Capture One Pro Tips - Dehaze & Contrast Improvements with Levels + Curves

[Music] in this video we're going to go into the different methods and tools you have available to you in capture one in order to correct an image which has got a particularly low level of contrast now a lot of tools out there will refer to this as Dee hazing or image enhancement or whatever but in reality what we're talking about is fixing an image which has most of its data in the mid-tones of the histogram and not much contrast caused normally by having stuff at the bottom end or at the top end of the shadows and the highlights so here on the screen we have an image was actually very kindly donated to us by Peter her neck on one of our live sessions we actually did this live for viewers and showed how we can pull all the detail up in this picture with some very very quick and easy tools so the first thing is in capture one there isn't a dije slider we don't have that slider on there one of the reasons for it is and I've used it in other tools the the way that Dee hazing works is very very very simple in that it's just a slider that goes from nothing to full extent and along the way as you increase the clarity as it appears in the image if you look carefully you're also doing things like introducing noise and introducing color noise and also you will find artifacts around pass the image which you weren't expecting so while on the one hand it's great that it's a bit of a click and click and go solution in reality I'd like something with a bit more control but still to be able to get the same effect so here's our image we can tell this is a low contrast image in part because it obviously looks a low contrast but in part because of our histogram so if we look at our histogram in the top left of the screen we can see there's nothing really here with the high end and highlights there's nothing really in the shadows and the low tones what you've got is most of the data in the histogram here in the middle sat in the lower mid-tones not doing a lot then that's a clear indication that we don't have a very high contrast image in front of us so effectively what we need to do is stretch this out because contrast comes from having dark shadows and light highlights so if we were able to stretch this histogram out we could possibly be able to see more contrast in the final picture one of the tools that we've got available to us is the levels tool now obviously levels allows us to do exactly what you said we can stretch the histogram out so I can take this output level here at the top an input level and I can manipulate the histogram using these sliders so what we mean by that is at its base level the levels tool tells me and tell us the image if in the input the bottom row the value of a pixel is 255 so in other words bright white then make sure on an RGB scale that is make sure that it comes out as bright white and likewise if it is black so zero and zero if it's black on the input image make sure the output the final result is also black and in the middle and we've got a scale that goes lighter or darker I can separate the levels out into red green and blue channels but in this image in particular I don't even need to do that all I've got to do to stretch that histogram is tell capture one to do it and we do that using these little pointers so if I pull this bottom pointer in what I'm now telling capture one let's just stop there anything that was in the images are 212 so in other words not that bright make it brighter so anything that was 212 make it the equivalent now of the brightest part of the output image 255 and you'll see this middle slider has moved along as well what we're doing as we do this and we're squeezing the bottom input we're stretching the top outputs of the histogram in capture one always shows you the output that we're getting whereas the levels will always show you the input then what was coming into the raw file so let's go some more and what I'm looking to do is to move it until we start to hit some data cuz what I don't want to do is move this point here beyond the point where we've got some white detail because then we're gonna effectively over expose it we can fix that in a second with another tool but we're not going to go too much further than this so let's go to let's say 190 so now what we're saying is anything brighter than 190 in the original image basically over expose it now we had a lot of latitude in this histogram so that's not going to be a problem we can do the same here in the shadows so in the input at the moment we're saying that zero on our input scale is the equivalent of zero now I can push this along and say notice I'm stopping when we start to see the data start to appear in this curve so now we're saying I'm just gonna go one more there anything that we had a value of 30 so not completely dark now make it completely dark so everything that had a value of 30 I now want you to make it zero and anything that had a value of 190 I want you to make it 255 anything beyond 190 is now going to be overexposed but effectively what we've done is we've taken the histogram of visible and usable data and stretched it to the histogram of visible output in our picture from 0 to 255 and if we look at the histogram at the top you can see that's happened to reverse that if I hold down the option key or the Alt key and windows and press the reset button with my mouse and hold it we can see the original and look at the histogram at the top and then when I apply it again you can see that we've stretched the histogram so I'm just looking at the data panel and I know that's what's happened let's look at the picture and we can see entirely what it's done it's added contrast which is fantastic so already we've got some of that detail back looks a lot more vibrant looks like it's popping a bit more let's put on our before and after option and slide across well we can see there's quite a big difference there between what was there before very flat lacking in contrast and what's come out at the end but we're not going to stop there so let's turn the our before/after off and now we're going to go into the curve tool so in the same way that we had inputs and outputs in our levels tool we also have inputs and outputs in our curve tool and what you'll see is there's this diagonal line the diagonal line hopefully now will make sense given the tool above and that's telling us that at any point in this line if you imagine one axis is input and one axis is output so for an input of 128 the output should be 128 for an input of 207 the output should be 207 for an input of 0 the output should be 0 so this is now a more finely tuned way of dealing with levels but we can do it as well as so let's just place a little marker on our curve and I'm gonna make sure that marker says it's gonna stay where it was which was at an input of 128 the output should also be 128 and I'm using that as an anchor now a lot of people will have heard of something called the s-curve when it comes to levels the s-curve is very very often referred to because it's a way of adding contrast into an image and we can do it in two clicks now that this level is set up I can take our shadows and I can pull them down and I can take our highlights and I can pull them up that is why it's called an s-curve because it looks like an S and that is the easiest way of being able to boost contrast without using any other tools in our palette up here and if I do our before and after let's go from where we were to where we are now and that was done with one two three four five clicks easy now here's the difference between the traditional D haze sliders which is a one-stop-shop which is effectively doing very similar to what I've just shown you here and what we can do in capture one because now with these sliders I can find tweak I can go into for example the red Channel and in fact let's pick on the green Channel specifically so I can just pick on the green Channel and make its levels behave differently to the others I can also do that in terms of the curve so we can focus on just the brightness of the image so they combined red green and blue scale effectively but the the level of brightness rather than the level of red green or blue that's into each Channel or I can pick on each channel individually and we can do some split toning stuff with curves as well but for the case of making sure that we've got something that's clear and high contrast we can do it all on the RGB scale here now what it does mean is I can put in more data points so I can lock this data point here and say well actually the stuff that was really dark I want to leave it to be slightly washed out and the stuff that was in the mid-tones I want to darken a bit more the stuff that's up here in the highlights I'm gonna really ramp up and make sure that by the time we get to 255 we're back to normal so 255 equal 2:55 so the difference here is we can accelerate and decelerate effectively the ramping of that contrast change tiny little increments tiny little changes and they can have a big effect on the image now of course you've also got a clarity tool so let's go into clarity if I push that up a little bit that's gonna help what that's doing clarity is effectively a mid-tone adjustment tool so it takes the mid-tones and it says okay you can't be middle gray anymore you've got to decide are you brighter or darker than the surrounding area so it forces slightly bright pixels to be brighter and slightly dark pixels to be darker and it gives the effect of making the image look slightly more clear now one of the side effects effectively of doing the levels work is if I go into the tree we might have found I'm being very unfair and with 300 and 200 percent but we might have found that some of these leaves and flowers a little bit overexposed we knew that because we've built this little spike by pulling our levels down here but I've also got our high dynamic range tool here so I can pick on the white and I can pull it down and pick on the highlights a little bit and just take the edge off of that brightness that was appearing there there's a little bit too much and that's it in terms of D hazing stuff it's really simple there's our original I've used really only two tools levels and curves to get to here and then the second that's done I can fine-tune I can tweak the curve a little bit in the RGB I can also tweak some of the hard on it range work so if I wanted now to bring up the shadows a touch as well I can bear in mind all the work you've just done in levels and curves to push that histogram out stretch it so to make it darker and lighter at the extreme every time I used a high dynamic range to tuck it in a bit effectively I'm squashing it back to the middle so if I use my high dynamic range and recover everything I've effectively got rid of all of that original work that I did to pull the shadows down and the highlights up so be very careful with high dynamic range don't overdo it once you've done the contrast change because the whole point of what you were doing was to introduce contrast not get rid of it just to prove the point here's a secondary image so this is shot from Shanghai so very very murky skyline they they call it mist or whatever it's not mist it's pollution and here we have seem looking down from one of the highest towers that are in the city it's quite murky is quite lacking in contrast we can do exactly the same trick to this image so let's go right before and after off so we can see here again it's an easy way of spotting a low contrast image is a big hump of data in one area on the histogram there's no spike up here there's no spike down there it's just one great big mass of non-contrast in the middle that's our indicator that we need to add some contrast in and that's traditionally what the DA's tools would be used to affect so here's our histogram in our levels this one's even more cut-and-dry so let's just pull that all the way down and watch that histogram at the top we're moving that entire bubble of data and we're stretching all of that out so it's gone now from here down at the bottom all the way up to our highlights which is wonderful we've got all that detail back and we've got a little bit of movement in the dark so let's just pull that up there we can use this middle slider now the middle slider tells capture one where the 50% point is effectively where the hundred and twenty eight so where this line should lie and I can make it so that it lies slightly darker or slightly lighter depending on how I'm feeling though on the image to come out and in this case I want it's slightly darker I'm now going to go back to my curve I'm gonna set the point in the middle and I'm gonna pull down our shadows not too much because I've already got some dark areas in here and I'm gonna raise our highlights just a touch actually we might even just leave them there a little bit that's fine and in this one I am gonna use our clarity tool just to make it pop a little bit but there we go again with very little effort I've gone from a flat dull low contrast image with a lot of haze that's getting in the way through to something that's really really in fact you could argue in some ways a little bit over contrasted but that was the effect we were looking for we were trying to get this area clean and clear and that it looks murky and dull with this and that histogram change to stretch across the whole space between 0 and 255 look at the difference we've got nice and clear nice and crisp effectively de-aged [Music] you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 25,618

Keywords: Capture One, Capture One Pro, How To Guide, Post-Processing, Post Processing, Image Editing, Tutorial, Tools, Photo Editing, RAW, Processing, Software, How To, Learn, Guide, Pro, Phase One, Paul Reiffer, Photography, Quick, Lessons, Tips, In Depth, Landscape, Brightness, Exposure, Slider, Settings, Highlights, Shadows, Tool, Image Adjustment, Comparison, Which One, Exposure Warning, Preferences, 20, DeHaze, De Haze, Increase Contrast, More Detail, Detail, Haze, Reduce, Cut, Fog, Levels, Curves, Workflow

Id: zvfnOkgzSZE

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020