LEVELS TOOL in Capture One Pro - Set the STRONG FOUNDATION for your edits FAST!

welcome everyone kasia smokwa from digital art classes here today we have quite a cold and rainy day in poland so i have decided to jump back into some memories and work with those images from the desert they were taken in oman so we will be focusing on this image and i will show you one of the really basic tools in capture one if you are working either in lightroom or in photoshop for sure you know this tool this is a super simple but super powerful tool and i'm not talking here about curves so i'm going to show you some very very fast and simple tricks and you will be able to take your images from something like this this is original raw file and achieve results like this with one single click so we will focus today entirely on the levels tool let's begin okay so let's talk today about the levels tool i'm going to reset adjustments on this image and we are going to start with a raw file so let's take a look first at our histogram so let's just pull it out so just by looking at the graph just at the first glance we can see that we are working with low contrast image so the left edge of our graph represents blacks then we are going through the deep darks and in the middle we have mid tones all the right hand sides half this is our brightest mid tones and the right edge represents highlights so we can see that all our data is crammed in the left hand side half of the graph so which means that we have quite a lot of dark mid tones however we don't have any really dark tones in the image we are missing entirely blacks we are missing highlights and we have no whites at all and the very first thing you want to do when you start editing your images is to make sure that your data is stretched along the whole graph so you want to fill in those gaps you have the gap here on the left hand side which means that we have no blacks and we have this huge gap of information here to the right and the other thing i want to mention here is that there is no such a thing as perfect histogram every image is unique every image is different and you should be aiming to stretching the data because this will make your work easier so let's just now go to our levels tool so here it is i'm in the exposure tab and you can see that you have exactly the same graph let's just pull it and position underneath the histogram this is exactly the same graph that we have above here so just by clicking on the second icon on this magic wand you will apply auto adjustment on levels and this will stretch data across the histogram so this will fill the gaps you can do this only on the background layer if i create another field adjustment layer just to show you this magic wand is not available so you need to be on the background layer and now if i just click on this magic wand this has adjusted the white point this has adjusted the black point automatically this has adjusted the mid tones and you can see how the histogram has shifted so if i reset this just take a look at the histogram how the data gets stretched and how we are getting our bright tones how we are getting all those bright mid tones and how the data got stretched so we have a bit of dark tones and the blacks in the image so this is super useful this is super important and as i've just mentioned few minutes ago there is no such a thing as perfect histogram and those adjustments applied automatically by capture one don't have to be perfect either so now you have freedom to adjust them manually if you feel that the contrast that you have achieved by the auto adjustment is too strong that the highlights are too strong you can now readjust those points so by pulling the white point backwards you will be dimming those highlights so the image was taken just before the sunset the sun was quite soft and actually creating such a strong contrast could be too much so you might decide that you want to maintain the atmosphere that was captured when you are taking the image and then you have the freedom to manually readjust those points so the same goes for the blocks if you feel that the image got too dark that you want to have the softness the original softness you can always pull back that point and make that image softer and to make the contrast a little bit less strong so let's just bring our histogram and levels back and now if we just hit y on the keyboard we will see the original image against the one that we have just changed so let's just go for split view slider and you can see that the change the adjustment is quite dramatic so this can be done just with single click on the auto levels so in this short video i'm going to talk about another adjustment that can be performed with levels and i'm going to be talking about color adjustments so if you are really short in time and you don't want to spend ages on color grading images and if you have already your levels tool opened you can try some color grading ideas just with the levels tool this can be super helpful if you are maybe traveling if you are on a small laptop and if you don't want to fiddle around with those tools you can do this only with the levels so on the background layer we have adjusted the contrast with the auto levels adjustment and now let's just try to apply a little bit of color grading so for this i'm going to add another new filter adjustment layer just to be tidy and organized so i'm just going to rename this layer to color so the principles behind color grading with levels are exactly the same as the principles behind color grading with curves we have exactly the same idea here so we have our rgb tunnel which contains all the colors in the image and then we can jump into single channels into separate channels the red the green and the blue if you are not familiar with the color theory taking a look at the color wheel can be helpful and you can just pull out your color editor tool so let's maybe take it out from here let's position it over there and i'm just going to sample any color or anywhere in the image just to have the color wheel visible so i'm not going to be making any changes here i just want the color wheel as a reference so let's just get back to our levels tool we have the red green and blue channels so if we will be manipulating with the red channel the opposite color to the red we can super quickly check it on our color wheel so the opposite color to the red is cyan you can see it here then we have our green channel and here the opposite color to green is magenta and then we have the blue channel and here you can see that the opposite color to the blue is yellow so now if we'll be manipulating either with the white points or the mid tones or the black points we'll be either injecting the blue color or the opposite color that is visible here in the color wheel so if we take a look at this image i might want to apply a little bit of cinematic color grading so we have that plant here i have no idea what's the name of this plant but it goes sort of towards the blue color so i'm going to shift those mid tones this red part of the sand towards the yellow so let's inject a little bit of yellow into the mid tones this takes a little bit of practice don't go too fast experiment and be subtle with these adjustments so i'm going to be working with the middle point because i want to shift those reds towards the yellows so if i start pulling this point towards the right you can see that i'm introducing yellow but this is already too much and the shift is too strong just to prove that the opposite color here to the yellow is blue if i go in the other direction i will be introducing blue to the midtones so they are mixing with the red sun and we are getting this sort of purplish color let's double click on the point so i have zeroed out my adjustment and let's just pull it again if you want to be super precise here you can just select that number value here and you can work with the arrows on your keyboard so now i'm going upwards and i'm reducing the amount i'm going downwards and adjusting the image injecting more yellow inside the midtones so as i said before you can experiment let's just now try to attach the white point so if i push this one towards the left you can see that i'm introducing blue into the highlights and the image gets really cold that's not what i'm aiming for i don't like it i want to make this image warmer so let's try this one so here if i push this point the white point towards the left i'm adding yellow into the highlights however this is flattening the image so i'm going to again double click on the point and i want to maintain my highlights neutral so if i just hover over my highlights over the part of the sand here i can read my color readout so now i can see that i have 231 for the rest 214 for the green and 198 for the blue so this means that the highlights are on the warmer side and to balance them out i can fiddle further with the color so this is just to illustrate how you can use the levels to work with colors how you can work with color grading so if i start working with the black point now i'm adding yellow into the shadows which is completely ruining the image because i'm getting rid of the color contrast so let's try the other way now i'm adding blue into the shadows and this sort of looks like blue lagoon so let's just get rid of this so i'm going to stick with this little adjustment that i performed in the mid tones so let's now quickly check the before and after so this is before applying the adjustment and after if i take a look at the split view this is the image before running the auto adjustment on levels and after so i am explaining all those steps in detail but if i would be working for myself this would have taken me just a few seconds that's what it takes to click on the auto adjustment on the levels and playing around with the color grading with levels the very last adjustment i want to apply here so basically we are done with levels i will add a little bit of clarity to the image because we have plenty of beautiful textures here and the image still looks quite flat so after applying the contrast after adjusting the contours and after working a bit with color i'm going to finish off this image so let's just add another field adjustment layer you can do this on background but this is the way i work i just like keeping all these things on separate layers and then i can adjust them and i can see very clearly and super quick where i have applied what adjustment so i'm going to rename this layer to clarity and let's zoom in so now we are at 67 percent i'm just going to go for 100 and this is the main element in the image so let's try to add a little bit of texture here so in my exposure tab i'm just dragging down and here is our clarity so here you have a choice you have four different methods the typical that i would go for is natural or if i don't mind adding more saturation to the colors i can try punch so in case of this image we have still quite subtle colors so maybe let's try punch i'm going to go for small amount on clarity because by increasing contrast i'm darkening the image so the mid tones will get dark and the shadows will get darkened as well so i think something like this is okay and let's just add quite a lot of structure so i want to see the structure of this plant and we can even get some beautiful texture of the sand so if we just switch this layer off this is before applying clarity and this is after applying the adjustment so that way i wanted to show you in this super short video that your edits don't have to be complex that's definitely true that capture one is quite a complex piece of software however with your knowledge that you already have from editing your images in photoshop or in lightroom you can use all those tricks all those tools that you already know and build your workflow from there okay so that's it for today we've been talking about the levels tool i have shown you how in a few seconds you can get from this original raw file to this result by setting the auto contrast with auto adjustment on levels and playing a bit with color and finishing the image off with clarity and structure if you enjoyed this tutorial if you learn something new i will really appreciate if you leave me a comment under this video you can like the video and i will be super happy if you subscribe to my channel and if you would like to learn more about capture one you can check out my course the link is under the video in the description of this video i have a comprehensive course on capture one i cover everything starting from the basic setup going all the way through all the editing and the organization just everything you need to know if you want to start working with capture one and enjoy beautiful results fast so thanks for watching this was kasia's mokwa from digital art classes and i hope to see you soon in my next video

Channel: Kasia Zmokla

Views: 1,764

Keywords: Kasia Zmokla, capture one levels tool, levels tool capture one, capture one, capture one pro, capture one tutorial, capture one pro 20, capture one 20, raw converter, photo editing, levels, capture one pro tutorial, tutorial, raw, base contrast photo editing, capture one pro for beginners, how to use levels in photoshop, color grading in capture one pro 20, post production, capture one 20 levels, capture one 20 tutorial, capture one 20 tutorials, capture one workflow

Id: MaPg444-RWI

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020