Capture One COLOR GRADING Secrets - Winter Mood (Agfa Vista inspired look)

hi everyone this is kasia's mokwa welcome to my channel today i will show you how to create a winter look inspired by akfa vista analog film coming up hello everyone kasia smokwa here welcome to my channel where you will always find photo editing training and educational videos to help you grow as an artist and photographer so today we will be working on this winter color grading that was partly inspired by akfa vista analog film look so let me just jump back to the browser we will be starting off with this image so let's just create new variant and this will be our starting point so in creating this aqua vista look let's just display the final result beside our starting point to create this winter color grading this aqua vista look we will be working with curves so first of all we will create the matte effect we'll lift the blacks if i switch the background color to black you can see that we have no dark tones if i click on this image and if we take a look at the histogram you can see that only reds but the other colors and the luminosity graph the luminosity line starts just here so we have lifted the black points there are no dark tones in this image there are no super strong highlights either there is this gap in the histogram to the right as well and if we change the background to the whites we can see that the snow is not pure white it is sort of creamy it has actually in fact warmer tone after color grading so we will be working with curves to first achieve this sort of matte effect to simplify the image to get rid of all these distracting details here and next will be color grading with curves you might be scared of curves some people would say that color grading with curves this is not going to happen this is too complex but in fact it is not that difficult i can reassure you that once you get a grasp of it once you understand how it works this can really provide some super spectacular results if you color grade with the advanced color editor or color balance you can get nice results but i don't know to be honest why but when you are collaborating with curves only with curves you are getting this really deep very sort of saturated strong colors don't ask me why i don't know i've done some research i've been trying to find from the technical point of view why the curves are treated the way as they are in the aqua vista film simulation but i haven't found anything yet if you know the reason if you know the technicalities behind please leave me a comment i would really appreciate this so this page is very interesting here you can find some different films you can have some reviews so if i scroll down you can see some examples so this will give you the feel and look of the film how it treats the reality how it sort of changes how it interprets the color so you have the technology described and so on and so forth but for me the most important graph was this one so this basically shows the rgb curves so we will be working here in capital one with the curves tool so let me grab my curves let's just take them from there let's open the tool and here we have the rgb we have luma so on rgb we can manipulate with luminosity ranges we can make the image more flat or we can enhance contrast this affects color as well in luma you can as well affect luminosities this doesn't affect colors but then we have these three separate curves for separate channels so individually you have red channel covered by this curve green tunnel and the blue tunnel and i found out that for creating this look the rgb curves are always shaped that way so basically for every single tunnel red green and blue there will be the s-shaped curve they are they have the same shape for every channel and for me this is really fascinating i would like to know why it is like that why the graph looks like that i don't want to bore you with this so let's just jump back quickly to capture one and here we will be working on our image we will apply some luminosity adjustments and we will try to emulate we will try to replicate the akfa vista look and for this we will need our curves so let's just get rid of this image and let's focus on our original image so we can get rid of the curves as well and let's get rid of our browser let's make the layers folder a little bit larger so we will see all our layers that we'll be working with today okay so let's begin our edit on the background layer i'm going to perform auto level so this will set the starting point it will set the contrast so let's just hit the first icon the magic wand and this gave me the automatic adjustment i don't really like those deep blacks here this could be correct from the point of view of capture one but i want to make those blocks softer so i'm going to manually sort of adjust it so let's just move back the black point a little bit to the left and now i'm going to be targeting further those blocks with hdr tools so i want to open the blocks and i want to reveal some detail that is visible here in the sky if we just switch on the exposure warning we have a little bit of the blown highlights here but we are not clipping the blocks so let's now start working on the hdr adjustments i'm going to create new field adjustment layer and let's just rename it let's call it hdr so on my hdr layer i'm going to open up the blocks so this will be done with the shadow slider so i'm just going to push it to the right and i'm going to go for quite a high value and let's now revisit the level so i'm going to close curve and let's see here on the background layer we can still go a little bit to the right as it was suggested by capture one automatically so i'm still manually adjusting levels on the background layer now i'm jumping back to hdr and here i have opened my shadows so i think 80 is a lot but it will work for this image so it's not too much now let's touch the highlights this i want to pull to the left so i will be revealing some detail that was lost in the blown eye without highlights in the sky so maybe this is a little bit too much something around negative i would say 50 is just fine so this is our hdr layer let's now create a new layer and we will be fine-tuning our luminosity in this image new field adjustment layer let's rename it let's call it luminosity so on this layer i will already start working with curves but i will first begin with adjusting luminosity so let's pull my curves out of the tools let's make it bigger and let's begin with rgb so here i want to apply a standard s-shaped curve the classic s-shaped curve to add some contrast so let's begin by adding first control point and pulling this part of the curve downwards so i'm darkening a bit the dark mid tones shadows and let's add another control point let's anchor the curve here so i'm adding contrast and here i can already see that it will be good idea to jump back to hdr and push further my highlight adjustment so negative 88 will be better because i'm clipping some highlights after i have pushed this point a little bit higher so let's fine tune this and here i will lift the blocks a little bit so i will be going for this velvety soft nice effect so no dark blacks no strong contrast all i want this sort of creamy frozen wintery tones for this winter color grading and to combine lifting the black point lifting my blocks i can add here this operation i can pull down my white point so this will cut off the strong highlights we won't have any strong whites okay so this is what we've done on our rgb layer let's now jump over to luma and here i will apply the opposite shaped curve so let's go for something like this this allows me to fine tune my adjustment and basically go for this really refined look so now i can target every luminosity range that i want to and i can tell capture one how it should adjust those ranges so combining rgb with the luma curve it always gives great results and if you know how to work with one of the curves if you understand how this relates to the histogram this is really really easy okay so this is my starting point on this layer i have adjusted luminosity range with my curves so this is what i've done as you can see manipulating with the rgb curve affected colors so i have made the colors more saturated so again this is before and this is the after so i have made the contrast basically stronger and the colors are a little bit more vibrant so now we are going to be working on color grading with curves this is the first stage of color grading maybe more difficult than the others because we will be working with color balance and color editor further on in this edit so let's jump right into it as i have said at the beginning we are going to emulate the aqua vista look and as i have shown you here in this graph basically they are the red and green and the blue curves they are they take the shape of the classic s-shaped curve and we are going to repeat it we are going to replicate this here so for the red let's create first control point and let's pull it downwards so that way in the shadow area in the shadow range on our luminosity graph we are adding the color that is complementary to red which is cyan and here to the highlight we'll be adding red by creating new control point and by pulling this curve upwards and i'm going to repeat this operation for two other curves let's go for more subtle effect okay something like this now for the green curve exactly the same let's create first control point let's pull it downwards so that way to the shadow range to the dark tones we are adding magenta which is the complementary color to the green and now by pulling our curve upwards we are adding green inside the bright tones inside the bright mid tones and highlights and now let's jump over let's maybe pull this point a little bit lower let's now jump over to the last to the blue curve and let's create again the classic s-shaped curve by pulling the curve downwards i'm adding yellow to the shadow range and by pulling the curve upwards i'm adding blue to the bright mid tones and to my highlights so that's the color grading you can achieve by manipulating with curves so on my layer i have everything all together i have the luminosity adjustments and color grading with the curves individually red green and blue so this is before and this is the after so all you need to understand is to how the luminosity ranges are placed are reflected on the histograms of the left hand side this is the blacks going from the blacks all the way through the mid tones to the highlights exactly the same graph is visible here so to the left you have blacks here you have dark mid tones represented by this graph by the speak of information in the middle we have plenty of mid tones this is very very clearly visible here in case of this image and here we have some bright mid tones and there are no strong highlights there is nothing here so that's it all you need to do is practice a bit and try to be maybe quite subtle with these curves because if you start pulling them very strongly and if you start going for very dynamic shapes then you will get in trouble but try to keep the shape of your curves very very smooth subtle and i'm sure you will get very good results very very quickly and here is one thing that i want to mention i want to give you one tip in capture one you have predefined points so you can use the ready presets if you go here and if you select the first option five point on all channels capture one will create five five points on every single channel so you don't have to add them manually you can just manipulate with them plus you can experiment with these other presets so i'm not going to do this since i've already worked hard on my color grading and luminosity adjustments but this can be used as well so if you are a beginner and if you are not familiar with curves you can apply any of these presets and then you can fine tune them manually you can move around these points so you will get understanding how this tool works okay so on this layer we have luminosity and i will add color with curves now let's move further and let's fine tune our color grading so the first tool we are going to use for this will be color balance so let's add new field adjustment layer and let's rename it to color balance okay okay so on this layer i'm just going to go for my color balance tool we can make the curve smaller so they won't be distracting here it is let's make it bigger and let's begin with shadows i'm not going to touch master i'm going to start right from shadows here i will inject still a little bit more of the blue so let's go for something like this color balance it is a very intuitive very easy and very fast to use tool so you can see immediately the results that you are getting when it comes to the mid tones i will go for complementary color so for the shadows i went this way starting from the center of my color wheel i went this direction towards the blue so in the mid tones i will go the opposite direction exactly the other way and i will add some warm tones something between the yellows and oranges something like this maybe a little bit more saturated so once you settle on the color here you can increase or decrease saturation so that way you will go all the way you will add the mid tones 100 percent strength saturation for the color i'm going to go for something a little bit more subtle and i will make it darker so with the left slider you are controlling saturation with the right side there you are controlling luminosity so let's make the midtones a little bit darker and let's take a look at our highlights so we had a little bit of this pale winter is sun so let's make the highlights a little bit warmer on this yellowy warmer side i will make them a little bit darker as well so this will darker the snow this will darken the snow excuse me and the cloud in the sky all those bright areas okay something like this perfect so on this layer i've been fine-tuning my color grading with color balance let's now jump over and fine tune selected colors in this image with color editor so with color balance i have the possibility of injecting selected colors into luminosity ranges so i can target highlights i can target mid tones shadows the same i can do here with curves but if i would like to for example change the hue of the blue i have to use the color editor and let me just show you how you can do this very very quickly and easily so let's add the new field adjustment layer and let's rename it let's call it color editor so here with the color editor let's first grab it so here it is we'll be working with the advanced tab so first i want to target the blues they are a bit on the magentis side and i want to push them towards the scion so let's sample let's say maybe somewhere here and let's click on this icon to make sure that the whole saturation range is included and i'm going to push my hue slider to the left so i will be adding more cyan so if i would go the other way i will be adding magenta and i will get basically purple winter color grading which is not what i'm after today let's go the other way and this is way too saturated so let's go for lower saturation maybe this is too much something about negative 21 when it comes to the hue maybe a little bit more okay something like this everything is falling nicely in place when it comes to lightness we can make the blue range just a little bit darker maybe still a little bit more okay so now let's target those brownish tones here let's zoom in and let me sample here in this graph so again i need to take the color picker and i'm going to sample somewhere here okay let's zoom out so we will see the image again let's click on this icon so that way we made sure that the whole saturation range is included when it comes to this color i'm going to experiment so let's see if i push it to the right i'm adding more yellow if i push it to the right i'm adding more magenta let's zero it out and i'm going to push it a little bit to the right so i will be basically creating complementary color to my science so if it's in the magentis range it sort of it's not that harmonious but if i operate on the other side of the color wheel i'm going into the complementary color and this should work together nicely so complementary colors will create color contrast and they will typically create pleasing effect when it comes to saturation let's see i don't want to make it grayish let's go a bit on the positive side so i will go for something maybe on the plus 10 and when it comes to lightness let's go a little bit to the left let's see i'm actually affecting the whole range here so let's zero it out and i'm going to narrow my selection a bit because i was interested in that graph lower here in those sort of beige yellowy tones i don't want to touch this so i want to exclude these colors i can do this by manually pushing this handle upwards and that way the reds will not be included in my selection and my further adjustments won't affect hopefully this part of the foliage so if i want to make it just a notch darker okay now this is darkening the bottom part but i'm not touching the reds okay let's just go for subtle value here maybe something around negative 0.7 so this is what i've done on my layer with color editor i have adjusted my science and i have fine-tuned those browns okay so everything looks good i want to desaturate the whole image just a notch i don't want to target any specific color i just want to go for the whole color range and to do this i need to click on this little plus button here i can manipulate with saturation so let's go for negative value i'm going to go for something around maybe negative 19. so this is before and this is the after so this is a very personal step i like my color grading i like to keep it on the sort of the saturated silvery side especially the the scene that way looks closer to reality this reminds me what i had in front of my eyes when i was photographing this lake on one of the recent sunday mornings so this is what we have done on our layers so far let's now take a look at the image as a whole and let's maybe balance the bottom because the now the interest point will go here towards the strong color we are looking at the trees and sort of the bottom part the bottom half of the image doesn't hold so i'm going to darken it just a bit so i'm going to create new field adjustment layer let's rename it let's call it lake bottom and let's work here with linear gradient and by the way if you are getting value from my videos i will really appreciate if you leave me a thumbs up if you leave me a comment under this video if you have any questions please feel free to ask i'm always curious your feedback and i'm always super curious your suggestions for future videos so if you like what i'm doing please consider subscribing to my channel that way you are supporting me a lot i really appreciate it and i'm able to record more videos like this in future for you so let's get back to our edit i'm going to darken the bottom of this image so i will hopefully create more balance between the upper half and the bottom half so i'm going to create my linear gradient something like this and here i will be working with maybe levels for a change so let's jump to our exposure tab and with levels let's see if i push this point this creates very nice effect very subtle so i'm gradually darkening the bottom of my leg let's not go too far i want to basically have the reflection that was visible here on the eyes and with this operation it is stronger so i've made it a bit darker not too dark and this creates better balance in the hole in the overall composition when it comes to the sky i want to still see if applying hdr adjustment will help a bit reveal those details here so let's quickly create new field adjustment layer let's rename it let's call it sky and let's apply again linear gradient this time going from the top of the image we can leave it here and then we can fine tune it and let's go for hdr tool and let's go let's touch our highlight slider so i think this benefits the image a lot so on that very day we had around negative 10 celsius so it was quite cold quite crispy and no strong light at all so maybe this is a little bit too much maybe i made it too dark so let's just fine tune it remember that you can do this either with the slider or you can change opacity of the layer so if i select my sky layer and now opacity is at 100 if i go lower this will fine tune my effect so i think something like this works really well the very last step i want to apply to this image is to add a little bit more punch and i'm going to apply some clarity so this will be applied to the whole image you could create gradient you can create the radial gradient and sort of target it in the middle but i think we can add it to the whole image new field adjustment layer clarity so what clarity does it adds contrast to the midtones so this should bring up more texture in the lake and here in those areas the trees should stand out stronger so let's go for clarity tool and let's manipulate with this slider so if i go for positive value something around maybe 20 i think this is already enough let's just get rid of these tools and important thing when you are either adding clarity and especially if you are sharpening your images take a look at the magnification level now i'm 33 the ideal is to look at your image at 100 so i should be looking at my image at this magnification level so then i can really judge how this is affecting my image if you are looking at your image at lower magnification level so you can easily go over the top you can apply too strong adjustment for the particular image so i think this is enough when it comes to adding contrast to the mid-tones so before after i'm tempted now to revisit my curves and brighten the bright midtones a little bit i feel that this part of the image is a little bit too dark so let's just jump over to my curves here is my layer and let's try maybe in luma if we just change positioning of this point and pushing it a little bit higher up here and only pulling this one lower so this will get the matte effect in the highlights but the image will be a little bit brighter i don't want to blow out highlight in the snow okay so we are still good i think something like this works really well and now i want to show you that once we have created this color grading so we have all these layers we've been building this effect let's just quickly see the before and after so this is our original image to the left this is our starting point as you can see quite gloomy wintery cold day and this is what we've done after our color grading after all the adjustments after simulating the aqua vista film effect again before and after so we've done a lot of work i feel that the clarity is a little bit too strong let's go lower okay so this is what we have done this is the style that we have created so now i would like to super quickly show you that once you have spent the time on creating this style you can reapply it with one click to other images yes i have some other images from this shoot even with the negative temperatures i have taken few more images so let's select these two and this is the edited image i'm just going to click on this arrow here copy all my adjustments so this has copied all my adjustments from all these layers into the clipboard now i need to click on this image now this one is selected we have the gray border around the image and only background layer no adjustments all i need to do now is to just click on this little icon here on this arrow pointing downwards apply so once i've done this the style is automatically applied to the image this works if the images first were taken with similar lighting conditions and if they have similar colors so let's try on this one let's select the image let's hit apply so this works quite well i can fine tune some details here so let's just select the image it is a little bit too contrasty to my liking so we can go maybe let's first take a look at the levels they are actually looking good maybe we can push this one a little bit to the left it will open up the mid tones it will make them a little bit brighter and we can [Music] maybe go to color editor and i would target specifically the greens so okay let's just add the tool here it has vanished somewhere so right click add tool and from here color editor here we have it advanced and now i'm going to sample specifically in the greens so let's zoom in let's okay let's command that okay so again let's get the color picker and let's sample somewhere in the greens let's say here perfect let's click on this icon the whole saturation range of the greens will be included let's zoom out and here i would like to make the greens more on the cyanish side i don't like the yellows that are here i want these three images to work together as a set so let's just zoom out and we don't have any of these warm sort of yellowy greens in these two images and this image somehow doesn't sit well together so let's try to fine tune this if i push my hue slider to the left i'm adding more yellow so i'm going towards spring i would say i'm adding yellow i'm adding sunshine let's go the opposite direction and i'm cooling down these greens this sample this is my original color and this is after editing so this looks good i feel however that the greens are too saturated during such a gloomy day with such a dim light you will never have such a strong color so maybe i have taken this image when the sun was peeking through the clouds few minutes or so but to create a consistent set i want to desaturate the greens so i have my green selected let's go to the left with the slider towards the negative value let's maybe zoom out okay this looks way better in terms of the set okay something like this and when it comes to the lightness maybe we can go a little bit on the positive side so something just a notch like positive 3. so that way it looks good let's now take a look because i have created these two layers that were specific for this image the one that darkened the sky my sky layer and the one that darkened the bottom this may not be needed here so i have selected my pine image and let's just switch off the sky so okay it's not needed i can delete it from here and like bottom so this darkens the bottom it is not needed either so i can switch it off or yes i can switch it off i don't need it here let's go to my curves layer and here on this layer we can fine tune the contrast so let's pick curves from here and in my rgb curve i want to add a little bit more contrast i want to darken the mid tones so let's go for maybe something like this and let's add another control point let's pull it upwards so this will make the snow more prominent and this creates this balances the whole composition so today we've been talking about color and i want to mention here that currently i'm working on a brand new course that will be targeting specifically color i will be talking about color about color theories and their applications so i will be working in capture 121 but no matter what software is your software of choice you can find value in this course if you would like to get updates on this course you can sign up there is a link under this video in the description so today we have been color grading this winter landscape i have shown you how you can do this with multiple different tools that are color related in capture one i know that these subjects are complex but it just takes a bit of practice and step by step you will get further understanding you will get deeper understanding and for those of you who want to learn more about capture one who want to have access to comprehensive source of knowledge you can check out my course on capture one this course is ready this course is finished i have already many happy students enrolled so you can find the link down below as well so thank you very much for watching this was kasia's mokwa from digital art classes and remember i'm always super curious your feedback and your suggestions for future videos thanks for watching and see you bye now

Channel: Kasia Zmokla

Views: 1,798

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 color grading, capture one color grading tutorial, color grading in capture one pro, capture one pro 20 color grading, landscape color grading, color grading landscape photography, winter color grading, agfa vista film look, color grading with curves

Id: 4Zakx-RjStU

Length: 38min 4sec (2284 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021