sky is getting i would say a bit too grayish if i go down this is adding yellow now this is too much so let's go with a touch of blue something like this no more than that and here i will go again for complementary color so i will add a little bit more just a hint of yellow into my shadows so let's now hide the curves and let's see this is the image before applying the luminosity adjustments and this is the image after so curves this is my favorite tool everywhere no matter if i'm working in photoshop or in capture one it's just super powerful and if i had only one tool to choose this would be definitely curves i can adjust luminosity values to my liking i can do so much i can even color grade the image so again this is the image before this is what i got from capture one these are the more or less natural colors that i captured and i wanted to take this image a bit further this is how i remember the atmosphere this is how i want to present it to the viewer and i have simply this possibility with curves so i'm really happy with the color grading i have created with curves let's now fine tune it with color editor so i'm going to create for this new field adjustment layer and let's call it color editor and here let's jump over to the color tab and let's grab our advanced color editor so let's see how can we further fine tune the tones in the sky so let's grab the picker i'm going to click somewhere here and let's see let's firstly click on this icon so this will include the whole saturation range of the stone and let's see if i go to the left with my hue i will be adding more magenta let's zero it out if i go in the opposite direction i will be adding more yellow and i don't really like the yellow direction so i think i will very very slightly push it to the left i really like those pink tones this is something that i very rarely do but in case of this image i decided to go towards different color scheme different color grading very commonly we would go for complementary colors so going for warm really nice skin tones and complementing them with cool navy bluish tones in case of this image we have quite dark skin tones plus the subject was photographed against the source of light against very bright sky and we have to work with this so i've decided to go for completely different color scheme so let me just take a screen grab so i'm just going to let's display the before let's take a quick screenshot and now i'm going to jump over to adobe color wheel if you don't know this tool definitely check it out this is a free tool and it gives you really massive possibilities when you want to learn more about color when you want to explore color so first of all we can grab our image inside the color wheel let's select the file so i have it here on my desktop so this is the original image and immediately i can see the main colors that are present here so this is the cinematic color grading that typically would apply to an image to get nice color contrast these colors always give pleasant very nice results so as i just mentioned before navy blue contrasted with the creamy yellow colors this could work however in case of this image i want to have emphasis on the subject i want to have the emphasis on the face and the skin tones here they are not really working in my opinion i wanted to take complete departure from here and go for something that i quite rarely do and go for let's jump back to color wheel i wanted to go towards the analogous color harmony so now the colors that we have here that are marked on the color wheel and the sample here they were taken from the image that we have pulled in from the screenshot from capture one so this was the original color samples and i've decided to go towards completely different color scheme and as i've already introduced some pinkish tones let's just see the after so we are at this stage here and let me now take quickly a screenshot here so now i can pull in my new screenshot so let's just grab this one and let's see so now this gives me again samples of colors from the image and we can see that after manipulating with curves in capture one after creating my color grading i have taken completely different directions so before we had complementary colors we had navies we had yellows now we are within analogous color harmony because these colors if i just jump over to the color wheel they are all lying along the one line here which means that we have one almost one hue one color and different levels of saturation of that color there is a little bit more yellow in here but this gives us analogous color harmony so use this tool this is super super helpful if you get stuck if you want to get some ideas for your color grading so here you can check what works what doesn't work and you can get some suggestions so let's jump back to capture one and let's go back to our color editor so here i have sampled in this peachy tone and i just want to see if i can fine tune it but i already know that i don't want to apply any yellows here i want to stay within this range so if i go a little bit to the left i will be adding more peachy tones but they are getting a little bit too saturated so what i can do now is to click on this large plus icon and apply a bit of negative saturation over the whole image so let's just go for something subtle this is already calling the image so let's go for something like negative 2.5 so this is the image before way warmer this part is very saturated similarly to this one and after applying a bit of negative saturation i would say the transitions are a little bit more harmonious what i like to do next is to pick the color within the kimono and see if i can make it a bit brighter so let's include the whole saturation of this color and let's pull lightness slider so this introduces a little bit more light i'm going to adjust it on the next layer with luma mask but i can already get really good results with the lightness slider so let's not overdo this because we can get some artifacts as well let's just check so this is before and this is the after so that's fine so this is all that i am going to do in this video with color editor i have just fine-tuned those few tones so this is before a little bit more yellow tones here and this is the after so the sky is a little bit more on the pinkish side plus the kimono got brighter again before and after okay let's now go back to our kimono and let's try to introduce a little bit more light here so i'm just going to create another new field adjustment layer let's call it kimono and here i'm going to be targeting specific luminosity range so all i want to do is to increase contrast between those bright folds and those that are in the shadow so i'm just going to jump over here and create a luma mask so let's just tick this button i will have my mask displayed and here i want to just exclude all the dark tones so this is going to be pretty straightforward operation i think something like this can be sufficient let's make this transition here a little bit softer so now i have the mask that covers those brighter folds and i have the sky included as well which is fine i'm going to apply and here on my mask if i again hit m this is the the overlaid preview of my mask i'm just going to jump over to the exposure tab and here with the hdr i'm just going to open up shadow so i will be pushing my shadow slider very slightly to the right and this actually gives me quite good result with such a high value so that way i'm adding more light to my subject i'm introducing more light to the kimono and this way it is getting more three-dimensional it is bringing more attention to the subject we have now strong contrast the face bright kimono and the rest is dark so really really nice let's just see this is before and this is the after the mask was including the sky if i again hit m this is the overlay so what i've done here with my shadow slider it affected the whole sky as well but since i've been manipulating only with the shadow slider it is targeting in the histogram the area around here i would say if i just pull out the histogram to show you more precisely so the slider highlight it would affect the bright mid tones the highlights here shadow slider dark mid mid-tones dark sort of all the dark tones but except the blacks because for the blacks and for the whites you have separate sliders inside the hdr range so with the shadow slider i'm targeting all the dark midtones but i'm not touching the blacks because the blacks this range that is near to the left edge in the graph this can be specifically targeted with the black slider okay so this is what i've done with my quick luma mask super helpful super useful i've added more depth to the image i've added more light okay let's move further now i would like to see what can be done with adding a bit of clarity so i'm not going to be manipulating further with the shadows i am happy with the harmonious result that i got at this stage i might even go down with the overall exposure value in the end but now let's try to add some clarity and let's see if we can get a little bit more pop if we can get a little bit more mid-tone contrast so let's create new field adjustment layer and let's rename it let's call it clarity so here let's jump over to the clarity tool and let's push it to the right so first i'm i'm manipulating with the clarity slider you can see how massive is the change so this is before way softer image after applying this i'm getting way more contrast here i can either try to apply punch method so this will affect colors i really like the results and let's try to add some structure when you are manipulating with adjustments such as sharpness and clarity clarity simply is adding more contrast adding sharpening with broader strokes so you should be looking at your image at least at 100 percent i am on a retina display so i should be at 200 so let's zoom in a little bit more and let's see so this is after adding clarity and this is b4 so way more contrast those dark falls are getting even darker the white falls are getting brighter this is affecting the sky as well but i'm particularly interested in those areas here because we have a bit of noise visible and i don't want to push it further if we take a look at the face before and after so before the face was softer now we have a little bit more sort of general definition the areas that were darker got deeper and we have quite nice highlights here around the eye so i'm really happy with the adjustment let's just try maybe to add some structure very subtle adjustment just to get a little bit more of the kimono fabric texture this can be visible more here let's see before and after it looks good so i'm going to leave it at 10 no need to push it further here i just want to add as one of the final touches a little bit more light to the eye let's try some of the style brushes so there is a style brush in the enhancements as far as i remember iris and hans so this style brush will push contrast let's see if we can get some more highlights quickly with this style brush so i'm just going to maybe reduce size of the brush and paint over the eye here yes so this is giving the result that i wanted and i'm going to in fact paint over the areas in the face where i would like to have a little bit more light so before and after i'm going to save the style brush only for these areas if i hit m this is my mask and this is enough i don't want to introduce any of these sort of adjustments in other areas i might be painting maybe softly over the kimono let's try i'm just going to go for lower flow since i want this to be really seamless and maybe add a little bit more light along the edge but remember that i've taken this image just with natural light i don't even remember if i had reflector i don't think so so i don't want to create results as if there was 50 lights around the subject so i think going further in this direction it will create just artificial effects so this is enough let's see this is before adding the light with the style brush that was basically designed to enhance eyes but in case of this image it worked really really well so in combination with clarity we have added more pop to the image we have made the image even stronger so at this point i feel that i would like to lift those blocks a little bit more i'm going to check what i can do with my hdr settings here let's just zoom in a little bit and let's see if i go just a bit further with my shadow slider i want to go get a little bit more creamy shadow so this is working really well i have added when working on my color grading with curves i've added warm tones to the shadow so if i hover over the face let's go for neutral curves or we can see that we have 42 for the red just 24 for the green and 16 for the blue so definitely we are on a warm side here and this is better visible it creates more soft effect when i push the shadows a little bit further if i zoom in i just want to check if i'm not getting any crazy noise i think it is still looking good and i'm already at 300 percent magnification level so this is working really really well the last thing i would be tempted to do is to just jump over to my curves layer and try to see on my luma curve i've been lifting the black point if i could do a little bit more here just to get those blocks still a bit more soft so the image definitely now gets the stylized look but i don't mind we have this very dramatic sky and i feel that these adjustments are still seamless i'm not doing anything crazy here so this should work let's just zoom in on the face a little bit so everything looks good the only thing i think could be adjusted is that now we have a bit of this white halo around the silhouette around the subject and let's zoom in here no yes there is a bit of this halo so we can go a little bit lower with the clarity value so this gave us this nice pop but everything is very dynamic right now very saturated so we don't need it as strongly enhanced let's just select the clarity layer and let's go down here maybe if we change from punch to natural let's try so this gives smoother transition and let's see let's go back to punch i really like those a bit more saturated tones in the sky and let's go down with the clarity value so i think this is better solution so i went down from i believe 22 to around 16 and now this looks a little bit better okay let's zoom out so that way working with the base characteristics starting with linear response you have the possibility of recovering the overexposed sky and getting back all the details if you want to learn more about the base characteristics watch this video click the thumbnail where i covered the tool in depth thanks for watching this was kasia smokwa from digital art classes i will see you soon in the next video

Channel: Kasia Zmokla

Views: 1,760

Keywords: Kasia Zmokla, photo editing, capture one, capture one pro, capture one tutorial, lightroom alternative, post processing, capture one 21 tutorial, capture one 21 photo editing, capture one 21 editing, capture one portrait editing, capture one portrait tutorial, capture one portrait workflow, capture one 21 portrait, portrait color grading capture one, linear response capture one, color grading using curves, photo editing tutorial, capture one color grading

Id: hLDy1sqZ6Kc

Length: 48min 3sec (2883 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021