How to create a SIGNATURE LOOK with STYLES in Capture One 20

hi everyone this 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 today's video was requested by trinicapone i was asked to take two different images and use the color wheel to grade the images to make them look the same signature look so this is what we are going to be doing today i'm going to take this image i'm going to add a style to it i'm going to color grade it so this is the original raw file this is starting point and i'm going to recreate this style then i have just taken two other images from the same photoshoot so they were taken during the same morning and we have the same lighting conditions so just to check the the style that the color grading will work across other images so these are original raw files and here are the images after reapplying the style so at this point i might say we have the signature look that we would like to apply across more images taken during different time with different lighting conditions so we will be taking this portrait so here i have already applied the style and this is the original image so if we compare this one with this one you can see that they sit in a different color space that one is more about brown warm tones we have some neutral grays but they are just completely different that one is much softer we have the fog here so we will be working towards unifying the look for both of them and i will recreate the style on the portrait so we'll be able to save our set of adjustments as a style and reapply to bigger bunch of images in the future to create a consistent portfolio so let's jump right into it okay so here we have our original image let's take a look at the histogram so as we can see the image is pretty well exposed we have nice amount of data stretched across the whole graph so it shows that we have some dark tones we have mid-tones we have some highlights we have this gap of information to the right which indicates that there are no strong highlights visible in the image but the photo was taken during very foggy morning during the very misty lighting conditions and the graph represents perfectly the mood the atmosphere so just to start on the right side let's select the background layer and let's just apply auto levels this can be only applied on the background level so by clicking on the second icon i have applied the auto levels and this increased contrast a little bit in my image so this is before this is the after and as you can see it has stretched the data across the whole graph which is going to be helpful when we will be working on our style with the curves tool so to me the highlights are a little bit too bright so i'm going to push a notch to the back the white point so something like this should be fine so this is what i'm going to be doing on the background layer and because we are going to create a style in this video and be able to save the style and reapply to different images we will be working only on one layer if you want to save a style in capture one you have to keep all your adjustments on one single layer so all the adjustments that are specific for the particular image should be done on a background layer so by this i mean correcting the exposure maybe correcting the contrast a bit so once you are happy with your basic luminosity adjustments you can apply style to your images this is very important because if you want to apply a style you want to be working on images that are already correct in terms of exposure you don't want to include inside your styles adjustments that are correcting luminosity levels so having that said we have our background layer let's start working on stylizing the image before we do just that let's analyze the image in terms of color so i'm going to super quickly take a screenshot of our image and i'm going to jump over to the chrome browser and we will be working in adobe color wheel so this is super useful super helpful i want you to start using this tool if you don't know it yet if you are not using it it is really really helpful when you want to harmonize colors in your image and when you want to analyze your images in terms of color so let's jump over to extract theme here you can import your image so i'm going to select my recent screenshot so here we are this is the image and automatically adobe color tool extracted the most important color samples that it believes are characteristic for this image so i believe these are spot on so we can manually move those circles around but i think they represent very well colors that are present inside the image so now if we hit color wheel we can see the same color samples and we can see how they are positioned inside the color wheel and by having those colors mapped inside the color we can create our game plan for color grading so we can see straight away that these colors are sitting very near one to each other on the color wheel so we are working with analogous color palette in this case all the colors are quite muted they are quite dark so let's take a look at the image again we have low contrast here and the image has this sort of muddy look to it which i don't like so to make this image more dynamic to make it more interesting to introduce color contrast i have decided to go for quite a strong change quite a strong adjustment and i want to introduce very strong color contrast inside this image so i will be pushing all the colors that are sitting in this range in the greens so everything that is sitting starting from the oranges through the yellows through the greens i will try to compress the palette to push all these colors sitting inside this color spectrum towards the oranges so that way we will have our grays but instead of those greens we will be working with yellows so this is my game plan for the color grading let's quickly jump back to capture one and let's start working on our image so as you can see here all these colors are sort of muddy they are not really saturated we have some luminosity contrast but in terms of colors the image is very flat and not really pleasing so i've decided to go for something entirely different so let's start working on our style as i have mentioned before we have to create a style on one single layer so that way we will be able to save a style for the future if you will create a style you if you will add several different adjustments on several different layers what i like doing in fact i like seeing all my adjustments on separate layers and that's what i tend to do because this allows me very quickly identify which adjustment is sitting on which layer and i can fine tune it super quickly but if you want to save all your adjustments as a style bear in mind that you will be better off if you will be working on one single layer so let's just rename this layer to style i have created new field adjustment layer this is our layer and let's rename it let's call it style so on the background layer we have around the auto levels adjustment and on the style we will do everything else apart from the custom vignette so let's begin with hdr tool i would like to take a look at my highlights and add my shadow so as we can see here we are losing some detail in the shadows so i want to open them up a little bit so i will be pushing my shadow sliders towards the right so i believe something around 24 let's go for 25 should be fine so this is before and this is the after when it comes to the highlight slider i'm going to check if we can recover some highlights as well so by pushing it to the left i'm going to go for quite a strong value because that way i'm harmonizing the sky with the foreground so this is before this is the after maybe this is a little bit too much so i'm going to go for maybe negative 50. so on our style layer we have adjusted the highlights and shadows so this is before this is the after so now let's take a look at our curves when it comes to the curves i'm going to use this tool to further manipulate with luminosity i'm going to make some fine adjustments on contrast and this will be part of a style so i'm not going to be working on curves on the background layer because on the background i have just run the auto levels adjustment and once the image looks fine in terms of luminosity now i will be performing adjustments on curves and this i want to be reapplying to different images so the curves adjustment will be an inherent part of my style let's start with the rgb and i quite like starting out working with curves with the ready presets so let's move over towards the hamburger icon and let's select contrast rgb so that's way capture one automatically added three control points and it created contrast so this is a bit too much i'm going to fine tune it so first of all i don't want my highlights to go that strongly i don't want to have them that bright because i have just corrected this with my hdr tool so i'm going to just move this control point downwards and this will darken my highlights so all the right hand side of this graph is representing bright tones we have mid tones in the middle bright tones to the right and shadows and dark mid tones to the left so i'm going to go for something like this and i think i will go for subtle matte effect here so i will be lifting my blocks so i'm pushing my black point upwards this one i will move a notch upwards as well this control point i'm going to delete because it is uncovering my curve it is keeping it flat and i would like it to be a bit more dynamic so i have selected the control point and i'm going just to hit delete to get rid of it so that way i'm moving closer to the effect that i like let's just make the highlights a little bit less prominent a little bit less soft so i want to maintain this misty atmosphere i don't want to introduce any strong contrast to this image when it comes to this point i'm just going to lift it a little bit to make my dark mid tones a little bit brighter and the dark point i think here it works quite well okay so we've been working with the rgb curve this is before and this is the after so let's now jump over to the luma curve with luma curve i want to just brighten the image overall so i'm just going to go for one control point and let's just push it upwards let's just brighten the image a notch so something like this and maybe one more here to add a little bit more light to the dark shadows so okay something like this my sky got bright again so let's just quickly jump back to the hdr tool and i'm going to push my highlights still a little bit more to the left so now i'm at negative 66 so let's zoom in and we can see that with the curves if i just press and hold alt key this is before and this is the after so we've been working with curves so before we jump into working on color i want to give you one tip that is quite important but not many of you are using this so i believe by default capture one loads with very dark color as for the background so when you have very dark or where and you have black the images look really good the dark background just makes the images pop all the colors are looking super vibrant but this is not the best idea specifically when you are working on luminosity adjustments because when you have the black background or dark background you will tend to make your images way darker than they should be so regardless what is your destination medium if you are working for print if you will be showing your images a large size on a digital display or if you want to just present your images as small thumbnails as social media it is a really good habit to change your backgrounds to white okay so at this point we are ready to start working on color so we are still on our style layer we are not going to be creating any additional layers let's just move over to the color tab and here we will be working with color editor and we will be working further on with color balance so when it comes to color editor we will be using advanced and skin tone so let's begin with the advanced just make sure that you are on your style layer this is very important because only this will enable you to save all your adjustments as a style so in our advanced tab we are going to sample colors here and adjust them to create our color grading so let's get the color picker and first i'm going to adjust the blues if we quickly check the color widows here we have 97 for the red 117 for the green and 135 for the blue so i want to push all these grays all these sort of neutral grays more towards the science so if we could quickly jump back to the adobe color tool i want to push these colors towards cooler part of the spectrum i want to inject a bit of cyan and then i'm going to create really a strong dramatic color shift for the greens and i will push them towards those warm orange tones so i will be working towards complementary color harmony and i want to get somewhere around here so let's jump back to capture one so i'm going to pick my picker tool and i'm going to start with the blues so we can quickly take a color readouts we have 97 for the red 117 for the green and 135 for the blues so i will be pushing colors in this image towards complementary color harmony so i want to make my grays in the image a little bit cooler i will be injecting a hint of cyan and the greens i'm going to create a super dramatic color shift and i want to push them towards oranges and yellows so let's take our first color sample let's click somewhere here now let's make sure that the whole saturation range is included so i'm going to click on this icon here and now i want to just check what is included in the selection so let's just click on this little icon here everything that is grayed out is excluded from my color selection and everything that has this quite soft cyanide tint is included so i want to maybe increase the selection color range i want to make sure that those darker blues are included as well so i will be injecting in all these colors that are including in my selection i will be injecting more cyan so let's switch off the preview of my color selection and let's start now manipulating with the hue first of all maybe let's push smoothness all the way to the right so this will make sure that transitions between my colors will be as soft and as harmonious as possible so when it comes to the hue i want to push my slider towards the left so that way i'm operating upwards on the collar wheel the dot represents the collar that i have sampled and i want to add more cyan so i'm going upwards here and this i can achieve by pushing my slider in the hue towards the left so you can see how this affected the image this is before this is the after and i think negative 25 works quite well i think i will go a little bit lower with saturation so maybe not that far something about negative nine works well okay let's now take an a second color sample so having the picker selected i'm going to actually zoom in a little bit and target those sort of warm greens so i'm going to click somewhere here and let's zoom out let's now adjust this color so i'm going to click again on this icon to make sure that the whole saturation range is included and i'm going to extend the range of colors that are included in my selection so here i want to increase smoothness as well and let's just include more of the oranges here and let's include all the greens so when it comes to this color i just want to take down saturation a bit because i will be targeting this color with the skin tone tool okay so this is preparation for the big shift that i'm going to perform in the skins on top so let's jump over to the skin tone tab and for some of you it might get confusing that i'm going to use the skin tone top the skin tone tool for landscape photography but this is just the name of the tool and actually the functionality works towards unifying your selected colorants unifying your selected hues so this is super super helpful when you want to compress a selected color palette or when you want to make a really dramatic color shift so in theory it sounds quite complex so let's jump right into action and let me in fact demonstrate how you can work with this tool so we have our color picker selected and let's just click somewhere around here so here the same as in the advanced tab first of all we want to make sure that the whole saturation range of the sampled color is included so now we have our dot position quite near to the middle of the color wheel so the newer the dot is to the color wheel center it means that the color is less saturated the color that we have sampled so this clearly shows that the strongly saturated greens and strongly saturated yellows are excluded from our color selection and this will definitely cause trouble because we will be working towards strong color shift so let's just click on this icon here to make sure that the whole saturation range is included so now as a next step i'm going to extend the color selection so when i was sampling the color i have clicked somewhere here and by default capture one loaded this selection but i want to extend it so i want to be shifting towards the orange all the colors that are sitting from the cyans through the greens through the yellows and all the way up to the oranges so now two super important things so here inside this selection are visible all the colors that will be affected by this color adjustment so we will be working on super strong color shift and all these colors that are visible here inside will be affected will be changed will be compressed and pushed towards the selected hue and how we can select the hue this is second super important thing maybe the most important thing in the whole video this can be actually adjusted by repositioning the circle by repositioning the dots so i haven't start amount and uniformity yet but you will see in a second how this will affect our adjustment so in the amount you will be adjusting your hue so here i'm just going to go for quite a small value something around 1.4 when it comes to saturation i will go for lower saturation something maybe negative 10 when it comes to lightness let's make it a it will be darker so now i'm adjusting values for the sampled color so this is the sample the original color that i have sampled from the image and this is how the sample looks like after my adjustments so let's now focus our attention on the uniformity part so here is where the whole beauty lies of the skin tone tool of the skin tone tub by increasing hue value you are applying uniformity across the selected hue range in your image so in other words you are compressing your palette so everything inside the selection everything starting from the science through the greens through the yellows and all the way up to the oranges goes unified and the selected hue that i have picked is indicated by this little dot here so all these colors from this selected spectrum are pushed towards those orangey yellows the very important thing is that i can reposition it so if i would like to put it here everything will be pushed towards the greens so here i will be compressing my palettes towards the yellows and i want to go in fact towards those orangey yellows towards those warm tones so we've been working with the hue and we can apply uniformity across saturation in your image so this i'm not going to push all the way to the right something i like this i believe works well typically i never touch lightness slider because this will sort of push all the luminosity levels across your selected color range towards similar value and this will basically make your image flat so i have already made some effort on my curves adjustments on leverage adjustments so i don't need to touch this at all okay so we have performed our color shift and now we can find units so let's go back here i'm going to push smoothness all the way to the right just to have the maximum value so this way we can see that the transition between my selection and other colors that are present in the image is smooth if we go with the smoothness towards the small value we are seeing that the transition is harsh and in fact if we zoom in let's go for 100 magnification level so you can see how this affects the image especially here transition between the range that was selected and the rest of the greens we can in fact include them by pushing this a bit lower this is really harsh and it doesn't look natural so let's go the other way and that way you can see it we are including more and the color transition is really soft this is important especially when you are shifting your colors that strongly as we are doing now here when creating this style okay so let's now take a look at a quick before and after so this is before working with color editor and this is the after let's now fine tune our style with color balance i'm going to put the color editor back and pick my color balance let's open up the tool so with this tool i'm going to adjust colors and i will be adjusting my luminosity as well i want to add a little bit more contrast to the image so when it comes to the master tab i'm going to leave it as it is i'm happy with the colors i have created i don't want to introduce any color cast when it comes to the shadows i want to inject more cyan to the shadows so i'm going to go for something like this and let's try touching a beat the slider to the right that enables us to either brighten the selected luminosity range or darken so we are focusing on the shadows with the slider to the left you are adding color and with the slider to the right you can further manipulate with luminosity so if we go upwards we will be brightening the shadows and if we go downwards we will be darkening the shadows and i really like this effect so this is adding mood to the image this is adding contrast but it is only darkening the shadow range in the image so not many of you are using this and i think this is really really helpful and it can work beautifully together with the curves so with this you can very intuitively adjust your luminosity when working on color when fine tuning color so we can add a bit more of saturation as well to the shadows so they are getting this nice cyanide tone to it so here let's fine tune the color okay something like this to complement our oranges let's now jump over to the mid tone and when it comes to the mid tone i'm going to add just a bit of warmer tones so let's go for something like this a little bit of orange and i'm going to brighten the mid tones and not with my luminosity slider so this is all the way up this is all the way down and i want to go for somewhere around here okay when it comes to the highlight i want to leave them neutral so i'm not going to manipulate with this tool okay so in terms of color we have finished working on our style now we can add maybe a little bit of clarity so we are still on our style layer let's move over to the clarity and let's zoom in so we are looking at 100 percent magnification level let's pan around so now we can add a notch of clarity here so this is 10 before and after okay so things are getting a little bit more crispy but i want to maintain my mystic conditions so if we have fog if we have this sort of super soft light we will never have any strong contrast and just pushing clarity further will not look good will not look natural we can try to add a bit of structure this will be visible specifically here in this part of the road so okay we have 10 here and let's go for a bit more for the structure so this actually works very well we have now the contrast between the foliage between the leaves and the concrete here so let's just see before adding clarity so the image is a little bit softer and after so nothing super strong nothing dramatic but it does its job and let's now on a separate layer and a custom vignette just to close the composition here at the bottom so i'm going to add new filter adjustment layer let's quickly rename it to vignette and i'm going to use the radial gradient and let's make something quite wide because i want this to be applied only at the bottom i don't want to darken the tree so by having the gradient selected if i press m on the keyboard i see the preview of my mask and here i'm just going to go down with exposure just to darken the road because it creates just too much of this empty dead space okay i think this is a little bit too much let's just push it lower okay so this is the selection and this is without and this is with our vignette okay so at this point we have our style ready so if we switch off if we go to our style layer if we switch this off this is our image only with the basic luminosity adjustments that we performed on the background layer so here we have applied auto levels and we have applied the vignette we can switch off the vignette as well so this is our original image without any adjustment let's just change this to full view so this is before this is after applying the levels and this is after applying our styling this is after working with color and after adding a bit of clarity then we have added vignette okay so our style is ready let's now make sure that it works across other images so first of all i'm going to try to reapply to two other images that were taken during the same photoshoot during the same lighting conditions so this is the first test that your style should pass there's no point in creating a style that will be working only on one image so there's no point on saving such a set of adjustments as a style okay so let's maybe before we save the style let's just quickly copy all these adjustments from one image so the image is selected we have this gray border around the image that indicates selection so let's now copy all the adjustments so the image that we want to copy the adjustments from is selected let's hit the arrow pointing upward so i have copied all the adjustments to the clipboard and now i want to apply them to this image let's click on the arrow pointing downwards and i want to apply them to this image so in terms of color everything looks good this image definitely requires some luminosity adjustments but i believe that can be done very very quickly on the background layer with the auto levels adjustment because the style will be saved from this layer but your levels adjustments were performed on the background layer and if we just take a quick look at the original raw files you can see that this image has way less contrast is way brighter than these two other images so we need to unify them in terms of luminosity this should be always done before applying any styles so let's hit y again this is the image after applying my adjustments and i'm going to very quickly jump back to the background layer and reset levels and hit again on the second icon so this applied auto levels on this particular image before i have copied all these adjustments from the first image and this simply didn't match the histogram it didn't match the luminosity levels of the second frame so we have simply reapplied the auto levels let's do the same for the last image so we are on the background layer and we can see here that those points they simply don't match the image let's reset and let's hit again so okay everything looks way better now and we can now fine tune the luminosity levels however i can say that the style works well across other images from the same photoshoot we won't be now spending time on fine-tuning the second and the last image what i would do is definitely i would go to my style layer and i would work on curves so here i would just make those brighter mid tones it will be darker i would introduce a little bit more contrast but this video is already quite a long so i'm not going to do this here i will maybe switch off vignette yes definitely by manipulating with curves this image will benefit so let's maybe push this point a little bit downwards and i think it helps to get a little bit more balance when it comes to this one i think i would brighten the shadows so in the style i would revisit my shadow or maybe the blacks in the hdr tool so if i go here i'm just opening up the shadows and definitely i would add as well a gradient here at the very top so i can make the sky a little bit darker and just to get back some of the details that were visible in the sky so super quick before and after but basically the point is that the style that we have created for the very first image on our style layer is working so now let's jump over to our portrait this image was taken during entirely different photo shoot different lighting conditions and the easiest way would be to first of all just copy all these adjustments from the image so i can just click on the arrow pointing upwards and have the image selected and apply these adjustments so this is one way the other way is to save your style and then you will have your style visible here in the styles in capture one and you will be able to apply them in the future to other images so to save the style you need to be in your layers tab and here just select the layer that includes all these adjustments that you want to have saved as a style and simply click on these three little dots and select from here save adjustments as a style so here you can further tick what you want to have included in your style so for example you might not want to have details or exposure but i would suggest having all these positions ticked so everything that you've done on this layer will be saved as a style so let's just cancel and let's jump back to the portrait so looking at this image i must say that the colors work very very well the image requires some adjustments in terms of luminosity so first of all i would like to get back some of the detail in the highlights this can be done as well on the background layer with the hdr tool so i just want to get back some of the detail in the skin some of the highlights and i would say that on my style layer i can fine tune the clarity i don't need to enhance the structure so i would go down maybe even to zero with structure so let's double click the zeroed out the structure and if we take a look at the clarity i think the image doesn't need that strong adjustment just to keep it consistent with the other series but something around six i believe works well so of course the image that we have applied the style to the original raw file i haven't done any retouching if i would be working on this image i would definitely fix few things here and there on the skin and then it would be good to go so just to maybe check another image i have copied another portrait from the same series so from here we can copy all these adjustments and apply them to the second image so we can see that it works really really well so we have created a set of adjustments we have created a style that can be reapplied to entirely different images and that way we can achieve a consistent look across a portfolio so i'm not saying that this is going to be working 100 for every single image that you will apply a style to but this can be definitely a starting point if you want to have a set of different images that are consistent in terms of lighting and in terms of color so these first three images were taken during very misty conditions misty weather so the light is way softer and these two portraits have different light and the colors are more saturated but definitely we can take our style and we can treat it as a starting point as a basis and we can start from there and adjust further colors if needed and luminosity so let's just get back this is the first image that we have started working with this is the second image that we have applied our style this is the third one so this is our landscape series and then we have applied the style to these portraits if you're getting value from this video i will be super happy if you hit the thumbs up and if you subscribe to my channel so that way you will make sure that you won't miss any of my future videos so today we've been talking about creating a style that can be applied across multiple different images to create a consistent signature look and if you would like to learn more about capture one i have a comprehensive course link is available in the description to this video so thanks for watching this was kasia's mokwa from digital art classes and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Kasia Zmokla

Views: 10,606

Keywords: digital photography, Kasia Zmokla, Digital Art Classes, colour, color, cinematic, analogous colours, complementary colours, hue, saturation, luminance, cinematic look, limiting your colour space, limiting your colour palette, controlling colour, editing color, color photography, capture one color editor skin tone, capture one color editor tutorial, capture one editorial color grading styles, signature look, style, color grading, photo editing, capture one tutorial, post processing

Id: Em_EJANzp-U

Length: 44min 21sec (2661 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020