Color Editing and Skin Tone Tutorial :: Capture One makes this easy

come little capture one tutorial for you guys in this video I want to take a look at the color editor the color editor is a really powerful tool that you can use just to isolate specific colors in your image to make adjustments to those so for instance if you just want to target all the Reds in an image or if you want to target all the yellows or let's say you want to target the skin tones capture one gives you an enormous amount of power and a lot of options as far as what you can do with these for color matching for just changing the look of your image whatever it is that you want to do this is part of an ongoing tutorial series that I'm doing that is sponsored by capture one and if you're interested in learning more I've got a whole link of videos in the show description that I will share with you guys and if you've never used to capture one make sure you download the free trial you get 30 days to try it out you can work along with some of these videos and see if it's right for you but let's talk about the color edit or best we just jump right in so I have an image up here that we're going to do some modifications to this is a sunflower this is very basic there's just two colors going on here but I want to get a feel for what we're doing without overcomplicating things so if you want to get to the color editor what you're going to do is go up to your tabs over here you're going to select the color tab which is the one with the three circles here if you go all the way down to the bottom you will see the color editor and there are three different sections here we're going to go through these there's the basic color editor we have an advanced color editor and then we also have one that's just specific for skin tones but we're gonna start with basic this had a nice overhaul and capture 120 it is super easy to use there's a little tool here at the bottom it looks like an eyedropper you're going to select that and that is the color tool and so if I go over to my image we have this image of a sunflower and what we're looking at here is we've got yellows in here and greens we've also got whites but let's look at the colors here if I just grab the yellows here and I move my mouse to the left or right while clicking I'm going to be able to change the hue so if I want to make that more red it gets almost cartoonish all the way over I can slide it to the left if I want to make it lean tomorrow towards green I'm going to move it to the right I'm still holding the mouse down but if I go up and down here I'm going to adjust the saturation so if I want more saturation you move it up if you want to desaturate you move down and so that's some real power that you get just by clicking and dragging the mouse another key variation to this is lightness and we use a modifier for this what you're going to do is hold down the option key on a Mac Alt on a PC and this will allow a little bit different modification because now when I move the slider right to left I control the lightness so if I want that to be a lighter yellow I can move it to the right if I want it to be darker I can move it to the left and this is all interactive so while still holding down the mouse or in my case the Wacom and pin I can let go of the option key and I'm back into my hue and you can move it up and down for saturation and this is really fun to play around with because you can get really fast at fine-tuning your colors and then we have added one color to this let's now work with the greens and to do that we still have the color editor selected which is that little eyedropper I'm just going to select the greens now and if I select that I can move that around and I can make my greens lean more towards yellow I can also bring them back out more towards a bright green here and then same with saturation if I move the mouse up and then if I go down I can desaturate we have now done some major modifications using the basic color editor tool you can also just go and move the sliders to do that what you would want to do is just select the color so in this case let's say it's yellow and then I would go in here and you can see the edits that I've already made and I can make changes to those everything is really easy we give you a little use case for this technique so this whole ability to direct select color in an image and make changes based on that is very powerful especially if you're doing something like artwork reproduction or product photography where the colors really do need to look like they look in real life and so maybe you're working from one image and you're trying to match color from another and so the easiest way to do this is just to select two images so you get a heads up in capture one the way I do it is I have my first image selected this is the one that I took the second image I actually didn't take this was an image taken by Irving Penn all I do is I hold down the command key and I click that image too and you can have a bunch image selected up here but I just want a heads up so I can look at one image and kind of try to get my image to match this now I am a huge fan of all of the work of Irving Penn I love the analog look that he got this is part of the series of Color work that he was doing for magazines at the time and color palettes are very similar so how can I make changes on mine just visually to appear more like the work that Penn did that was all analog Minds digital so I will show you now the first thing you want to do is make sure that you have this box checked up here that says edit selected now which image is selected well is selected here on the left because it's got this bar around it and when you see the border if I want the other image selected I just click on it on the thumbnail or you can click on it direct on the screen either way that is the image you will be making adjustments to so I want to make sure that I have my image selected first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to look at these yellows well it looks like we have a little more brightness a little more contrast a little more bit of saturation in there so what I'm going to do is grab the color editor tool I'm just going to grab in the yellow and I'm going to bring my saturation up by clicking and dragging upwards it's looking pretty good and I'm going to move the hue a little more towards orange I'm totally eyeballing this but that looks a lot closer and the other thing I could do you can use the option key or you can also just use the slider I'm gonna bring my lightness up just a little bit because it is brighter in my target image let's go ahead and move that hue over a little bit more and starting to look a little closer now let's work with the greens I basically just grabbed the tool I'm going to select in the green area anywhere and what I'm going to do is I'm going to first of all it's increase the saturation a little bit maybe a little too hot use the option key I'm gonna bring the lightness up because that's definitely a lighter green over in my target image and also the huge starts leaning a little more towards yellow here so I'm going to go ahead and bring that down manually here and I'm starting to get something that's a little more close if you want to do a quick before and after I hold down the option key and click reset up at the top and you're gonna see that that looks a lot better and closer to the image that I'm trying to match so you could work on this as much as you want and get as specific as you want it's a very powerful tool and we're just in the basic color editor let's check out the advanced editor we'll use a different image for this example something with a little more color range to it and this one fits the bill because we got a lot of range and our flowers back here we've got skin tones with our model there's a lot going on we've got greens and the leaves so what we're gonna do is we're going to make some edits to this and we're going to use the advanced color editor so to find that if you go back to the color editor tool we're gonna select advanced which is the second tab and we start with a blank slate the first thing we're gonna do is grab the little eyedropper tool here for the color editor tool we're gonna go over and just select the color so for instance let's say that I want to select the greens in the foliage back here so I'm going to select a green and it's going to pop that on to the color wheel and it also puts it into this list and this list is kind of key because it keeps track of our edits and once I start adding more colors like for instance let's say I want to add lavender in there or I want to add reds it continues to add those to the list and so if I want to go back and edit my greens and you can just select them and pick up where I left off you can add up to 30 colors I believe in here it is very powerful so the other thing you need to understand is this color wheel and what it is that we've just selected so it's really important to remember that in photography that color becomes very complex you see a range of colors colors aren't just flat all the time I mean I guess they could be but generally speaking in real life colors are not flat when you look at skin tones for example if you look at a flower petal or a leaf you see a wide range of varying saturations you see a wide range of may be varying hues they're all similar but it adds that complexity that makes it look realistic so what we've done here when we've selected a Green Point or a skin tone or a red point is what it did is it actually made a selection of a color range so if you look over here now there are 4 sliders below this color wheel and you probably understand what hue saturation and lightness do exactly what you think if I want to really make these green saturate what I'm gonna do is grab the saturation and pull it all the way up and they become obnoxiously green and neon let's undo that for a second it's also important to remember the smoothness slider up here what this is going to do is if you look at the color wheel this little blurred area in here if I move that down you're gonna see that that goes away and if I move it to the right here or up you can see that it intensifies it what that does is it actually adds a little bit of smoothing around the color range that you've selected and this is important too because if you have to kind of similar color ranges they can start to conflict and so what we want is we don't want weird hard lines and stuff because something's oversaturated something's not so this is going to smooth things out so that's an important thing to remember another key tool here is if we want to note what we have selected you can sync this box at the bottom it says view selected color range I'm going to turn that on and what it does is it turns the image pretty much black and white and only shows colors of what we've selected so I'm not too worried about this green range here it pretty much did an excellent job of selecting greens so I'm gonna turn that off and I can make my edits knowing that it's not going to drift into my subject or any of the other flowers and let's say that I want to bring my hue over and make a little more yellow maybe I want to make it darker and you have a lot of options here I can bring my situation up if you want to just make it pop a little bit a little bit goes a long way boom this looks good and so let's do a quick before and after so here's before here's after I have targeted the greens in my image let's say that I want to deal with something like this lavender color and this is going to add another layer of complexity so let's go over here I'm gonna select the lavender that I selected earlier and let's go ahead and take that box so we can see what it's selected and it did a pretty good job just the color range in here and if I deselect that for a second let's say maybe I want to target the lavender but I want it to drift into these blues and those are neighboring colors that should be pretty easy to do so let's go ahead and select our view color range here and what I'm going to do is just manually click and drag this down here I'm going to bring this down into the blue territory and you're gonna see that it starts adding some color into our blue flowers over here too so this looks really good so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and deselect that and let's go ahead and work with that a little bit I'm gonna bring some saturation in there probably too much saturation gets out of hand real fast especially when you're being selective you can move your hue around to maybe make it a little more and saline that way and then let's take the lightness down make them a little bit more dark so they're not conflicting with their model bring the saturation back in a little bit so I'm totally eyeballing this but a quick before and after so we can do before after and I've got an image that's starting to pop a little more not crazy about those greens but if I want to go back and edit them I just simply grab the green selection and I can turn my saturation down no big deal you just pick right up where you left off so again you can add up to 30 colors in here and it gets very powerful in terms of what you want to do so I want to show you another option now which is actually being able to select skin tones so to work on skin tones what we're going to do is go back to the color editor here and we're gonna select the third tab which says skin tone and we now have a blank slate again and we have our little eyedropper tool and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go grab a skin tone probably offer a cheek here we're go ahead and select that and now we have a point of which to start working now again we can view selected color range only and we can see that our model is selected but oh we got a problem here if you look in the back we have in this image a problem with these flowers and so any edits that I'm going to make the skin tones are actually going to cover those flowers too so we have little bit of a challenge here where we want to work on our subject but we don't want that to affect other areas in the image and so the best way to do this is to use a masking layer we've covered these in previous videos I'll link up here somewhere if you want to know more on masking what this allows us to do is just mask out part of the image that we want to affect there's a really easy way to do this when you're using the color editor tool you can just make a mask from a selected color range so what we've been doing we've been selecting color ranges so I could just make a mask that targets all the greens or I can make a mask that targets in this case skin tones and then what I can do is actually erase parts of the mask of areas that I don't want to be affected let me show you how to do that so what we're gonna do here is I'm gonna grab the eyedropper once again because I move this around I'm gonna go grab the cheek again here that looks pretty good and we're gonna just make a layer out of this so if you go over to the color editor tab the three dots for the extra options here the second one down says create masked layer from selection we're gonna go ahead and do that it's going to take just a couple seconds and we are going to get a brand new layer up here and this just says layer one let's go ahead and read labels oh we know what it is and call it skin tone and we're going to work off of that layer so we've got a layer here but where's the mask well if you press the letter M on the keyboard stands for mask it's going to show you in red where the mask was created now remember I just gave it a basic skin tone range but unfortunately all these other areas were included in that so what I want to do is grab the eraser tool that's on the top here you can press the letter e on the keyboard and I'm going to get the eraser tool let's go ahead and make that a little bit bigger and not that big and I'm gonna go ahead and just start erasing parts of the image that I don't want to be affected so what is going to be affected is just what's under the red and in this case I'm going to leave our model so I'll go through this doesn't have to be neat and absolutely perfect but I do want to make sure that it doesn't touch any of those flowers over there we can also exclude her hair from this equation there's not a lot skin tones going on in there but it probably did have some red highlights in it or some pinkish highlights at least probably from the white balance but I'll go ahead and do all this erasing here and I'm going to apologize to Julie now for making her look like a demon but anyway this is what we're dealing with we want that red area that is the mask and what I've done is I pretty much made sure that I've got all my flowers out of that mask I also brought all the hair out of the math the eyes and the lips and so if I press the letter M on the keyboard again she won't look nearly as bad but now we have a mask that any edits will only affect this so when I make changes to the skin tones I'm not going to be running into flowers and stuff so what we're gonna do is grab the eyedropper tool and I'm just going to grab a little part of a cheek once again now if you look down under the color wheel here we have basically two sets of three tools and these kind of interactively work with one another and so uniformity is the one I want to start with actually even though it's below now uniformity is going to deal with how uniform you want these edits to be across skin tones this is really important because like even you're looking at my face right now and I've got some shadows going on and a lot of blemishes and stuff so what we want to do is we want to smooth out the skin tone so we take care of some of that but we also don't want it to look too fake or too plastic or to uniforms so these kind of work interactively with the other three sliders which are going to be hue saturation and lightness and so you could be in a situation where your model was poorly lit and you need a lot of saturation and lightness to come through it just every situation is going to be different but notice that you can adjust the uniformity so the first thing I'm going to do here is we're going to saturate the skin tones just a little bit so let's bring up the saturation I'm gonna bring my hue and I'm gonna go back this way just a little bit and let's bring the lightness up and now with uniformity I can change and I can bring the hue and you're gonna notice that if I bring all these all the way up hue saturation and lightness she's gonna look a real phony real fast and that is not a good look see we've taken out all of the the shadows in any of the details and it just doesn't look right so what I want to do is actually especially with saturation and he was bringing those down you can go high with him I just wouldn't go all the way a little bit goes a long way with this so this is looking pretty good bring a little more saturation in there these are very subtle edits but I've got all the skin tones including her arms hits so if I want to do a quick before and after here's before and here's after and you can see that sometimes it becomes really intense really quickly so you might want to actually do some before and after and pull back if you are a little hot on things it's just like anything else yeah see it's just still looks a little too little too uniform so I'm gonna bring that down just a little bit but now we're getting something that we can actually work with so the way that I approach color and post-production is basically there's two types of edits that there are global adjustments and then there's local adjustments global adjustments are gonna be things more like white balance or maybe curves adjustments and even though you're tweaking the color maybe you're adding a little bit of toning to shadows or highlights or maybe you're just changing the white balance you're changing color but it's in a way that affects the entire image so anything with a certain yellow light to it and highlights is all going to change for instance this is a localized color editing and this is being able to just direct select a color now generally speaking subtlety is key here you can get out of control really fast but this is really good when you need to do something subtle that just matches something and gets a little bit tighter and of course capture one gives you an enormous amount of control over this and I really love the layer option because images are complex and as we saw in this example with skin tones you run into problems where you have the same color range going on in flowers so being able to just create a mask out of a selected color range saves a ton of time and then I can just go erase the parts I don't need and move on so anyway I would love to know what you guys think don't forget to download a trial version capture one if you haven't tried it yet the link is below I'll catch you guys in the next video until then later

Channel: The Art of Photography

Views: 47,504

Keywords: capture one tutorial, capture one pro, photo editing, capture one, capture one vs lightroom, how to edit photos, raw convertor, lightroom vs capture one pro, photo editing tutorial, capture one color editor, capture one color editor skin tone, capture one skin retouching, capture one skin tone, capture one skin smoothing, capture one skin, capture one skin tone uniformity, photography, the art of photography, Ted Forbes

Id: KaH1ahP-6Jk

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 30 2020