Capture One Pro COLOR GRADING - Beginners Guide

hi everyone my name is kasia smokwa welcome to my channel where you will always find photo editing training and educational videos to help you grow as an artist and photographer in today's video we are going to be working on a portrait of marcella and i'm going to show you how you can use the skin tone tab in the color editor to create a stylized color grading effect so this image is going to be our starting point this is the original raw file and we'll be working towards this effect so when you are typically color grading you would use the skin tone tab to even out the skin to get rid of unwanted color shifts and if you would like to target specific colors if you would like to go for stylized effect you would go for either color balance or advanced color editor and in this video i'm going to show you how you can use the skin tone tab to take it as a basic tool when you're after a stylized portrait ready let's jump right into it okay so let's take a look at our image before we start talking specifically about color grading this image about creating this stylized effect i want to quickly walk you through all the steps that i have performed before i started working on color if we take a look at our layers stack you can see that starting from this layer skin tone and color i started working on color grading but before i've done just that i have several more layers so first of all we have hill layers we have dodge and burn so let me just very quickly show you what i have done on these layers because these layers all these adjustments are crucial for any successful portrait edit so this is my image after switching off all these layers that contain the adjustments however this is not the original raw image yet this is the original image this is the starting point so what i have performed on my background layer on the background layer i have performed my favorite operation so this is what i always recommend and it doesn't matter if you are working on a portrait on a landscape no matter the genre this is my recommended step because with the auto levels adjustments you are able to set the proper foundation for your edit so if we just take a look at the histogram you can see that now after correcting my levels automatically i was able to stretch the whole information along the graph before if i now press and hold on this little arrow you can see that the graph looks differently and let me just create a new variant of this image because i was manipulating with hdr tool as well i was adjusting shadows so just to show you how the image looked like at the very beginning i have created new variant so this is the image before i have cropped it and here you can see what is the difference so this is the image before i have applied auto levels and if you take a look at the histogram you can see that we are clipping a bit of shadows here we can use the exposure warning so if i switch this on yes you can see that we are clipping a little bit of the shadows not much but we have lost detail in those dark areas in the hair a little bit in the eye the image is underexposed so the highlights look good but the shadows are clipped so let me just switch off the exposure warning and this is reflected clearly in the histogram so to the left we can see that the shadows are clipped we have plenty of beautiful midtones here plenty of data in the midtones range and when we take a look at the right hand side of the histogram we are lacking highlights we have no bright tones so the image is pushed towards dark tones the mid tones got very heavy very dark and just after applying auto levels you can do this with this second icon visible here in the levels tab once you click on this this will adjust your levels and if you just now take a look at the histogram and if i temporarily switch off the levels adjustment so this is before this is the after just take a look at the histogram before and after so this is how this tool is able in a split of a second establish a foundation for your edit so let me just quickly jump back to the previous image so here i have manually readjusted those points but basically what was applied here is quite near to is happening here so i have readjusted those points manually because as i just mentioned at the background layer so we are here now i was manipulating with the shadow slider i wanted to open up those shadows and introduce a little bit more light to have her face lit a little bit more evenly so if i switch this off this is how the image looked like before and this is how it looks like after opening up the shadows so mostly i was interested in having a little bit more detail in this eye i knew that i will edit it later on that i will be adding a little bit of dodging and burning but i just wanted to have a little bit better starting point so again this is the image before and after applying hdr adjustment okay so what else i've done here i haven't touched the curves i have applied the auto levels and i've been working on hdr apart from that i have corrected white balance so if we take a look at the original temperature so if i press and hold the alt key and if you just take a look this is very little difference if you just take a look at the value beside kelvin so now after the adjustment the number is 4 2 7 0 and before it's 4 1 eight nine i just wanted to make this image a little bit warmer so the result is not very strongly visible but it is there i just touched this a little bit to have the image on a bit warmer side because it contains a lot of these blues greens and i wanted to have those tones a little bit more harmonious with the skin tones so as you can see on my background layer i have basically performed some exposure adjustments i've been working on luminosity so additionally i've been pushing my exposure towards 0.56 so this is the original image before applying the adjustment on exposure and after so this is what i've done on my background layer very very quick adjustments very intuitive this is the initial steps that can establish really strong foundation for any edit so the exposure adjustment before i've done the exposure adjustments always do this as the very first step i have performed the auto levels then i've been working on white balance and at the very end i have opened a little bit the shadows so this is my background layer let's now jump over and let's focus on the next three layers where i have been working on cleaning up the skin so you must know for sure by now that capture one has this new healing brush that can handle a lot in terms of skin retouch so i want to mention here i want to make it very clear that this is not a beauty retouch for this you definitely need to jump over to photoshop very often i have heard comments that it's not worth the time spending in capture one and working with the stool when you are required to provide really professional results and just perfect spotless skin so i agree with this fully don't get me wrong when you are working on a beauty retouch when you are required when you are asked by your client to provide an image that is just spotless with perfect clean skin for this definitely you should jump over to photoshop and just photoshop has tools dedicated to this process and you can do this way faster however if you're working on a fine arts portrait and your result is basically up to you you decide how much of the skin you want to retouch how much you want to live in then you can easily stay with capture one and remember that staying inside your raw editor and here it doesn't matter if you are working with lightroom capture one or adobe camera raw just staying inside euro editor without exporting your image to a bitmap to thief or psd helps you to maintain the highest possible quality so when we are working with a raw file we have at our disposal all the data that was recorded on our memory card once we would jump out of the raw editor in this case once when we jump over to photoshop and we leave capture one we are already losing access to this data and if we would jump to photoshop and perform the skin retouch over there and then go back to perform color grading we would be working already on a teeth and this can be of course done when you are working on a sort of beauty image however if you can stay inside capture one please do so and your images will look way way better so let me now super quickly walk you through my heel layers so to clean up the skin i've been working with the healing brush this is the tool that is visible here so all you need to do is to just pick the brush and start working on the image so here i've been working and higher magnification level i'm now at 200 percent so first of all you need to get into your brush settings so right click on the image and here you can set size of the brush so we can do this here you can go for hardness opacity and flow so when it comes to hardness when you are retouching skin of course you want to go for as soft edges as possible so typically i would work with the value zero when it comes to opacity i would go for 100 and when it comes to flow it depends because when i start retouching the skin and you can see that i have three layers on which i have retouched the skin so on the very first one the heel layer number one i would go for flow at one hundred percent then on next layers i would modify this value let me just show you so if i go on my hill layer number one you can see the results that i have achieved here so this is before this is the after so here i've been working with my brush set to the flow at 100 so if i'm on this layer and if i hover over the image you can see all those points where i have retouched the image and the arrows are showing points from capture one was taking the data to fix those points that i have selected so this is my first layer and let's just zoom in so we'll see those points so this is my first layer here i had the flow set to 100 if we now jump over to the hill layer number two this is the result i got on this layer so you can see that i've been polishing the face further so here i've been working i would say again with the flow set to 100s however there are certain parts especially here around the lips where i needed softer transitions and when you are fixing little things like this so let me just switch off this layer and switch it on again there is this little part here that i wanted to fix so again before and after so to just fix this line inside the lips i've been working with the healing brush set to lower flow value so i wanted to have the result sort of half transparent so that way i wouldn't be copying this line from another place from here and pasting it here but if i'm working with lower flow value this creates more subtle result and sometimes this blends better especially when you are working on retouching the skin so this is what you should remember when you are working with the heel brush and when you are working with the clone brush that you have those settings at your disposal that you can still change the opacity and flow so whenever you are retouching skin and you are creating just too obvious effect to obvious result you might benefit by lowering especially the flow this value so your retouching efforts will blend better so this is my second layer and here on the third layer specifically on this one i've been working with lower flow value so here i've been focusing just a little bit on fixing few last parts in the forehead and still a little bit around the chin and on her cheek so on those three layers i've been working with the heel brush why i've been working on three layers why i couldn't do this on one layer only so the reason is very simple if we jump over to the heel layer number one you can see that after going for 200 percent magnification level i have so many of these control points so it turns super difficult to add more you are confusing capture one and sometimes you get in trouble so to maintain control and to have the flexibility typically i would add just another healer layer and i would continue working over there there is a limit when it comes to the amount of layers that you can have in capture one in the layers editor however when it comes to the healing of my portraits i don't skip on creating new layers because this is just super super important when i'm working on a portrait if i don't perform these steps right if i don't manage to get pleasing results there is simply no point for me to work further on dodging and burning and on color grading because hearing the skin preparing the portrait for further edits is just crucial so remember create as many of these healing layers as you need and after you are happy with the results you can jump over and start working on color grading so again let's just take a look let me just zoom in so this is the image after cleaning the skin and if i just switch off those layers this is the image before so this is magnification 100 but i'm on a retina display so to have better representation of the work that i've done we can go for 200 so again this is before and this is after cleaning the skin with the heel brush in capture one so after preparing the skin i've been performing a little bit of dodging and burning so if you are coming from photoshop you must be for sure familiar with this technique so basically in photoshop you would create two layers okay the stack can be a bit more complex if you needed to do so but in capture one to replicate the process of dodging and burning you would create basically two layers dodge and burn as you can see only on these two layers i've been able to add more depth to the image i've been able to shape the face a little bit let's just switch off my healing brush so i won't be seeing the arrows the overlay so this is what i have achieved on the dodge and burn layer so how do you go about this so basically the dodge layer is the layer where you are making selected areas in your image brighter and on the burn layer is when you are making selected areas in your image darker i'm not going to walk you through all the details of dodging and burning process so the same as i wasn't hearing the image in this video if you would like to see the whole process step by step of healing the skin with the heel brush tool watch the video that i have recorded specifically on retouching the skin with the heel brush i'm going to add a link in the description to this video and it should be visible now in the upper right corner so in this video i will walk you through all the steps of healing your image with the heel brush and if you are specifically interested in dodging and burning i will add a link to the video where i will show you again in depth step by step with every detail the whole process of creating these two layers and all the principles behind successful dodging and burning so just to say very very quickly very shortly on your dodging layer you are creating a curve typically this would be luma curve because you don't want to affect colors you want to keep the colors neutral you don't want to create saturation shifts after you apply adjustment on your layer so remember for dodging and burning you always go for luma curve and here on dodging you push your curve upwards so that way you will be making selected areas in your image brighter so let me just switch on my mask i'm hitting m on the keyboard so this is my mask for dodging so everywhere where you can see this red overlay this is the areas where i have brightened the image you can as well in capture one have a preview of your mask in black and white in order to do this use the keyboard shortcut alt and m so this is my mask in black and white wherever you see those white brush strokes in those areas i've been working with the brush i have created the mask and then we have this result so let's switch off the mask so this is my mask for dodging and you can see let's switch off the burn so this is my result before applying dodging and after so as you can see very clearly in case of this image dodging is the next step that helps to retouch the skin so with the heel layer we've been basically cleaning the skin from all those little imperfections all those little spots but with the dodge tool we've been working on those larger transitions so if you just take a close look let's say you can look here on her cheek or on the right hand side of the forehead so now after applying dodging all these transitions are smooth so i didn't want to make the skin super perfect this is just natural portrait i wanted to maintain realistic look but i have improved those transitions so here you have plenty of these uneven areas so if i just zoom in now this is better visible when the image is zoomed out so we are still looking at the image at 100 percent magnification level and you can see all those little darker spots so here here on the forehead here so when i've been working with dodging i've been brightening those little areas here around the eye here those lines from the nose so i've been working on brightening those areas and working towards smoothening those transitions so the results that you can get with dodging layer is really important so i would never skip this step when i'm working on a portrait retouch so again this is before this is the after burn this is the second layer when you do just the opposite so here on burn layer you would create one control point and you would push it downwards so that way when you are creating your mask let's just jump back to layers so on that layer when you are working on your mask you will be darkening selected areas in the image and if we hit m this is the preview of my mask so wherever you see this red overlay this indicates that i have decided to darken those areas if we want to take a look at the mask in black and white you can hit alt and m so here you can see that i just wanted to make the eye a little bit stronger i've been working on darkening the eyebrow and here i've darkened a little bit the area under the chin to make it a little bit more three-dimensional so this is what i performed with my burn layer so typically of course it depends on the image but typically you would spend way more time on dodging than burning and again this is very subjective all those adjustments you will always perform basing on your taste so for me this is where i went when it comes to the healing the skin and this is where i went when it comes to the dodging and burning some of you would like to have stronger effect and work stronger on shaping the face i like keeping my portraits natural and especially when it comes to portraiting this girl marcella i really like keeping it very subtle very natural and i think that the image holds the attention already i don't have to go towards manipulating with it further when it comes to shaping the face and when it comes to targeted luminosity adjustments okay so i have walked you through my entire process of healing and dodging and burning now we are going to talk about adjusting enhancing the eyes because eyes are super important when you are working on portrait and especially when you have such a potential as in case of this image so we have those very natural beautiful catch lights and adding a little bit of enhancement on the eyes can help working on your portrait further so on the eyes layer i would create a very simple mask so this is my mask i would go over those dark areas in the eyes and here in case of this portrait i wanted to brighten up the eyes a little bit so this allowed me to reveal the detail that was recorded that was there but was not visible because it was just covered in dark shadows so this is the image before this is the image after adjusting the eyes so i have opened the shadows and additionally i have applied a little bit of clarity adjustment so before i done just that after opening the shadows the eyes will be very bright too bright of course but when you apply clarity you will add more contrast in the mid tones range this will darken the eyes i went for the punch method because with these metals capture one can add a little bit more color so when you are going for natural method this won't affect color but with punch capture one can alter saturation and i don't mind doing this in case of this picture so let's just zoom out and you might say that this is too much so again this is very subjective if i would be just looking and the close-up of those eyes i would say that this is too much as well but when i zoom out and if i take a look at the portrait as overall composition i think that this works quite well so this is before and this is the after so remember that when you are working with layers in capture one you are working of course in a non-destructive way so at any point after applying your color grading you can always go back you can return to those layers and you can further fine tune it so you can either go lower with opacity on this layer if you feel that this is too much or you can go down here with the shadow adjustment so this is what i've done on my layer that targets the eyes again this is before and this is the after so at this stage i'm happy with the foundation with how the image is prepared for further work so before i start working on color grading i want to really emphasize this that these steps i know that they are really time consuming and they require a lot of patience however if you would be working on color grading without going through all these adjustments i would say that you will never achieve good results because these steps are really crucial so let me just show you if i would skip these steps if i wouldn't heal the skin but i would apply my color grading so here are my beautiful colors so here i've been stylizing the image with the skin tone top then i've been polishing my color grading then i've been fine-tuning my luminosity so this is the final result that i wanted to achieve but let's just super quick just as an experiment switch off all these layers where i have performed let's say for the beginning healing the skin so this is my image how it would look like with my color grading but without cleaning the skin let me just switch off my dodging and burning so if you want to go for super natural effect you might leave it as it is but i think that working a little bit on cleaning up the skin can really benefit a portrait like that so of course again this is super subjective but just to show you the difference in my opinion it simply doesn't make sense to spend all the time and create the beautiful color grading because the result with so this is with and without skin retouch is really dramatic so this is my image after performing the skin cleanup and this is with dodging and burning so even skipping on the dodging and burning if i would switch off my dodge layer you can see that the image looks very very different i feel that after applying the dodging i just make the image more harmonious and more pleasing to look at as a final composition in terms of luminosity adjustments so again so this is before dodging and burning and this is the after so if you ask my opinion i would always recommend to perform all these steps i would always work a little bit on killing the skin on fixing the texture and on dodging and burning and once this is done you can start working on color grading and again if you want to learn in detail how to heal the skin how to work with the heel brush and if you want to go in depth and learn the whole process from a to z of dodging and burning check out links in my description to this video okay so let's now move over and let's start working with our color dedicated tool and we will be working with the skin tone tool so let's very quickly clone this image so i'm going to create clone variant so now let's maybe get rid of this one because it will be a bit confusing so on this one i'm just going to delete all those layers where i've been working with color and i'm going to remove the film grain i believe there is some film grain yes so i'm going to just get rid of this and right now we have the image and the stage that i have achieved after applying all the healing layers and my dodging and burning so if we just look at these two images side by side you can see and of course this image was first no i don't think i can change the order right now but if we just look at the images side by side you can see that this will be our starting point for color grading and this is the result that i'm after so in this image after healing and after dodging and burning i just wanted to go for a bit more stylized color grading of course i could just work on the skin tones make them a little bit brighter and perhaps push them a bit towards yellowish tone as i've done just here so this will complement nicely with the bluish sweater however i wanted to go for something a bit stronger and i have used the skin tone top in the color editor to create this super stylized color grading effect so let's just work with this image we can hide our browser so we have more space let's zoom in a little bit and let's now jump over to our color tab and here we have our color editor and we will be working with the last tab the skin tone tab okay before we start working with the skin tone tab let's create a new layer so i'm going to make this tab a little bit bigger and here i'm going to create new filled adjustment layer and i'm just going to rename it to skin tone okay so here we have our layer and here we will start working with our color grading so typically the skin tone top will be used on portraits to even out the skin so when we take a look at this portrait we have a little bit of color shift so we have some uneven areas in terms of color we have a little bit more of pink here in the cheek we have a little bit more of this magenta stones here in the forehead we have a little bit more orange here so if you would like to unify the skin in terms of hue saturation and lightness you would do this with the skin tone tab so this is basically the main purpose of this tool however it can be used to create a strong color shifts and you can use this tool in any genre that you want in case of this image we will be working on creating different color for the sweater and pushing all those stones in the image towards one unified direction okay so let me just create my first sample and you will see in practice how this tool will perform because as always explaining these things in words without actually working is just confusing and sounds super complex super difficult but in fact it is not so let's just start working you can follow me along and you can learn how to create a stylized color grading effect with the skin tone top and by the way if you're getting values from my videos i would be super happy if you like this video if you leave me thumbs up if you leave me comment on this video as always if you have any questions if you don't understand anything that i'm explaining or anything that you would like to go more in depth you can always leave me a comment and i reply to all my comments on my videos so like the video leave me a comment and if you like the content i will be super pumped up if you subscribe to my channel if you hit the bell icon and that way you will get notifications on every future video that i publish okay so let's pick our picker here inside the skin tone and i'm going to sample inside the image to get my collar that will be altering it is not crucial to create a perfect sample here because i'm going to show you in a few seconds that you can still change it you can still push around inside the color wheel the point that you will sample okay let me show you how to do this in practice so i'm going to sample somewhere between the yellows and oranges so maybe where the color is a little bit more saturated let's say here so here i have created my sample first of all let's just click on this icon so this will make sure that the whole saturation range of my selected color sample is included inside the selection because now we can see that this slice here represents the selection so the stronger saturated hues are not included in the selection if i just click on this little icon i have now included everything inside the slice to get a preview of your selection you can click on this little icon here so now everything that is grayed out is excluded from your selection so this is obvious we have yellows maybe not yellows we have the oranges reds and a little bit of magentas so all these colors are included and the sweater was sort of bluish magenta so this is lying this range of color is lying somewhere here and we can see that this is excluded from our selection so let me again show you whatever is grayed out is excluded from our selection so now this is where the beauty of this tool lies so now i can extend my selection range and by doing this i will be including blues i will be including the greens so basically i will be including my background and that way now if i start manipulating with these sliders here so in other words if i start affecting my initial color sample this will affect all these colors that are now included in my selection so not only the little slice that was originally generated by capture one so originally we had only some of the skin tones we had the oranges a little bit of reds and a bit of magentas but now i have pushed this line that far so i have included all the blues and greens all those scions so let's now start manipulating with these sliders here so when it comes to the amount we can now push that hue either towards the yellowish tone or towards the pinkish tone so this little dot here indicates the area where i have sampled inside the image so if i start pushing my hue towards the right you can see very clearly that i'm adding yellow if i go the other way if i go the opposite direction i would be adding more magenta so if you take a look at the color wheel just going upwards and you could say counter clockwise you will be adding yellow and going clockwise you will be adding more magenta so here you are obviously going either left or right so i wanted to add a little bit more yellow so let's double click to zero out our slider and i'm going to just to push it towards the right i don't want to overdo this i think something around zero 0.9 looks good so again this is before this is the after when it comes to saturation let's maybe increase saturation a little bit let's just make something stronger we can always fine tune it when i will start working on uniformity sliders and when it comes to lightness let's just brighten this sample a little bit so let's go for something around 3.6 so the difference is not that strongly visible here basically this is the sample before my adjustments and this is the sample after i have adjusted the color let's now start the whole fan so with the uniformity sliders when you start working with the hue now you will tell capture one to unify towards this adjusted sample to unify towards this color all the colors that are inside your selection range so capture one will push towards this sort of color towards this hue all the colors that are visible here so it will push towards this tone all the blues all the skin tones and all the cyans that are included here so let's just see how this will work if i start pushing my hue slider towards the right hand side you can see that this is super strongly affecting the image and now this is the time when i can change the position of my sampled color because i have sampled in sort of orangey yellowy place but the skin is definitely getting too red so let me just reposition this point i'm going to go a little bit more towards the yellow tones so i'm going to go a little bit upwards so let's go for something like this and i think we can go down a little bit with saturation no let's just touch the saturation slider in here so if i start let's now hit enter so this will disappear now if we manipulate with the saturation slider in the uniformity tab you can see that this is basically pushing all those colors that are inside our selection towards the same saturation level so this is how this works i'm going to extend my selection here so i will include more yellows because this is creating super unnatural effect inside the face that included more yellows and we've been basically cutting it in half so i'm going to go somewhere around here and i'm going to go down with this one because i don't want to change the cyans those tones in the background so basically i'm going to go for let's say something like this okay so let's further fine tune this point let's take a really close look at the skin tones okay let's revisit our amount slider so here i can go a little bit lower on the hue when it comes to saturation let's see this is more this is less no definitely i want to maintain the strong saturation but 8.4 is a little bit too much let's go for maybe 8.2 okay and when it comes to lightness i think this value works really well and now i want to modify the mask because as you can see those color adjustments affected the lips they affected the eyes and this creates this super unnatural effect so i'm just going to super quickly erase those areas in my mask so they won't be affected by the adjustment so now if i hit m this is my mask it fully covers the image let me just zoom in and let's go for e for eraser and let's go for high flow and let's just erase my mask first of all from the eyes so now this is my mask with this little hole inside and let's just erase it from the other eye i'm just going to go for a little lower flow and erase it from the eyebrows because they lost their original a bit colder tone the same from eyelashes here and i'm going to remove it from the lips let's go for higher flow so that way i will be going back to the original colors in the image so i will have my stylized effect applied over the image apart from the lips apart from the eyes and i'm going to erase this from the cheekbones as well okay so this is my mask after modification and here i'm going to go for bigger brush but i'm going to go for lower flow i want to be quite subtle here just to get back a little bit of the original color that was visible on the cheeks so that way it can be treated as a blush okay so that way the image looks way more natural next i'm going to target those colors that appeared here so i prefer is to have it in blue as it was in the original image because this is the light that was naturally reflected from the sky the image was taken beside a huge window so this is looking way more natural so this is how my mask looks like after adjustments and before here we can fix the parts here on the background because i don't want to have the edge in a different color later on let's just paint it back but basically this is what we want here let's just erase this one so this is my mask after applying these adjustments after erasing the areas that we want to maintain the natural color okay so let's switch off the preview of our mask and let's get back to our image so you can see now that what felt quite wrong and quite strange before after this very subtle modification on the mask after removing certain areas from our mask covering how this helps to maintain this more natural look and maintain the super strong color shift that we have applied to the other areas of the image so let's again switch off this layer so this is our image before applying the color stylization with the skin tone tab and this is the image after so here again we can try to reposition the point so if we just go towards different area we will be pointing to capture one what color basically we want it to push our tones towards to so if i go let's say for the yellow this is telling capture one to push all these colors that are inside my selection to push them towards the yellow in terms of hue in terms of saturation so let's go for blue again so this is super super strong effect and i'm just going to go for something a little bit closer to my tone that i have sampled at the beginning so you can see that the closer i go to the middle of the color wheel the less saturated the colors are you can as well take a look and the color samples here so you can really spend a lot of time playing around with this tool and i think it's totally worth it because you can create really beautiful results so now my color grading got this very beautiful sort of serious tone i would compare it to the pearls it's very subtle very feminine and you can just play around with this and you can achieve this color you can achieve this result without going lower on saturation in the exposure top so all this you can do here in the skin tone tab so let me just go maybe a little bit towards more saturated color somewhere here because next i'm just going to add one more step to this edit and work with color balance okay so i would say that at this point when you are working on color grading it is a very good idea to step away from the screen and just go back after few minutes to take a look at the image with fresh eyes because now i would say i can't already see a strong difference and i feel that the skin tones are a little bit too dark so let's just switch this off and on no now it it actually looks quite good we could maybe go a little bit higher here on saturation so this will unify the tones even stronger when it comes to hue if we go lower this will bring back some of the natural colors the original colors and if we go further here this will get rid of them and this will push everything towards this hue so i think something around maybe 60 around 50 would be a good idea here so on this layer i have created the strongest change in the image when it comes to stylizing it with color when it comes to creating the stylized color grading let me now create one more layer and we are going to finish off this color grading with a little bit a little touch of the color balance so let's just super quickly create new filled adjustment layer and let's just simply call it color because now on this layer we will be working with color balance and we will be basically targeting the whole image per se and we'll be working towards further harmonizing those tones and remember that inside the color balance tool you can as well fine-tune luminosity levels of selected luminosity ranges so inside our color balance remember to stay on your color layer let's begin with the master tab so here on the master this is the only tab where you actually don't have access to adjusting luminosity but you can do this in shadow mid tones and highlights with this slider position to the right okay so let's quickly jump back to my master and here i would say i would like to add a little bit more warmth to the image so this will unify the tones because now the image has quite a strong color contrast which is not bad the color contrast between the purples and the greens as you can see here basically the greens are here positioned in the color wheel and the purples are exactly opposite from them so this creates very very strong color contrast this means these colors will harmonize together however i feel that the image will benefit if i add a little bit warmer tone overall in the master tab so let's just go for something like this so this is adding orange overall to the whole image let's now jump over to my shadow top and here i will go for the typical operation and i will add a touch of blue to my shadow so this will add depth to the image let's go maybe something closer to the background so like this i'm adding more purple blue and this is affecting very strong strongly the hair and i want it to be harmonious with the background that lies sort of here so let's go for something closer to the background something closer to the science so quite strong quite saturated color you can see how just this step harmonize the hair with the background so basically it creates this very beautiful color link and this makes the image way more harmonious way more balanced in terms of color so i've made this adjustment i've added a hint of cyan to the image let's go for even a more stronger saturation and i want to darken the shadow so here i will be further manipulating with luminosity of the selected luminosity range so this will affect only shadows range in the image so let's go for something like this let's now jump over to my midtone tab and here i want to warmer up the mid tones a little bit more so let's go for something between the orange and yellow okay something like this and here i want to brighten up my mid-tone so i will go with this slider upwards quite far as you can see and when it comes to my highlights okay let's maybe make this one a little bit more cooler so i'm going towards the greens but i'm maintaining the yellow color so a bit less orange and a little bit more yellow when it comes to the highlights i feel they will benefit by adding the complementary color so i will go for just a touch of cyan here so we have those very beautiful strong highlights inside the eyes and they are reflecting the light from the outside so they are naturally blue so by adding here inside the highlights still a little bit more cyan we are not going against what was already present in the image we are strengthening it we are working within the color range that was captured by the camera so let's go maybe somewhere here and let's brighten the highlights as well okay so after performing these adjustments especially in the shadows range okay here this disappeared let's just again call it color okay that's now working fine so especially in the shadow range we have darkened the shadows we have added a bit of cyan but this dark and overall the shadow range so this made the hair way way darker i'm going to fix this as the very last layer here in this edit and this is what i would typically do i would add one more layer curves and over there i would be looking at the final luminosity adjustments in this image because i could maybe try working with the hdr but this would basically open up the shadows uh but i would like to add a little bit more contrast and take a look at the whole image when applying my curves so let's add one more field adjustment layer let's rename it to curves luminosity and here on this layer let's just lift the blocks okay so let's just get our curves let's right click on the image add tool and let's select curve from here so we can switch off color balance we can maybe move them away and let's make our curves tool as big as possible so this will allow us precision so let's try to apply some of the ready presets this can be helpful so let's go for contrast luma contrast rgb okay so let's go for this one and here i want to brighten my shadow so i'm going to basically drag my black point upwards so this will be creating sort of matte effect and lifting my shadows so something like this maybe we can go a little bit lower with the bright tones and i'm going to fine tune this let's go a bit higher with this point i'm going to fine tune it on the luma curve and here basically let's just pull the whole curve upwards so remember with the luma curve you are not affecting color so basically i'm adding light i'm brightening the image overall but the colors are untouched so let's just leave it somewhere here and let's maybe flatten the curve around this place so we are getting back to this beautiful matte effect and let's jump back to our rgb and let's see if we can make those shadows still a little bit lighter okay so let's just quickly check this is before and this is after applying the curves i feel that this part of the face is a little bit too bright if we just check the color readouts yes we are clipping here the reds we can see 255 for the reds so let's just go lower here so that way we will recover a little bit of texture here on the cheek area so now we are still around two five five okay this could be fixed if we really wanted to we could jump over to our hdr and go on the negative value with highlight so here we should recover a bit of texture here in the cheek area so let's just check again in terms of color we are still clipping the reds but the other values look good we have two to seven for the green totally five for the blue so we are basically clipping data in the red channel so this is visible here actually here in our histogram so we are clipping the red but overall it doesn't look bad we are not clipping data in terms of luminosity so we are safe here so only the red is clipped but this is perfectly acceptable so again let's just see before and after so by adding those curves we are still adding a little bit more light to the image maybe i will flatten a little bit the rgb curve so it won't be adding that much saturation to the image as i was really happy with the color grading that i have created on the previous layer so here we can manipulate with those points and set them to our liking okay i think that this creates really nice pleasing effect and let's maybe push this one just a notch lower so we will be darkening our dark mid-tones here okay perfect i think the image looks really really good so let's let's maybe jump over to the luma and let's see here so if i go lower this is affecting the background very strongly and is adding or adding contrast or going back towards the matte effect i think when the curve is a little bit lower this gives more balanced result so let's leave it like that and let's just hide our curve so this is our image before applying the final luminosity adjustment with curves and after so as the last step i don't think i'm not sure if it's required here yeah maybe a little bit we can add just a bit of targeted sharpening so let's create new field adjustment layer let's rename it let's call it sharpening and here on this layer let's jump over to the detail tab and basically i want to take a look at the eyes and basically i will add a little bit of sharpening to the eyes a little bit maybe to the tip of the nose and the hair here so nothing crazy the image was sharp from the beginning and let's just make it a little bit sharper just a notch so here i'm going to apply a mask now the mask is covering my image fully so let's go for invert mask and now we have to paint in back our sharpening to the image so let's go for quite a strong flow a little bit stronger a little bit bigger size and let's paint over the eyes let's switch off the preview of the mask so just for the eyelashes for the eyebrows a little bit more on the eyes let's go with bigger brush so now i'm increasing size of the brush with my right square bracket let's paint over here and now maybe around the tip of the nose and a bit around the lips so basically i think there is no need to sharpen the image further let's just show the mask so this is where i have sharpened my mask and just to unify the overall effect i would add just a touch of film grain because now the especially those areas where we have flat color like here in the hair and in the background they are contrasting a bit in terms of texture with the skin with the hair so i want to unify it i want to make the image a little bit less digital so let's just jump over again to the details tab and here it doesn't matter on which layer you are performing this adjustment because you will always add your film grain to the background layer so let's go maybe for silver reach and let's apply a film grain here let's go for higher magnification level so this is before and this is the after so you can see that adding just a hint of the film grain simulation very beautifully unifies the whole image okay so our image is ready my only feeling is that the skin tones could be a little bit too saturated so to fine-tune this i might go back to my skin tone tab this is the layer to my skin tone layer and to my skin tone tab which will be here so here is my color editor so here i might be tempted to fine tune this so if i would go closer to the middle of the collar wheel i would be lowering saturation however i'm not sure about that so i like the stylized color grading that i have applied overall to the image and if i start manipulating with this this will of course affect the rest so the best idea for now will be for me just to step away from the screen and perhaps manipulate with this later or i could alternatively just right click create clone variant so now i have my two images here so i've been working on these two images today with you and on this one you can see this gray frame around the image so on this one i can try to lower my saturation and i will decide further which one looks better so let's just let's do just that so here remember it is important to be on the skin tone layer so that way you will have access to everything to all the work you've done with the skin tone top if i would go to a different layer this will go inactive so let's go back here and let's just push this little control point a little bit towards the middle of my collar wheel so this will be going down with saturation i will be going more towards this silverish effect and i think i like it a little bit more because this is going towards those very beautiful silvery stones and now the lipstick is a little bit more visible so the change is very subtle now we can these two images side by side i can say that i prefer the one to the right this affected the background a little bit as well so you can create as many variants as you like you can play around and just introduce different adjustments and see what result is the best for your image what benefits the image stronger so let's maybe stay with this one or this one i don't know you can add a comment and you can tell me which one you prefer i think i like this one better with a bit lower saturation on the skin so this is our final result let's just super quick switch off the layers that we've been working on today so we have started with this image as a base i have performed the skin cleanup before doning and burning and i have enhanced the eyes after this we've been focusing on creating the stylized color grading on our skin tone tub so this is what we've done here we have pushed everything towards our selected color sample everything towards this beige color next we've been polishing our color grading with the color balance tool and in the end we've been just adjusting a little bit of luminosity in the image and we have finished it off with sharpening with targeted sharpening remember the key word targeted here because i didn't apply sharpening over the whole image i don't want to sharpen the skin that i spend so much time on cleaning up so i want to maintain the skin beautiful and soft i have just applied a bit of targeted sharpening over the eyes a bit over the hair and we have added just a very very last step in form of the film grain simulation so this is what you can do with the skin tone tab inside the color editor in capture one it is super super powerful top and i want to encourage you to experiment with desktop because you can create really beautiful results for those of you who would like to learn more about capture one i have a comprehensive course you can find a link in the description to this video and i believe it should appear in the upper right corner so for everyone who wants to go in depth and learn capture one check out my course on capton so thank you very much for watching this was kasia's mokwa from digital art classes and remember if you have any questions if you have any doubts please leave me a comment under this video i always reply to every comment on my videos and if you have any suggestions for future videos if you have anything that you would like to learn more about if you have any specific techniques capture one related please leave me a comment as well and if i find that it's interesting and if i find that it will benefit more viewers i will definitely record a video on it so again thank you very much for watching and i will see you soon in the next video

Channel: Kasia Zmokla

Views: 3,742

Keywords: capture one 20, capture one 20 tutorial, capture one pro, capture one 20 photo editing, capture one 20 editing, post processing, capture one 20 portrait retouching, capture one 20 portrait, capture one pro 20 portrait, portrait color grading capture one, capture one portrait tutorial, capture one pro 20 color grading, capture one pro 20 skin tone, capture one pro 20 skin tones, capture one pro 20 color editor, how to color grade, capture one 20 tutorial for beginners, how to

Id: Ink_y7TM_mk

Length: 69min 15sec (4155 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020