Live Editing Sessions - Capture One 10th June 2021 (Exposure, Layers, Noise, Sharpening, Luma Range)

hello everyone uh welcome welcome back um for those of you that have been online for a few of these now or more um and hello and welcome to everyone that is joining new so um we've got some of the normal gang on uh allen michael ian joe's on jeff's odd um paul is on um jerry's not on that's weird he normally apologizes if he's not going to be on but but anyway um derek's old oh yeah cool all the normal gang however um for those of you that haven't been here before um welcome we've got an hour of editing your images so your photos in capture one capture one being that logo um that piece of software um it's a raw editor um built by the guys in copenhagen so for those of you that aren't familiar with it um follow along hopefully you'll get a bit of a view of what capture one can do for those of you that are familiar with it please make sure that you are either on version 20 or 21 preferably 21 but version 20 a minimum in order to follow along with most of the stuff that we're going to show you today so for those of you that are familiar you'll know there's a bit of a delay so we want this to be interactive please do put in comments and stuff when you've got questions or you don't agree with something i'm doing or you know there's a there's a an idea that you've come up with then please please make it as interactive as possible because that's the way that we all learn a bit better but beyond that just bear in mind there's about a five or six second delay between you typing a comment me seeing it and me being able to actually react to it on the screen so i'm not ignoring you um it's just the way that streaming works unfortunately um for those of you that didn't get to see the webinar stuff that we did with phase one um yesterday crikey um feels ages ago um that is now online on learn.phaseone.com so if you want to learn about something called frame averaging frame averaging being the ability to take something that looks like a long exposure without a long exposure so you can i can shoot for an hour's worth of content um we average it out within the camera and that's on phase one's channel now so that was presented yesterday but do go to learn.phaseone.com you can catch up with that too so back to version 21 make sure if you are on version 21 that you're on 21.2 which is the latest version it was sort of i guess pegged as a bit of a apple m1 release that's not all it's about it also does some bug fixing and all that stuff as well so please do make sure you're on the latest version if you're on 21 if you're not um go into captureone.com go into your account and you can see whether or not there's an upgrade deal if you're on a subscription then it's part of that subscription if you've bought a perpetual license you'll need to upgrade if you want to be on the latest and if you don't have any of that and you just want to try it you can download a 30-day trial from captureone.com as well um so have a little play too right jerry is on from arizona there we go jerry you didn't have to apologize for not being here well done you made it um to be fair so did earl so cool we've got we've got the gang back online so let's go into capture one and we're gonna start where we left off actually um so last week we finished with alan's shot of a barista um this week we're going to start with alan's shot of a waterfall um and this the question from alan on this one was just a bit of a general i guess um you know what's the edit like so the first thing i'm going to do is turn on the before and after so if i go into here i've got my option at the top uh the default before and after is a slider so you can go left and right we can do it as well we don't talk about this but we can do it for multiple images at the same time and it does it sort of in proportion so we can use that pretty powerfully to compare different images in different edits but in this case we've got our before image so our raw data on the left and as i slide across we see the edit that alan's done and if i look at a lot of the layers that are in here there's some very intricate detail and i'm actually looking at it and thinking actually the edit is fine but there's always a but i think we've flattened it a bit too much alan if i'm honest so if i look at it beforehand um yes you're missing a lot of the detail out here but there seems to be a lot more drama or um you know certainly contrast in in the shot that's that started to be washed out a little bit to the point where and i hate using this phrase there's a stigma with it but it i'm not going to use the phrase actually i'm going to say it looks almost line drawn rather than necessarily a a contrasty photograph and i know why um it's because the temptation is to try and recover all the details so we might look at backing some of them off not a huge amount but just enough so a couple things that alan did do which we're going to run through so there's a layer on here remove pink in the foreground and actually if you didn't notice it it's this bit here so there's a little sort of set of i guess strips um of this pink sort of color so what alan's got is a layer over here with a mask on it so literally a brushed layer so click on the brush and you can add to it and that layer is effectively taking away some of i think it's somewhere in here or is it under here yep it's in our advanced so some of this pink hue that's in there rather than doing it with white balance which would upset that area um if i try and remove some of the pink tint let's call it um in this area what's going to happen is look not only does it remove it from the pink areas but it also removes it from everything else so it shifts the entire tint across so if you're trying to focus on one color don't be tempted to use white balance instead that's what the color editor is for and in this case it's a case of without and with and it's just muting those those pink so it's literally a saturation layer in here nothing more um in in those sense uh one question where are we from titan what did the histogram look like when it had contrast before the edit and what would it look like flattened out so let's have a look so unfortunately as we do our before and after we don't actually alter the histogram as it were in here we can see the original histogram through curved data and so on however if i go to a new variant of this shot now i get the original histogram back so this is my original histogram here this is our edited histogram we can actually see what's going on so effectively the the wider or the more spread out that histogram is the more contrast we have you know the the bigger the difference between the light areas and the dark areas the higher the contrast the scene and in our original here there was quite a spike up here we can see on the the right hand side of this histogram so that's where our highlights were and that's where this water obviously is starting to hit 255 i can confirm that because as i move my mouse over the histogram will over the image you'll see on the histogram this little orange bar bouncing all around it does it on levels curves and the histogram tool and as i do that you'll see we're in the shadows here in the orange bar here we're in the lower mid tones here we're more in the mid tones here we're in the upper mid tones and then when i get to the water we're way off that right hand side and that's also confirmed if we look at the numbers at the top of the screen so wherever my mouse is capture one is going to give me a readout of red green blue and also gray which is luminosity so the the luminance of that pixel the overall brightness and we can see in the water you know 251 up here 253 with the blue channel clipping 255 here is a 255 element and if i were to turn the exposure warning on we'd see some of those elements have hit 255 my warning set to 255 but all of this is recoverable of course um so it's not wildly out so if i go back to our exposure tab here and i pull my exposure down well we can see there is detail in all this water so if i go before let's just turn off that warning no detail here after yes it's darkened down but it's also introduced a bit more detail too so we're in a good place we've got good data in here likewise with the shadows so if i move my mouse around let's just reset that exposure so in our original obviously we've got some stuff that's very very dark in the shadows as i move my mouse around up here in this branch we can see that orange bar on the top left of course off to the way way back part of the shadows and i could of course lift up those shadows so as i go back to our after we can lift it up and we can see in those shadows there's all this detail so in our bark all the details there great and that's what alan's done in his edit so if i go back to this one here which is alan's version if i come out and go to our global adjustments which is where alan's done most of this stuff there's no levels change or curve change but what there is is a pulling up of shadow pulling down of highlights so effectively the shadow and black bringing them up towards the middle of the histogram the whites or the highlights bringing them down away from the edge of the histogram and then he's used a brightness slider so just to explain that if i use exposure on its own we we talk about it every now and then we move effectively the histogram so it goes from left to right or from right to left that's fine but we've moved all the data so if i wanted to recover some highlights i then have to push the shadows off the end and as well remember in this histogram it was right at the end on the shadows and right at the end on the the highlights so any movement really in exposure is going to risk losing one end or the other so some of the hdr recovery will fix that because it's bringing that histogram in it's bringing the highlights and the whites lower it's bringing the blacks and the shadows higher but the brightness tool instead of exposure does a slightly different thing instead of shifting the entire histogram so off to the right or off to the left it squashes it so it squashes the shadows up towards the highlights without pushing the highlights over the end or if i pull the brightness down it's going to squash the highlights down without pushing the shadows over the end so it can be a very useful tool if you want to squash the histogram without pushing or brighten or darken without pushing anything off the end of shadows or off the end of highlights but here's the problem in this shot we've got an exposure reduction we can see that here by about one stop and that's to counter the brightness um change of 42. 42 is pretty high on a scale of 0 to 50. so we've lightened it up by almost the maximum amount we've darkened down the whole histogram by one stop and then we've pulled down highlights we've pulled up shadows and black so all of those actions together squash that histogram in the middle and that's why we end up with this flattening effect in here so if i look at the remove pink in the foreground no issue with that layer it's a it's a good decision it gets rid of some of that color in there the dark and the top is something obviously some of you will have seen i do that quite a bit um so unfortunately um when something gets brighter towards the edge of the frame it can look a bit odd when we're trying to um we're trying to view it um it's nicer if it can sort of fade off um towards the edges so there's a darkened top and also i think yeah there's a darkened foreground so if i press m on the keyboard for mask i can see my mask in there and this darkened foreground basically draw or drops off that that brightness as it gets towards the edge of the frame on this one i'm going to just adjust that a little bit less so maybe two thirds of a stop rather than just over one stop um personal choice but that's that's sort of where i get to there's a heel of a stick um i think i found it earlier let's just have a look um yeah there so there's a stick here obviously that was distracting um so that's gone um and then we've got our reverse clarity so here's an interesting trick in the foreground here so clarity is used obviously to enhance contrast especially around the mid-tones it means that we can differentiate things that are very very close in in tone so if you've got a lot of subtle grays or mid-tones in the shot clarity is a great way of separating those out because it adds in contrast or micro contrast but in the mid tones is where it's most most obvious using reverse or negative clarity reduces that contrast so effectively we go from here with detail and contrast to here with less contrast and the effect of it being smooth but again it's another contrast killer so we've got a contrast killer on a contrast killer on a contrast killer on a contrast killer and that's why we're scrunching all that data and we can see it in the histogram here this sort of bundle in the middle and that just leads to a little less contrast than personally i would like now a lot of people love low contrast images more than happy to go with that but for me it's just a bit too flat as a result of doing that now the color adjustments again so if i just turn that off and turn it on again there's a bit of a improvement let's call it to the the greens they've become a lot more vibrant but it's this global layer that we're going to focus on and all i'm tempted to do is just back away some of these sliders now i could do it with the sliders i could go in and reduce the exposure change reduce the brightness change reduce the highlight change and so on but what i can also do is just use the opacity on that layer so the advantage of doing all those global adjustments on a layer rather than on the background is i don't have to go into every tool to do it i can just slide back so to zero to 100 or anywhere in between and if you watch the histogram what's happening is it's not just a case of um we're darkening or lightening because we're reducing the impact of those squashes into the middle your watch as i as i do the opacity change you'll see this histogram start to stretch out and when i get to say about 60 maybe yeah around there we've got a lot of that contrast back um and to me that's adding something here um i don't really want to see less contrast than that because i don't need to i've got all the detail so the recovery that you've already done alan in here is great we've got all of the um the detail in the water already and that's through that highlight pull down and the exposure pull down those two operate together um and and overall we've just got a bit more pop in that in that image in the scene and if i compare it to the original by reducing this layer down to 60 in opacity terms away from 100 all we've done effectively is get back to a bit more contrast more similar to what was there before but we still preserve the details you've still got your color enhanced layer you've still got the the stick this is now missing we've still got rid of the pink layer because you've done it on all the different layers it's great the fact that you've got it layered up with each different effect but the result is in my head a lot more realistic and natural than this full flattening here the temptation here is just to get so much detail back pull up all the information in shadows all the information and highlights and we end up with a cluster of information in the middle of that frame that's that's possibly just losing an edge a little bit here and to me that's possibly a slightly more um i guess more more punchy image if that's not what you wanted and you wanted it to be um to be slightly more sort of painted and line drawn in in feel then reverse what i've just done but to me that's um one thing that i would change the only other thing finally back to that color editor if i go back to our where is it foreground and we got yeah so our foreground we're going to use the same leg you've already done the mask on reverse clarity here so with that foreground i'm going to go to our color editor because while all this is very interesting and very nice and you remove the pink here this brown hmm i'm not i'm not too sure um i want to um want to keep so much of it obviously it was there it is brown um it's there in the foreground but if you look the other result of lightening up those shadows is of course we give the impression of increased saturation so we've gone from this dark um color here it's almost in shade through to a more greeny brown sort of color as a result of lifting those things up so i'm just going to go into our color editor go to advanced on this layer which is the foreground layer choose this area here which is the sort of orangey ready area increase the the area of this cone and the reason is because i want to go from stuff with no saturation which is near the middle all the way to stuff that's a hundred percent saturation now obviously nothing down here is up there at 255 but i just want to catch all that's going to get anything with any color in it adjust the smoothness so it's got a nice fall off and then with that color area just pull that saturation down a touch in fact quite a bit as i said that um maybe that lightness down a bit as well and all i'm doing is trying to get a bit closer to where we were here if i temporarily undo this tool so if you ever want to temporarily adjust something or change the adjustment to see it of course if you've done it on a layer you can turn the layer off and on but this layer also has clarity on this so to undo this tool hold down the option key or the alt key on windows and then click and hold with the key held down um the undo button on an individual tool so we can see without and with so that's without and that's with really subtle to the point where actually i'm going to really push it down a bit more but there we go so from without very ready brown little bits of green to with and it's just neutralized now it's neutralized to the point where it's probably a bit more neutral than the original but it's now out of the way it's it's not that browny muddy color that's sort of distracting here and we push all of the viewing up to that waterfall out in the background uh where are we couple of questions so um [Music] oh i would go back to the scene on a day with a big diffuser on it um yeah i mean yeah the the challenge with this sort of scene um what's great with it is the light falling in so as the light falls in in different ways you get these sort of patterns of light all around and the fact that it picks up on this foam and all that sort of stuff is great the fact that it happened to highlight the waterfall and you've got all this shade around it is wonderful um it's just a bit of a you know it's a bit of a tweak i guess to um to force this to be a bit more um open if we wanted to give that impression of sort of looking through a tunnel a bit more we could even go as simple as go back to the the old school you know the vignette tool um and just pull it into there you know we're not then affecting any of this stuff out here any of the shadows that are in the middle of the frame we're leaving alone but we're dropping maybe i don't know half a stop or something like that um out of the the very edges of that frame remember it's elliptic on the crop so in other words it's based on where i cropped in the image not the overall image so just bear that in mind in terms of that vignette tool um where are we uh got a bit lost on comments um jim more contrast makes the waterfall more of the subject and leaves the eye there absolutely yeah so just be careful if we're wiping out too much of the contrast in a shot because we do want the subject to be here and in fact you know if we really wanted to let's call it really make it pop let's call it contrast add waterfall i could with my little brush i'm going to go i'm actually 100 it's fine and we're just going gonna do a very rough layer over there turn my mask off so that's the m key again on your keyboard um go to my clarity just like before so if i do it too much it's a bit overdone if i do it not enough then we get that negative clarity just like alan had already done so i'm going to push it up to about there and we might even use that actual contrast tool just to push it a bit more the whole time i'm doing that i want to keep an eye on making sure i'm not losing detail so we see here's a bit more detail it starts to lose but i'm not losing too much detail in the water so i'm sort of in a place where we can afford a bit more contrast out in that back i might want to back it off a little bit maybe so that's you know without and with maybe that adds a bit more drama out there but this shot needs to lead you up to that area of the image here not have you look around here and that's one way of doing it um or are we good move to leave the background layer as is and do the initial adjustments on separate layer absolutely so honestly um i forget to do this for every now and then um and it simply comes down to if i think oh yeah i know what i want to do with this shot i know what the edits are and it's probably three or four sliders quite often i'll just go to the background layer and i'll make those changes it comes to bite you later on when you want to back it off a little bit because you're then in a place where you have to do it tool by tool if you want to do this to get started on any image before you even start making adjustments go to your plus oops sorry go to your plus and hold it go to new filled adjustment layer the reason we do that is because i want the layer if i press m on the keyboard to be completely masked 100 applied so anything i do on this layer now is going to apply as if it were on the background 100 um but i've got the ability then to back it away with that opacity where i don't on the background the only thing to be careful of with a layer rather than doing on the background is things like noise reduction um and also things like the black and white editor here will typically only apply to the background they won't necessarily apply across different layers um in the same way as was what you'd expect so just be careful with that one and yeah jim so if you could lock the background layer against accidental change yes and no that there is another problem with with um not editing the background layer which is some of the previous styles and in fact some of the relatively new styles so the um go into them the style packs that we can download um some of these styles make adjustments on the background layer itself um so you do need to be able to edit the background layer but yeah maybe a maybe a way of doing it could be good um and then joe what about recovering the highlights so i would argue that they kind of already are my worry with it we've already got on here allen's original highlight recovery if i pull down white for example so we go from there to there what's happening is we're losing the actual white from the foam and the and the the um what's it called froth whatever um the the the turbulent part of the water let's call it that we're losing the the genuine white parts of it so you know if we're not careful um we get too worried about trying to fix detail and less worried about the actual picture itself so i'd just be careful with white recovery in here if i pull it down too far we end up with a gray and flat waterfall which the whole point is we want one contrast okay so um that's pretty much um where we get to with alan's shot michael if you forget to make bass adjustments on a layer can you copy them from the background to a layer uh you can not i don't think what you can do well you can but it's probably not worth the change because what you can do you could you could in theory save your changes as a style and then apply that set of changes to another layer but by the time you've done that you may as well have just recreated it i uh it's possible but it's going to be messy um so i'd just try and remember to do one on there to be honest as i say i'm probably one of the worst people for forgetting to do it um and when i do uh fine suck it up um you might have a few extra buttons to click but it's not the end of the world okay uh esteban shot it's been a long time since we've done a night sky shot that's quite um quite cool so here's our original and there's our night sky and there's a couple bits in here that we're going to cover um in quite a bit of detail i guess to change but you know good galaxy capture um if i go to the original here there's a lot less noise or perceived noise in the original when i come into here yes we get that amazing explosion of all of the stars but we're also introducing a lot more let me just go in to 100 percent we're getting a lot more noise in there as well um if i go on to our background layer obviously capture one has loaded in the standard amounts of noise reduction and so on so i just be careful i guess is the key with this the the the defaults by the time you've added it's almost i guess revisit noise reduction that's that's i guess where we need to get to so if you if you take the standard noise reduction and then do all of these extra changes over the top which may include extra details you've got clarity at 100 at one point on here we've got another layer of clarity of a hundred we've got clarity of 54 and another layer if i go to our background you know there's not much going on but all of these milky way ones are extra clarity extra clarity a bit more saturation by the time i've done all that remember clarity can add a lot of noise so when i finished with that it's worth going back to the noise reduction tab make sure you're back on your background layer remember and maybe you want to do a little more luminance reduction um you can still protect the details so you can pull this up so details is about protecting the stuff that it thinks is is meant to be there rather than noise itself and it's a way of tweaking um just to you know just don't forget that you can go back to these tools afterwards you're not stuck with what um what the default was when you first loaded it up because if i go back to our default here and then compare it to there we've got a bit less noise now in our comparison to where we were also remember with star shots your single pixel be careful it's not deleting stars in this case i don't think it did i had a look um but be careful with that single pixel if it if it rakes in too high you can end up deleting some stars out of the galaxy which isn't particularly um isn't particularly helpful when that's what we're trying to show so let's go as a very cool sort of shooting star thingy there going on that's very nice right so let's look at where we're at um in general with um the the feel of this and the first thing i'm going to do is just do the before and after so there's our split screen and your eye is obviously drawn to the galaxy it's great you know that's that's the subject of the shot but look at this building all the details in this and it's been lost um and it's lost because of some of the layers that have been put on top and in here we can really see that difference in noise as well noise is part of shooting at high isos we're at six thousand four hundred so just be um just be conscious of that um jose just said what about playing with paul's um night sky brush let's have a look i haven't actually done that with this one but let's have a look so if i create a new variant um we created a little fun brush some time ago um let's have a little look at what that would do if i hit the button so in this case we're going to get a lot more depth in it but we're not getting that sort of color explosion and so on because it that night sky brush is designed to clarify the stars it's not necessarily designed to pump um the galaxy if we want to do that we're kind of in a place so similar to esteban shot if i go to um is it center or detail i can't remember um one of them anyway i think it may be center yeah so this layer change here is the biggest change that happens with this milky way so if i go back to our one with the brush and do the same change here we start to see some of these differences now in what way you go entirely up to you um if i go again back to the original you know it it is a little flatter than where we've ended up here with that edit um oh sorry joe um i've still got your comment up there it is a little flatter um in the original so let's just go and compare these two um but if i look at the original here and we go from you know night sky across to this one there's extra stuff that's been added in here and that's what i kind of want to address because there's a few things that i'm a little less comfortable with on on one of these edits and it's where are we extra detail this layer so to give you some idea milky way right we've got that levels pull um so it's darkening down the shadows we can see that pull up here so this bit here is darkening the right hand side it's also lightening up the the brights the highlights and it's moving that midpoint to make all of the bits that are in the middle so basically the the stuff that makes up the galaxy around the sort of hundred-ish mark lightening that up a little bit as well to the left similar layer similar approach to the center another layer um with a similar levels approach and and you start to see the the effect so we've also got this custom white balance that then gets used um within that milky way center so if i were to undo that we can say it goes a bit more blue that goes a bit more pink but it's the um detail one which is across everything and we'll come back to that in a second and this extra detail one that concerns me because the extra detail one i can see it's been drawn in um and what this extra detail one does let me just show you if i turn it off and turn it on i'm gonna wait for it to uh work out his noise so that's without that's with it's effectively boosting the saturation in the areas that have been drawn on and it's adding extra contrast but to me my worry with it i guess is that we're almost drawing designs on the milky way um and i don't i don't know how i feel about that um because effectively these lines are very very soft and they're meant to but they are naturally very soft in comparison to the surrounding stars and so on so if we really add in all that all that extra clarity and contrast we start almost painting in i guess the the milky way um so i'm just i'm a bit cautious of that and i'm sort of tempted to turn that particular layer off and leave it comparatively how the camera saw so the camera saw this bit slightly darker than that bit in that same space it didn't see it massively darker than that bit so my temptation is to leave that one bit that's drawn on um just out of the equation the detail um so again we've got this sort of boosting here of levels so most of the work that esteban's done is on levels it's a good call but the problem with it if i turn this off and turn it on while it's done wonders for the top sky and i'm just going to back it off a little bit to there what it's also done is it's knocked out the detail in the building down below and the foreground in this is really cool it's this old what is it a bus shelter or something or i don't know um but the graffiti sort of building you know it's a cool foreground element so by turning all of those shadows and that's what's happened it's this shadow layer here we've got a mask over the whole picture and we move anything that was 21 down to zero so unfortunately anything that was a shadow now becomes a complete and utter underexposed area so all we're going to do is add a luma range onto what esteban's already done because it works well in the sky it's just not necessarily down in the bottom so tony's just said drawing lines across the milky way could wipe out countless civilizations there we go um don't mess with the galaxy um on a serious note um just bear in mind astro astrologers and astronomers and and all the other astro wording um people um are very very very conscious aware and critical of photos that aren't accurate so when it comes to shooting the galaxy just be careful that you're keeping the galaxy real um and not trying to enhance extra bits in there because unfortunately well fortunately unfortunately um people will notice so just be careful with it um so our foreground here at the moment this detail goes everywhere across the image so if i go back to our mask here we can see that this mask is everywhere over the middle it just doesn't affect up here quite so much so i'm going to go to my luma range and i'm going to say display the mask so i can see it and i'm going to leave all of the bright stuff but i'm going to move the base of that luma range so in other words the position at which the mask starts to take effect i'm shifting up out of those shadows and we know that this stuff here is affected by the 21 number we know that because that's the level bit here that's turning it dark so if we get clear of 21 let's maybe move it up to i don't know 40 something so double that have a nice soft fall off we can probably push it a bit further up here okay and then with that mask i'm going to hit apply okay we now have a mask that doesn't include the darkest shadows so all of the changes that esteban made so all of the milky way detail that still happened all of this stuff up here as my as i move my mouse around you know we've still got in fact some of it is still pretty dark but we've got you know 60s and 70s in that cluster here hundreds in there you know here 84 and so on if we think it's affecting it too much of course we can drop it down a little bit um but i want to get away from affecting that shelter so that's our first luma range in there the second i think there was another one or was it only in that one maybe it was only that one no it's this one as well the milky left so this also includes some other stuff in here so again i'm going to go into luma range and just make sure that we're absolutely excluding some of those darkest tones so if i hit apply i now get my whatever hut shelter whatever back so the the challenge for me is we go out to shoot the milky way against a foreground element don't delete the foreground element keep that because that's the important part that gives you a sense of place and and where the shot was taken so you know absolutely um go for you knock yourself out in terms of how much you want to um enhance the the sky the night sky if you want to you know bring out the colors as you've done in here great um be careful with noise so again all of those clarity layers are gonna add in extra noise so you've got you know clarity a hundred clarity oh no no i won't but this one clarity 100 there's another one which is clarity 54. you're adding and adding adding in noise no problem that's one of the ways that we have to unfortunately do this but then as a result of all of those layers go back to your noise control go back to the background and play with your noise reduction so in this case here i've actually pushed it a little bit further just to try and get rid of some of the extra luminance noises in there so you know the the edit esterman i would keep it as is this bit in the foreground down here maybe we could shift the tone a little bit from that foreground and to do that we're going to do the opposite of where we were before so i'm going to create a new one say foreground tone uh let's go up to there so i've drawn a little gradient mask so it'll fall off as i get nearer to the top of the trees the opposite with the luma range to what we did before so in this case i want to attack all the shadows and drop off before we get to the sky so maybe out to there it's looking pretty good nice soft fall off yep and then with this layer so remember we only have this bit highlighted i can go back to my white balance and we can if we want to warm it up a bit we can pink it up a bit if we want but we can probably maybe neutralize it a bit as well with a bit of a tint change we could even if we wanted to desaturate slightly and that gives a nice cool effect let's just keep that there that tint down so again without and with it's entirely up to you how you want to change this but now as a result of having these two layers split between the milky way and the foreground with that hut or shelter because we've got the two separately or separated out with luma ranges we can independently play with them we can cool down the foreground warm up the background we can cool down the background and warm up the foreground we can lift the shadows in the foreground and leave the background as it is so to me a lot of this stuff is about splitting the workspace out between your foreground and the background to be able to play with them independently so we go from here which is the original edit across to here which is just you know we're not going to touch necessarily too much in here i would remove the the sort of hand-drawn detail stuff um in this layer i wouldn't have that but the rest of it no issue and then just go back and make sure your noise control is there okay uh next up knowles nose on the well i'm gonna go with knoll um so shot from above with a load of sheep this is one of those cool ones where you get the shadow effect looking like they're um looking like they're walking along but they're not um they're shot from above on an aerial so really cool photo really cool setting let's go to our before so obviously there's been a lot of grading done on this shot i haven't covered it in the previous two shots but do make sure obviously before you get started to put in any if you want diffraction correction but more importantly the lens profile make sure you've got your chromatic aberration ticked if you want to you can analyze it for this specific shot and just load in your lens distortions before you do anything else so let's have a little look at where we get to because the challenge that knoll sent in is that some of these sheep are overblown they're they're their highlights have been blown too much effectively um and we can see that so if i turn on my exposure warning yeah we've got a lot of stuff here that's hitting 255. so my my level is set to 255. in other words these sheep have got elements of them which are beyond the visible or printable range of 0-255 now just be careful with that information though because if i go in and look at this part of the sheep here let's just turn off my exposure warning so this bit obviously isn't bright white it's it's not in theory overexposed when we look at overexposed stuff we're like well it's got to be 255 you know it's bright white it's gone beyond um the the visible range remember that the exposure warning is telling you that one or more channels is beyond whatever threshold you set and to set that threshold go to preferences in capture one uh go to sorry exposure and in here you can set your threshold you can even have a shadow warning if you want as well by default it's something like down it's either two four something or two five oh to me that's a bit too conservative i tend to be at 255 or 254 because it tells me when something absolutely is clipped rather than might get to being clipped and we can see in here that we're getting those warnings because in this case if we look at the top the red channel we can see up there is 255. green isn't clipped the blue isn't clipped the overall luminosity is 2 2 1 but the red channel is hit 255 which means that red is overexposed we've got no more data left in the red channel but we actually do because i had a look at this and if i look at the raw down here the red only started out 253 and then 230195 and we just remember we're looking at these numbers at the top of the screen so something in the edit has pushed that red channel to overexpose and the temptation with this and this is where i think a lot of people get a bit unstuck when it comes to exposure warnings if i've got this stuff that's exposed or overexposed the temptation is to say okay really simple we're going to do that thing so let's do a filled adjustment layer and we'll call it exposure fix so simple temptation let's pull down the exposure great so i've got rid of all those exposure warnings i've lost two thirds one nearly a whole stop of light um but i've got well there's a couple of little dots but we've got all the detail back great look at the overall picture um it's lost something it's not quite as as cool as it was before so then what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring up the brightness let's say and then as a result of doing that even though brightness protects it to an extent it's countering that exposure change so i'm back to having overexposed areas so don't fall into the trap of thinking that because something is overexposed i have to use exposure or brightness to fix it because the exposure tool isn't necessarily telling you that all the channels are overexposed what it's telling you remember is one or more channels is overexposed and by overexposed it means hitting the 255 level of saturation for that channel or brightness for that channel so what else could be causing this issue well we have a saturation layer which is set at 30. so if i look into this saturation layer here let's just turn that exposure warning on pull back the saturation layer and all of a sudden it disappears why because it's desaturating the channels but it's desaturating the red channel and it's the red channel that's clipping remember so the result of the grading and that saturation layer is what's pushing all of this stuff to go over the top and if i look down here at for instance this area here so if we look at this random sheep's head here we can see we've lost all detail in here if i turn off that saturation layer we've got a little more detail back i know it's difficult to see it fifteen hundred percent or whatever but you get the idea that it's not just about brightness it's about that saturation and it's only the red channel that we've got the issue with up here so it's a little bit ahead oh what about the red channel in levels yeah maybe so with our saturation layer which is effectively a um let me just zoom out a second so it's a filled layer the saturation there be careful that you're not doing this in certain tools but if i go to our levels tool or even the curve tool and it's probably the curve tool that's going to be more useful to us and go to my red section in here so rather than all the colors i'm just going to affect red i can change this saturation layer because that's affecting the whole image i can exclude our sheep so let's just turn that out here so i'm reducing the saturation in this area down here so i'm not affecting the overall grading yes i've lost a little bit of color out here without the sheep so maybe actually we do it slightly differently and we say you know what the saturation layer we're going to exclude seems familiar the brightest parts of the luma range i think they were down here yeah there we go so as i start to exclude the sheep from there hit apply unlike before where we were trying to actively try and get some of it in there now we're actively excluding certain areas of this picture so the saturation layer is now not affecting the sheep as much but i can equally go into the red channel on the sheep so let's create a new layer a new empty layer cheap red and we could go in with a nice little uh soft brush just over our sheep down here just turn on the layer so we can see and equally i'm going to go to my luma range and say i only want to affect those sheep so only the brighter parts the bits that are too hot and hit apply and i know that it's only these bright um areas of the sheep the sort of 200 to 255's that are affected so on the red channel i can pull down how bright they end up and we end up in a place where we've got a lot more detail back still a bit punchy but we're in a better place than where we were um with all of those warnings and so on so if i go back to our exposure warnings we're now in a place you can see here these tiny little traces of overexposed bits compared to where we were so that's without that red curve and then if i were to put that saturation back obviously we'd be back to where we were so it's not about exposure you'll see in here we haven't touched exposure at all in in the fixing of this all we've done is is through either reducing the saturation effect of the sheep using a luma range and affecting the red channel in isolation on the curve of the sheep again um sir just said what about a linear response so i looked at this and yes it is possible but let's just go into what i mean by that so if i go back to our original image under our base characteristics we can choose a linear response curve which already is because i thought the same thing originally i thought this had been set to auto and actually it's not and this is the the interesting part of actually what knoll's done to start with took the linear response curve if i go back to a new variant uh oh sorry let's just clone that variant and reset so this is the auto curve and the auto curve out of the box has some overexposed areas if i switch this to linear response we get rid of those over exposed areas in the main great but then all of that grading all of the contrast build all of that extra stuff has started to increase the amount of exposure or or overblown areas in those channels to the point where it's then a case of recovering so yes if you start from linear response you have a better chance of coming out without overexposed areas but noel actually did that already in this shot if we'd started from auto we'd already be recovering from day one and then it's it's just even more difficult so start from linear response you don't have as much in terms of the peak of the contrast you don't have the great big s curve of contrast that's in there um but just be careful that all of your extra layers that you've done don't add and keep increasing some of those channels especially in this case the red because that saturation was already pretty high um on those highlights and then the extra bits that you've bumped in have just pushed them a bit further overall though there's nothing else i'm going to change on here um if we wanted to you could again it's all personal choice but if i go back to my background layer almost i can remove a little bit more green out of this but that's genuinely personal preference you go from sort of here to here that looks a bit hotter that looks a bit more muddy i guess um but that's entirely up to you that's the grading and the grading that you've done on their nose really nice it's just don't fall into that trap of thinking that an overexposed or an exposure warning area on the shot needs the exposure tool to fix it it is a factor of exposure obviously but in this case using the exposure tool you'd have to bring every other channel down by so much to get that red to be not hot that you're going to lose the feeling that you were going for in the original grading right um i think i i'm hoping the pronunciations deal um if it's not then giles i'm really sorry but i think it's she'll um so you're sent in this this shot and it's actually a comparison with um dxo uh dxo labs deep prime um and the the email that came in said you know they were happier with what dxo did compared to what capture one did uh in terms of sharpness and noise um you know so can we get can we revisit it in capture one and i'm gonna say i disagree contentious um if i load up these two images side by side our image on the left is capture one with no sharpening applied this is you know this is out of camera fine and our image on the right is out of dxo with deep prime um loaded in and in theory yeah the one on the right in theory again um is sharper yep in practice i think it's too sharp and i know it's rare to say that but i'm seeing all these these halos around everything look at these these branches here that branch didn't unless that branch was covered in neon lights and had glow sticks all the way around it these these things here they're designed to give you the illusion of sharpness but they're not sharp they're just artifacts of an overly sharp image we could do the same with capture once if i go into capture one go to my uh handy little sharpening tool and say dial that in even at almost maximum we're not getting to that level so to get to that level i'd have to increase the radius it's allowed to play with uh maybe decrease the threshold a little bit great i've now got a very sharp capture one image but it's horrible um because it's it's not real um and what dxo has done in this so we've got all of those extra artifacts without noise for sure so if i look at the background here yes it's done a cleaner job of of producing bad sharpening than capture one has done if i want to go into our noise reduction and put in a load more noise reduction we can go up to here keep some details reduce some color noise maybe you know i can get near it's not quite the same and obviously dxo is doing different things um as part of it but it's just too sharp now i keep coming back to the same statement i'm sorry it's just too sharp um and where i'd be on this is is actually backing all of that stuff away so you know one of the reasons why we're getting too much noise and capture one at that level of sharpening is because it's too much sharpening and sharpening also can impact noise so let's just reset noise and sharpening back and instead of doing a comparison to where we're at with dxo let's just look purely at this picture as it is in capture one so i do want to sharpen the image um in theory you know f20 yep there's gonna be some pretty heavy diffraction in there so number one let's dial in some diffraction correction that on its own has done a good job to start with so without and with that's looking pretty good if i now want to enhance that a little bit more well i can dial in a bit of sharpening but don't push it too far it's it just hurts your eyes especially when you go to print it um i'm going to reduce the radius down and reduce the threshold so radius is how far away from the branch in this case the sharpening is allowed to to perform its action and just so i think we talked about it before but so you're under no illusions you can't sharpen something that's not sharp all of the ai platforms and stuff will claim that they can they're inventing pixels so if you're there to try and capture what was in front of your eyes and you then tell an ai program to sharpen it it's inventing stuff that you did not see so number one get the picture sharp in your camera there is an argument that says f20 is possibly not the best choice however if you're there at the time and that's the only option you've got to get this long exposure which you know i'm assuming that was the the thinking on it you know i've shot at f20 no problem i've shot at f22 quite often um for certain things um so there is a method in doing that not a problem but then use diffraction correction and don't expect an overly sharp image i think that's it you've got the expectation that you can sharpen everything up to infinity out of the box and you can't um ai claims it can it can't it's rubbish don't just just stick to what you were seeing stick to what's real um in my opinion of course um so in this case here this threshold and radius so basically dxo has been allowed to expand beyond the branch and create these halos that's how it gives you the impression of sharpening because what it means is if i look at it at 100 it looks sharp when i go in detail and let's just go in out from 100 into maybe 400 it's not sharp at all it's just added contrast lines by adding light and adding lighter parts and darker parts to give the illusion of sharpness we do we can do the same in capture one by increasing that radius all the way out and upping our amount and we see these same lines start to appear but they're not nice and when you start printing it you're going to see that it looks horrible when you print stuff like this so back that radius right the way back down um you know you might want to push it a little bit if it's really unsharp but certainly not more than sort of 1.3 1.4 on there yes you can whack up that sharpening amount to a thousand but again don't do as much as you need to so this is not sharp enough for sure where do we get to a reasonable amount probably about there i wouldn't go further than that threshold determines how much contrast capture one needs to see before it sharpens so if i put the threshold too high people think this works in the other ways they put the threshold up if you put the threshold up you're limiting how many areas of the image capture one can actually do the sharpening to so it's selective as you lower the threshold down more and more and more elements of the image can be sharpened so it's the the benchmark that area has got to hit before capture one will pay attention threshold at zero you're going to be sharpening noise in the background so again there's another reason why you quite often see noise so use the threshold sort of 0.7.8 for intricate details use that radius maybe keep it down a little bit maybe just leave it at one that's fine if this is overdone there's a very cool thing in capture one here you've got this thing called halo suppression there we go don't get me wrong this is not a good result but in an emergency if you've got all those halos around the branches you can use halo suppression to certainly soften it if not eradicate it but the best thing to do is just get to the reasonable sharpening amount a reasonable threshold use halo suppression if you see halo starting to creep in but not to its maximum and to me at 100 that looks real if i compare it to the dxo one the dxo one looks over sharp it is and if i look at what it's done to things like the lens flare uh where are we here you know we end up with extra sharp bits and extra artifacts coming out of the light which which just doesn't make sense so i'm very you know this isn't a i think dxo do some wonderful stuff um some of the processing they've got is fantastic but just don't use all the tools to their max you can push it too far um and then let's just have a look let's just do a quick fill layer on this where i would get to with this is a nice little happy um up so a nice little gradient like this um i can't see the mask there we go so and with that gradient i'm gonna pull down our exposure a bit just to lead more into the bridge from the top i'm going to create another gradient following this line of light here and the the wire and the cable and again do the same thing with that exposure which allows me on the background then to pull up brightness a little bit and more importantly shadow just to touch not too much don't overdo it um if anything i can afford now to pull down brightness a touch on both of these two layers as well as exposure and on our background layer now let's go back to our background highlight complete recovery i can get all this detail back here in this bridge so look at it without with and white complete recovery too so we've now got some nice detail back i could on the background now push a little bit more clarity of course going back to earlier i could do this on a filled layer and that would allow me to back it off as well i'm just being a bit lazy and doing it on the background layer for now but we get to there um so it's a subtle change because out of the camera this is a nice picture so you know nice tones in there nice colors um so we go from there to there the biggest changes are going to be this light in the middle of the bridge if we don't like how much that's been subdued well of course we can wind back that hdr a little bit too so we go from there to there but i wouldn't be sharpening it to this point here and i know the temptation is and i know that that dxo has done a better job for sure on on noise reduction if i look at you know the capture one version on the left um we've got a bit of noise creeping in here dxo's done a cleaner job certainly but it's over sharp and and don't be tempted to push it too much that's well in my opinion there we go but then it's it's not the dxo opinion or dxo opinion show it's the pause opinion show um unfortunately um so there we go so that would be it jill i think for me um yes you can get just a sharpen capture one but it gives you the tools these extra bits down here so the radius of the threshold and the halo suppression to just refine that sharpening don't just go all or nothing don't just go to the maximum sharpening use those tools to to really detail in exactly how much sharpening you want and then bear in mind when you go to print it you're going to do some output sharpening as well potentially so just don't push it too far so uh jules shot here um with the comparison um knolls shot of the sheep um which are no longer oversaturated and overexposed esteban's milky way where we've got the uh the building back it's back back in the world and where we started with allen's original waterfall so all very nice nice shots everyone remember we can carry on talking about these for infinity i guess in the facebook group remember as well we've got uh the uh webinar stuff so do if you're interested in the frame averaging stuff which a lot of people do on software as well um make sure um to check that one out it's on learn.phaseone.com as we talk about doing it in camera between now and next week so we'll see you in a week's time just as normal um don't forget to upload your images please include your name if you don't include your name we can't include your image um but from there um do send them in um keep them coming we've got a bit of a backlog to get through but we'll get in there slowly but between now and next week look after yourselves wherever you are in the world and we'll catch you later cheers everyone bye you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 3,937

Keywords: Capture One, Capture, One, Post Processing, Editing, Phase One, Capture One Pro, Live, Examples, Training, Learn, Lessons, RAW, Photo Editing, How To, Guide, License, Variants, Clarity, Tools, Graduated, Masks, Natural, Histogram, Processing, Gradient, Support, Q&A, Edit, Adjustments, Contrast, Color, Software, Exposure, 21, Landscape, Curve, Mask, Luma Range, Style Brushes, Custom, Style, Brush, Layers, 21.1, 14.1, Luma, Range, Cast, Colour, Grading, Milky Way, Noise Reduction, Exposure Warning, Warning, Recovery, DXO, Sharpen

Id: HRI2NiaX3_8

Length: 63min 35sec (3815 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021