Create Beautiful Black and White Photos in Capture One Pro 20

welcome back everybody it is so great to see you all again I have something really cool to show you this is a picture of my high school sweetheart who is my wife and the mother of our nine children I photograph this of her in high school I believe it was around eleventh grade and by that point I had already done photo one in photo too so I'd gone through the black and white course and the color course and was basically given freedom to go into the darkroom and do what I wanted to do so this image I shot for her senior photo and yeah processed it printed it and by that point I was getting really really good at printing my own black-and-white images fast forward to 2000 2001 when digital started becoming mainstream I picked up a Fuji s1 Pro and began learning how to process those files as black and white within digital workflow so today we're going to talk about that we're gonna talk about how we can take our digital files and process them I will be using capture 120 for this tutorial and so if you don't have a copy there is a link in the description below feel free download that link if you really enjoy using capture 120 and you purchase it that will help support my channel and for that I thank you but for now why don't we jump into the Edit so here's an image of a parking structure that I photographed in downtown st. Paul I did this handheld with my fujifilm x100t Optus in RAW because I knew that I wanted to create a more dynamic black-and-white than what the internal black-and-white settings would give me within that camera now capture one Pro has a few really awesome ways to create a black-and-white now a lot of people will just simply desaturate the image all the way down so I don't recommend to do that so what I recommend is you click on the color wheel scroll down to the black-and-white tool palette then check enable black-and-white now what this is going to do is allow you to adjust every single color channel within that image the one thing I want everyone to notice here is you'll notice that it looks like a adjustments sliders for saturation and that's exactly what these are so the more saturation you give it the brighter the tones will become the less saturation you give it the darker and as you can see as I increase the saturation the red tones get brighter or if I decrease the saturation 'z they get darker the beauty of this is that as I increase or decrease each level each channel I can then basically adjust the curve to where I can either get more or less contrast I can reduce highlights or increase highlights shadows etc so I'm going to start processing this image the way that I would like it to look now the one thing is the sky has a lot of blue and cyan x' in there so that's the first thing I'm going to touch I'm gonna take my scienze and I'm going to drag them down because I want to darken the sky really like a nice dark sky in a black and white image pull those blues down and you can see just how dramatic that already is now inside the parking structure the concrete concrete has a lot of Reds has a lot of yellows and some greens to them so I'm gonna play with those three sliders next I'm going to slightly increase the Reds I'm going to decrease my yellows ever so slightly here and the same thing with the greens so here if I hit alt or option and this reset up here I can preview the before and the after so already we're looking really really good next I'm going to go up to my exposure tab here and then I want to increase the contrast I'm going to put this rate at 15 I'm going to reduce my highlights ever so slightly there we go and I want to increase my brightness to about 7 that's looking pretty good and then here in the levels I'm going to increase my black and pull in my brightness my whites just so I get more contrast that's looking great okay so as you can see here we've got you know more sunlight more brightness over here than we do over here so what I would like to do is create a gradient here and just adjust these tones to even them out what this tonal here to do that I just hit the plus sign over in my layers I'm gonna double click that and call sky right click on my gradient tool drag in my gradient and let me just move this guy down just a tiny bit I'm gonna adjust my exposure down ever so slightly there we go now the cool thing about this is I can go into my color editor click on the Advanced tab if I grab this eyedropper and I just click on the Blues here now I can do the same thing in here that I could in my other tool so I'm going to bring those blues I'm gonna bring those blues down just a little bit now I've got a little bit more even tone in my sky so the process of creating interesting black and white photos is pretty simple it's just a matter of balancing your highlights your mid-tones and your shadows as you would with the color photograph but you're looking at monochromatic tones and so you want certain things to pop out certain things to disappear and you're trying to create a level of balance and contrast in the image some images need to be contrast here some need to be a little more subdued it all depends on the mood and the message that you're trying to convey within your image so let me jump into a few more images and show you my process on those some of these are portraits some are landscapes and some are more architectural type photos here's an image straight out of camera of a portrait that I did for a creative company with in Minneapolis and this is shot with my GFX 50s on Fuji film classic Chrome so I had a completely controlled lighting scenario the white balance and everything was already dialed in so there was no need for me to really change anything within this image now when I photograph the image originally it was intended to be done in black and white and this is how I captured it and this is how capture 1 read the file this image is pretty much ready to go there's nothing needed so here's an architectural image that would normally be done in color for the client but for this video I will show you how I would process this one in black and white I'm gonna click on enable black and white and now this is where we get to have fun because we have some red tones that are going to be in these little pine cone type things or these seed pods and then we have the green tones of the plants and there's the yellow tones within the grass and stuff so as I play with this you're going to see everything kind of changing ever so slightly so I want to bring those highlights up a little bit I'm gonna bring my yellows down to right about here now the big thing is again skies are blue so I'm gonna pull down some of that just like that bring up the greens ever so slightly and they bring the yellows back up a little because I'm a little more contrast okay and then now I'm gonna start playing with my contrast so this one I'm probably gonna start at 20 yep I like that and I'm gonna bring up my shadows by 10 that's looking pretty good and then I also want to go down to my clarity here and I'm gonna go with we're get to like 40 yeah that's looking really good now the other thing we can do here is we can check our exposure warning to see if we're blowing out any highlights or shadows and we're currently blowing out these highlights so I'm gonna go back up here to my highlight slider the high dynamic range tool and I'm gonna start pulling down these highlights there we go and the stuff that's back here I'm not too worried about it's not going to print anytime soon so there we have it that's a quick black and white conversion it's an image of my daughter that I did when I was testing out some lighting this was shot with a nikon d800 and the reason why i'm showing you images with so many different cameras is that it doesn't matter what you're shooting with whether you're shooting raw or JPEG doesn't matter the camera this conversion process will work with any image as long as you don't push it too far so in this image I want to make this really really catchy she's got some beautiful eyes here that I want to accentuate and I'm going to show you again how working within your channels helps to make things pop so I'm gonna go down click on enable black and white already Wow that looks really good I'm going to play with the Reds first pull these down give her skin a little bit of a relaxation there there we go pull the yellows down now her eyes have some blue in them and science so if you notice I don't know if you guys can see that let me zoom in watch what happens when I bring the cyan slider all the way up to brighten up those eyes did you see it pull them down look at how much her eyes pop now I'm gonna bring the Blues up to do the same I'm gonna pull the Greens down ever so slightly now your eyes are drawn directly to hers but this image like all will still need a little bit more tweaking so we go into our regular adjustments tools and I'm going to start playing with that here I'm gonna bring up my brightness just ever so slightly in my levels and pull down my highlights ever so slightly you know what now I want her skin a little brighter I'm gonna reset my red and I actually pull it up a little bit yeah that looks much better and then we're gonna add some contrast and check my exposure warnings all of this these are all crushed blacks so I'm gonna have to pull my black slider up just a little bit because I don't want to crush them too far there that looks much much better and then I think this deserves a 1 to 1 crop okay so on the next couple of images I'm just gonna show you what I did to make them look the way that they look so here's an image of the Stillwater lift bridge in Stillwater Minnesota this was I think back in 2014 there had been a lot of rain and the river was swelling I'm actually on the boardwalk and the boardwalk was flooded but I put my camera down it was a d300 as low as possible so that I could get a nice view of the water because I really wanted to show the swell of the water and how choppy it was so for this particular photo what I did was I enabled black and white you can see here how I adjusted my reds yellows greens Cheyenne's blue is on down and then I went into my my standard adjustments here I increased my exposure a little bit of course I increased the contrast I pulled down the highlights and you can see I adjusted the levels I increased the blacks by five I decreased the highlights by ten and so on I also increased my clarity to 35 structure to 15 that helps get everything it's all this detail to pop throughout the image I added a vignette negative you know 1.13 and then from there I added these filters so I did a gradient filter on the water and you can see here it's just a gradient mask that I then adjusted with the levels tool and then I added a brush to the trees area and from there I just increased the contrast the brightness I lifted the shadows a little bit pulled down the blacks on the levels just to give those trees some pops and definition so what if you have an image that's a little bit more subdued doesn't have the high contrast look to it can you make a good black and white out of it and I have a really good example of that in this image the intent was to shoot it for the process of becoming a black and white in fact I printed this one on metal and it looks like a tintype it's absolutely beautiful the process that I do for one of these because you still want to create you still want to get some of that contrast back that gets lost in an image that's so foggy or so hazy I'm going to just go into the black-and-white settings on this one because there's not much for color tone to really play with here it's pretty much in the blues and so if I increase the cyan you can see the brightness going up there we go because that's what I want to do is I want to create kind of a halo effect in the center drawing my eye up to the lift bridge itself now this area down here is really muddy really gross but I want the eye to know that there's some separation here because this all looks like it's kind of behind a hazy glass so I'm going to add an adjustment layer and call this water Brad and I'm gonna create a graduated filter graduate a mask over this section right here I'm going to pump up the contrast here I'm going to increase the black levels to about seven and then pull in the brightness there we go increase the clarity that's looking pretty good I might actually call this one punch there we go that's a little bit better I'm gonna pull in a vignette just a slight vignette nice increase my exposure a little bit more on this guy and then I think I'm just gonna really pump up the contrast even more there we go yeah I like this I love how the eye now feels like I'm close and this is gradually getting hazy ER and hazy ER as we get to this section right here now the trick is I don't want all of this in fog I don't mind this guy being in fog because my focus is on the bridge so I'm going to take and create another layer this I'm gonna use a brush on I'm gonna call this bridge I'm gonna hit em for masks so I can see where I'm painting and I'm just gonna paint in on this bridge a little bit because I just want him to pop out a little bit more okay am to turn off the mask from here I'm going to basically increase my black levels and pull in my highlights just a little bit more and then my clarity pull that clarity in there we go now you can see here it is before and here it is after now the bridge feels more like it's coming towards me so what about for a landscape photo I have a landscape here that I did actually was just from the side of the road I was on a trip in Colorado for a client and I had to pull over and get this shot because I loved the way that the clouds were rolling in over this mountain range now there are two ways because this was done with my X 100 F there's two ways to process this though I can either choose the acro filter and as you can see this changing the look of the image now when I had originally processed it I did it with the a Crow's with the red filter what I'm going to do is leave this in Pro via and I'm gonna go and do my enable black and white and I'm gonna pull down these red tones I'm gonna pull down the blue I love a dark sky look at that sky that has a nice nice sky all of my yellows a little bit let me bring them back down no we're gonna go up up up up I want some brightness up front now I'm gonna create a graduated filter for the grass I call this grass yep we graduate that puppy up there go here we're gonna pull down exposure ever so slightly we're gonna increase the contrast though see see how beautiful that is that's what we're gonna do we're gonna keep doing this I'm gonna bring in the blacks ever so slightly we're gonna bring up the highlights a little bit nicely done now what about the mountain range I think the mountain range deserves a brush Mountain brush I'm gonna click em so I can see what I'm doing with my mask my mask of amazing powers in capture one okay now that I have that set I'm just going to pump up the contrast oh yeah now I'm gonna go back to my background layer I'm going to boost the exposure just a little cuz I'm on a little more contrast just a little more overall pal oh my goodness do I love that photograph that one is getting printed okay so I have to stop there because I could spend all day playing with my mountain images and making them look like Ansel but anyway what if you have a JPEG of a portrait than you did and you overexposed it a little too much can you rescue it as a black-and-white absolutely let me show you what I did here is a photo of my good friend Jake while we were out photographing in Minneapolis one day this is what the Fuji x100s I believe this is shot at f/2 now if you know anything about the Fuji x100s Erie's besides the V the f2 was very soft and nobody liked it but actually I liked it a lot here's good portrait of him but it needs to be black and white it needs to be a better looking portrait so how are we gonna fix a JPEG in capture one well the same process as always we go in to the channel mixer click enable black and white and now we start playing with our sliders no he has a lot of red tones in his face and in his hair so if we bring those up ooh looking like an alien not a good idea we're gonna pull this down get some definition around his face same thing with the yellows we're gonna pull those in just ever so slightly I'm gonna go over here to my exposure slider and I am gonna pull my exposure down not too much so down and I'm gonna pull in my highlights just a smidge II there we go and then I'm gonna start bringing in the black right there going back to the black and white sliders let's adjust now there's gonna be some blue tones right in here cuz using shade so I pull that in you can see how that darkens stark in real nice and the Greens not much happening you see that barely anything happening in the greens so we're just gonna leave them leave them greens alone okay no this is looking okay it isn't great this still needs a lot of help so how do we help it well clarity is gonna do a lot for us we're gonna pump clarity up to 60 come on 63rd yard okay no I'm saying that looks pretty good I'm gonna pull in a little vignette I like a vignette I'm kind of old-school like that and I'm going to reduce or pull in the blacks over here and I'm gonna bring up the highlights now see now we're really starting to look look like something's happening so let's look at our original it's looking pretty good what do we need contrast oh yeah more bring it more there we go right there there it is that's all it takes just a little bit of work in the channels and you got yourself a beautiful black and white now it isn't as hard as you thought it's actually quite easy especially with something like capture 120 if you don't have capture 120 I highly suggest getting it there's a link in the description below purchasing it will help support my channel and for that I am super grateful as is my beautiful wife but so go and play play in this sandbox of capture 120 take your rom and just take your JPEG and just put them in there tweak those sliders mess with it play with it you'll be happy you did so until next time thank you for watching god bless you

Channel: John Magnoski

Views: 11,953

Keywords: capture one, tutorial, photo editing, architectural photo workflow, raw editing, workflow, lightroom, photoshop, adobe competitors, architectural photography, architecture, john magnoski, Fujifilm, GFX50s, capture one vs. lightroom, lightroom vs. capture one pro, capture one pro 20, black and white photography, editing black and white, edit black and white in capture one, black and white portrait photography, Nikon, d300, d800, Fujifilm x100v, x100s, x100f, black and white editing

Id: vdLRsY8Y5vg

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020