Live Editing Sessions - Capture One 12th August 2021 (HDR Recovery, Crop, Contrast, Brush, Grading)

hello everyone welcome it is thursday obviously again um but unlike what i said last week i'm here and i'm here with you all um instead of off on a shoot if ever that you needed proof that this stuff is still interrupting things um it's when you get a big shoot cancelled the week before because someone has caught it or got notified of it or whatever else but there we go so the good news is it means that we're back on um for a thursday editing session so we are going to spend the next one hour as we normally do going through that software so capture one capture one being the raw editor uh that's made by the guys in denmark we're gonna load up your images and hopefully either fix the problems that you guys have sent in or um maybe try and improve some of the aspects of it that maybe you've gone a little bit wrong overall don't forget send in your pictures if you want them edited we've had a couple of questions from people actually a few things so the first being if you want pictures sent in at the end of these sessions we always tell you how but the the quick answer is go to paulryforlive.wetransfer.com and upload them with your name most important and we'll try and get as many as we can through um the second question someone um emailed in saying that they didn't get notified of when we go live so generally speaking if you go on to my set or website you'll see when the next live session is due to be obviously this week was a bit weird um but you from there you can link into or back into this but the easier way is literally if you click on and i can't remember because i'm not normally on it the youtube thing there's a subscribe thing and there's a little bell if you click on that that will tell you it'll warn you um when we're going to do a live session i don't think it gives you that much notice but it's maybe i don't know half an hour or so which is better than none so there we go um right um terry how was the vacation the vacation's non-existent because i'm still here unfortunately but either way let's get on and edit a few images so we are going to edit in the current as of right now version of capture one which is version 21.3 or 14.3 if you look at the about screen in capture one the reason for the difference is one is a marketing term so version 21 is the year 2021 and 14.3 is the technical term so it's the actual version software version number for those of you that are still on uh 14.2 or even 14.1 or 14 um 14.3 gives you a few extras so magic brush universal exporter um catalog subfolders being able to count the number of images in the catalog subfolder is priceless the bigger it's the biggest change for me in 14.3 despite all the other toys um however obviously there was a bit of an issue with some workflows that was uh that came to the forefront as it were a couple weeks back so if you are reliant on process recipes being in a tab you might want to hold off capture one of instantly said um you know we're looking at it bear with and they've now come out um more recently with a statement that says 14.4 so the next release will include uh the ability to re-customize your workspace and have that process recipe tab back if you don't know what i'm talking about at all then the chances are you're not affected by process recipes being moved into the exporter so go ahead and update on the 14.3 which is the latest version if you're still on 13 which is version 20 as it was marketed or 12 or 11 or 10 or whatever um go into capture1.com into your account um you can check what your options are for upgrading um or if you're on subscription you get it anyway so your choice right let's get into capture one now that right on cue i've just got something in my eye that's always handy when we're editing photos uh and we're going to start with georg's first shot so there's a question in my head as to whether this is intended to be a focus on the location or the buildings or the sky my gut feel is it's intended to be on the buildings um but the question that came in was in general from an editing point of view how are we but then secondly someone had recommended to georg about moving uh maybe the crop to the right hand side to give it more space so let's just have a look at before and after because there's two things i think on this image that we're going to probably have a look at um georg actually mentioned that they've used um he's used deep sky up here um it's probably the right use of it just to try and get those clouds to pop a bit more almost has like a a polarizing effect but digitally which is kind of good but there are two issues in here that we'll try and resolve the first one being actually the shadow tone in this shot so let me do a before and after up here for those of you that don't know you've got a before and after option if you don't have any of the buttons that i have on my toolbar never forget you can right click get a customize toolbar and this will allow you to drag and drop any of the functions that you want and ones that i would always recommend people put on their toolbar is guides for a start and also if they don't have before and after to put that up there too the reason for guides is you can keyboard shortcut it obviously but it's a very quick way of getting some vertical and horizontal lines up on the screen which we can use regardless of whether we're keystoning but we can use just to make sure things are straight and level so slightly off on that one but yeah having the guides thing up there is kind of handy too but the before and after click on there so we've got our raw with a color space applied but here's our after which is basically that raw with any edits that giorga's already done and when i talk about the shadow tone what i'm talking about is the flattening that's happened on the shot and we talked about this a little bit last week but we'll sort of revisit it with this shot in particular when you look at a an image here um and what i'm going to do just quickly is uh clone this variant or actually would just reset it so here's our original original so remember that before and after we'll still respect your crop so if you're looking for a true before and after from raw raw back to um after you have to actually get or create a new variant so either clone the variant and reset it or right click go to new variant you'll get the original original you'll notice there's no change then before and after and in my original here we can see a we've got some um some extra space let's say for a start um but b there's a lot of contrast in this shot so we've got some deep shadows in the buildings and we've also got obviously some brighter areas up here on the cloud nothing's really clipping so if i look up here on my histogram on the top left which is probably one of the most important tools that we use on that histogram we've got the ability just to see exactly where any one pixel is and for this purpose here well we can see anything up here in the brightest parts up in these clouds it isn't clipping it's not at the top right hand side so if this is a scale from 0 to 255 i'm only worried really if my raw data goes outside of that scale so below zero or above two five five and unfortunately once you get to that stage some cameras we can recover that that dynamic range back a little bit but once it goes beyond 255 or below zero we've got no data in that pixel it's beyond black or beyond white and up here are highlights even on these windows up here which are just picking up almost sort of specular highlights we're not really risking anything going massively overblown maybe we've got a little bit in there if i really really zoom into here obviously that particular pixel there might hit well even even with that it's not quite there it's a 2-2-2 so i've got room on the right of the histogram to expand the brightness of this image and moving that brightness up if i just use exposure to do that what we're doing is we're shifting the histogram along proportionately effect it's almost sliding we refer to it like on a skateboard so it's literally moving the data from right to left but we're keeping some of the contrast because we're keeping the difference between the dark parts and the light part so even though the light parts are getting lighter and the dark parts are getting lighter too they're staying the same distance apart and what gyorg's done in the original edit here is use a little bit of exposure correction absolutely but then also used high dynamic range and high dynamic range allows us and again we talk about it in previous sessions but we can push the highlights down and we can pull the the shadows up so effectively we're squashing that data in histogram not sliding it we're actually squishing it into the middle so in other words reducing contrast the further apart pixels are in in value and tones are in value the more contrast we have from dark to light the closer together we move them and hdr is a massive instigator of that is unfortunately going to reduce our contrast and reduce the amount of tonal difference we get from the darks to the lights so in here this addition of the high dynamic range change if i undo this temporarily so to undo any tool temporarily rather than having to redo it hold down the option key or the alt key on your keyboard and hit the tools undo button and hold it so that's without hdr and that's with hdr and to me i get why we want to recover some of the shadow detail but to me this is verging towards a sort of cartoony look as a result of that hdr so if i go back to our original and just reset that exposure this one is in in you know comparison let's just pull them up side by side the original is pretty dark it could do with being brighter and and more light and more more open but i'm not too sure about the amount of hdr recovery that's happened here so my gut feel is to just back this away probably by half so we're just going to pull back down to there and if i still want those shadows to become brighter i'm going to do that but i'm going to do it effectively with exposure and contrast so i'm going to move up our exposure a little bit and also use contrast which kind of counters what i just said in in a way if you if you think about it but what contrast is doing is it's taking the bits to the left of the histogram and making them darker or deeper or richer and the bits to the right of the histogram making them brighter and more airy but at the same time i've lifted the whole histogram a bit to the right and if i then compare our sort of hdr version to this version we have the same amount of detail we're not losing any detail in this but i haven't got such a flattened histogram that everything just looks a little bit just almost drawn or line drawn rather than bold especially when the image is of steel and glass buildings you know i want hard rich bold lines um i want to see that texture i want to see the metal looking contrasty if i if i flatten it too much yeah we lose some of that and that's that's a problem in my head to that extent and there's already a bit of clarity and structure on here across the whole image but i would almost be tempted specifically on these buildings i'm just going to draw a new layer and i'm going to grab a radial mask so we talked about this last week but you can invert the mask or we can flip it or we can set the default either way but i'm just going to position this mask right over the middle of these buildings along here and this might not quite get it but we'll see i'm just going to turn it so we're on the right angle and with that mask in other words oh the other thing um to show you a mask obviously m on the keyboard for mask m on the keyboard for masks go away or whatever um if you want the actual tool for it in 14.3 this moved this cluster here or this tool here for the showing mask used to be down here instead it's at the top of the viewer and this is going to tell a keyboard shortcut grayscale version of the mask is the option or om m turns it on and m turns it off easy so with this one here because i've got this area here masked well let's just have a look at what we can do with a bit more clarity and actually a bit more contrast and to me that then if this is about the buildings that then really makes these buildings stand out so without that layer and with that layer it's just adding an extra bit of depth into those buildings that we didn't have before um so a couple questions um what's that one two one two three okay um so i'm not the only one with a permanent rotating loading indicator above the toolbar no you are not this thing here does my head in um it's been there for a few versions now um it's background activity thing it's not stopping anything there's no process going on if i go into my window and go to activities you'll see there are no activities going on the activity wheel is actually to the right up here so if you're processing stuff or whatever then or generating previews that's where it would appear this thing up here i think it's just coded to annoy people like you and me um i i know it's known i know it's been picked up um i know in fact david at capture one has talked to me about it because i think he's seen it now a few times but yes annoying but not important it's not actually doing anything that's that's interrupting what you're doing uh simon's just asked uh what's the film curve under the bass characteristics my gut feel yeah this is auto um so obviously we've got different film curves we could have started with linear response but actually remember what we're trying to do we're trying to get contrast linear response is going to flatten that image even more so the auto curve which is actually film standard in most cases um we'll put a slight s-curve in so it's going to deepen the shadows and enrich the highlights linear response even with those changes that we've put in so remember we're changing the film curve underneath all of these existing changes in here is going to flatten and dull things down simply because it's more of a straight line curve it's not darkening shadows and brightening highlights it's taking the data almost as close to raw as you can get out of the camera so in this shot here because we don't have anything overexposed or blown or under my gut feel would be leave it on auto or film standard um and then you know and go from there um so joe's just saying yeah what's the main subject of the image buildings or boats the file name suggests spokes yeah i i agree the final name says boats however um this crop that yours got at the moment would suggest that it's not necessarily about the boats because we've got a lot of room and i'll just show you in here if we go into our crop we've got a lot more room here to place those boats as more prominent if we wanted to so i'm just gonna move into the i guess the second question that we had which was you know should we leave more room to the right so first thing to say regardless of whether it's boats or buildings yes in my view i would leave more room to the right for one simple reason there's a nice end to this little floating pontoon that we don't see in this crop because it cuts off towards the edge and i like completeness maybe i'm just weird but um to me i would be almost in a two by one crop at this point here but just to come out maybe to there and that gives me a nicer finish here than what we had here this feels very tight and again if it's about you know these boats as much as is about the buildings having them so close down this bottom you know it almost makes them ancillary to the scene you wouldn't normally have the subject of a scene quite so close to the edge and again this is then purely down to what the intention is but to me you know if we wanted to do this crop and have a bit more space to the right to give this some breathing room here i'd equally be tempted just to pull this down you know if not that much then certainly give it a bit more breathing space down to there in fact i think we've just added a bit onto that side which is a bit annoying half a lamp post no one likes half a lamp post um and then we get to there so i go from there which is a relatively flattened version it's it's you know for the right reasons we've recovered all the shadow recovered the highlights we've got all the data backed into that that nice neat middle um space but you lose the contrast that was there um especially when you're dealing as i say with with buildings which are glass and steel you know they're full of contrast and texture and lines and edges and and this just flattens them um whereas if we use that contrast they stand out a little bit more so that's probably where i would end up on there um joe just learned something what what what did you learn um right uh and joe's second question though uh grab mask to darken the foreground potentially so it again it depends on that subject so if we didn't want the foreground to be quite so prominent then of course you can add a whole new layer so new layer on here put a soft gradient in and make sure it is soft up to there and then with that gradient just a subtle very subtle drop in there equally with the sky i'm seeing slight tinges of of green up in there um up there in the cast so i'd be tempted just to pull that tint up a bit not too much but on the background just to get some of that green out of the white and try and neutralize it a little bit um so and then where are we derek how do you resolve the clipped boats or the right edge of the frame i don't um is the answer um so i had a look at this um before at any point um so when i when i come out of this crop let's just go into our crop here it doesn't really matter at what point i try and cut this to the right and this is i think why um he all stopped there just so you didn't have half a boat the the fact is you're always going to be cropping or clipping something um on this right hand side my gut feel is you know somewhere maybe around there at least don't have the start of a big boat coming into the frame you know that's that's pretty neat there we've got two complete boats and the sort of the stern of one of them somewhere um but to me that sort of works uh and there you go joe that's what you learned the five boats is the building's name there we go i didn't do that either so um again we're making lots of assumptions here but my assumption being we want to keep contrast we want some space to give our subject to breathe and we believe that the subject is those buildings so i would then go from there up to there with or without that gradient in the front okay uh david is there more on the buildings or is that just youtube it's probably just youtube um yeah there's a bid on there actually yep you're right so there's a little bit of patterning um on here yeah you're gonna get that what sensor are we on sony a72 is that the s2 or the a7 ii i think is the a7 ii um i wish they wouldn't put this m stuff anyway um so yeah uh unfortunately trying to fix that is a bit of a challenge um there are tools that do it very well out there but you're always going to be losing some stuff um to to d moiring or whatever you want to call it uh where are we oh you're right roger adjust the verticals of the left building um so yeah i forgot to come back to that uh going back to our guides that we were using before so on my vertical guide specifically this right hand building looks about right number four i guess looks right number three looks okay number two looks okay number one is leaning quite a bit and that's actually concerning me a bit because it means we've got probably some distortion as well as keystoning distortion corrections on so if we were to undo that we get more of a bend so it's not going to help us doing more than that but we can do a tiny bit more keystoning if we need to on this shot so it's already been keystone we can see that because we've got the the weird trapezioid shape from the crop but you can see here this keystone line here is a little bit off uh we're not following that line of pillars so i'm just going to move it to the left a little bit make sure your amount is set to 100 and then you're going to cleaner hopefully um line from that keystone as a result remember when you keystone just to revisit your crop just in case things like that lamppost have crept in and also once you've checked and made sure that one building is now correct so this one is now straight good make sure the other ones are too i've had that a few times where correcting one on the left hand side is completely screwed up the right but um and i've just removed my guide which wasn't very clever so if you want to add guides you'll find it in the view menu so we can add that vertical guide back right let's move on to oh shot of some trees um so oh welcome back you've been away you didn't get permission either um so what can we do with this shot now i'm gonna um i'm gonna experiment a little bit with this shot um we wouldn't normally do this so as a general rule we want to keep things as close to what we saw as possible and as close to you know what we tried to capture at that time sometimes it doesn't quite work because our exposure is a little bit off or you know the lighting conditions are impossible but um to me there's a lot of room in this shot to be able to make a few tweaks that will have an artistic impact to it rather than a corrective impact to it so what i mean by that is we can spend our time trying to correct back to what was there originally and it's always difficult to do that when i wasn't there but what we can also do instead is use our time to move an image into a mood that's pretty cool to look at potentially so i'm going to clone this variant we're going to do a quick couple of checks so we're f10 maybe there's some diffraction the first thing i'm going to show you though in this shot is that there is an issue here with focus um so well sorry not an issue but one thing to just be aware of our back trees here obviously out of focus even at f10 this tree here is quite sharp this tree here is very sharp and then our tree here isn't so that then gives me a challenge in terms of what subject we need to make out of this scene and it doesn't make sense for this front one to be the subject it might have done with a row of them slowly falling off but in general terms we kind of want the most the most in focus object to be our subject unless we're doing something abstract with it so in this case it kind of forces my hand i can't really make this one our subject it's a little bit out of the focal plane there's possibly a little bit of diffraction in there but it's not going to change much instead of and i've seen this before instead of trying to get more in focus by using sharpening so this tree is now a bit sharper but oh look what we've done to that one don't do that we're gonna work with what we've got and and that is this tree here being the subject of our photo and everything's gonna lead towards that so let's start with our color tab so normally we'd be on our exposure tab we're going to start with color i could change to one of the fujifilm simulations remember that your auto curve on a fuji shot isn't necessarily going to be your film standard curve in this case it's actually not even um because the fuji camera will record the fujifilm profile within the raw file and that's what will be loaded in you can still use linear response you're going to see it's a lot flatter so that's with and that's without so in other words with the auto curve set in with linear response setting and although the auto curve has given us a lot of contrast i kind of like the linear response flattening on here and i'll show you why in a second secondly um let's look at our white balance so this is obviously as shot i'm guessing unless earl typed that specific number in that it was on auto white balance on the camera either that or he's very precise when he's shooting um but that auto white balance is probably right in terms of if we look out here at this sunlight out here fitting or hitting this tree in the background that looks kind of warm and soft light so i'm guessing the camera's got it right but i've got some more room here to maneuver with our overall white balance and i can make us look a little bit more dusky and spooky if i want to color balance so we covered this last week in quite a lot of depth um color balance itself is a part of color grading an image part of it obviously is the auto white balance sorry the white balance tool itself part of it is the color editor but part of it is the color balance so what we can do with color balance is split the different elements of the image to be bluer or redder or greener or pink or whatever based on whether they're the shadows the midtones or the highlights but before i do that i'm going to address that histogram first so bear in mind these three tools will allow us to change the shadow separately to the highlights and separately to the mid-tones if everything is sat in the mid-tones kind of like it is here that doesn't help me so i've chosen to almost compress things so not use the auto s-curve out there which has effectively moved everything into the middle so just be careful if you're using color balance tools and everything's sat in one portion of the histogram you're only going to be shifting one part of it so with this change i'm going to up our contrast a little bit which is going to introduce part of an s curve but more importantly it's going to stretch this a bit and then i'm going to use our levels and our levels is going to allow me to drag this right hand side and drag the left hand side of our histogram across so we're increasing contrast and that's the key part with levels where you either increasing or decreasing contrast so with that done what i've effectively done is spread and stretch that histogram a little bit i'm going to check that we don't have any overexposures so i haven't pushed it too far which we haven't but we've stretched that histogram to have more in the shadows and the highlights while keeping some in the um in the mid tones in fact we can stretch the shadows a bit more there quite like that so already we're going from there to there and this feels like a bit more of a rich um sort of lush forest as it were rather than the the uh the flat and sunny one doesn't mean the flat and sunny one is wrong um by all means keep the flat sunny one it's just if we're gonna play let's play so with our color balance i can take our mid tones and i can warm them up a little bit i can take our shadows and i can cool them down a little bit we don't want them to go pinky blue we want them to go sort of greeny foresty blue let's say highlights so that includes the stuff up here and just be careful look my exposure warnings on up there so just be aware that that highlight as i start to shift the colors remember what your exposure warning is telling you it's one or more channels is above 255 so think about this as i'm moving that color around for my highlights look nothing's clipped now a load of stuff is clipped why well because i'm increasing the amount of red and orange in this highlight and as i look off sorry tongue tied move over here look at that top readout up here that gives us our rgb numbers we're now hitting 255 on red well of course if i move our highlights to be more blue less red we don't hit 255 so it doesn't clip so even though this is about color just be careful that you're not clipping certain colors or if you are that you're comfortable with that clip as you do it so that's where i'm going to leave there in terms of the color balance so let's just do quick without that was before and with okay and then back to our original original and with and to me this starts to feel a bit more spooky foresty like um but that's again personal choice here so with that done let's now look at what we do with the focus and one way is to use a vignette obviously the other way is let's call it a manual vignette so i can draw a wonderful mask over here remembering capture one if you choose either the brush or the um the gradient tools or any even magic brush it will create a layer for you the first time if you use those tools later on a different layer it's going to replace the mask with whatever whatever tool you're now using so just don't get into the habit of relying on capture one to create that layer for you it will the first time but from then on the risk and it is a risk is that you start overwriting the master you already drawn a layer so we're going to call this one tree focus i'm going to soften this down so really really really soft into here the difference or the distance between this inner circle and the outer circle is going to tell us how long it takes to get from 0 impact across to 100 impact on the right hand side so with that done let's now darken with exposure the rest of the shot a little bit and i'm actually going to spread this out wider so it's not quite so tight on just that tree but we're getting a nice feeling of leading into it on top of that of course now we've darkened the rest of the image we can actually afford bearing in mind this top part which had our overexposure included is darkened too to push up our brightness of the whole image if i don't like that and the reason i'm i'm sort of going maybe not oh sorry oh our background push up our brightness there we go brightness is a flattening tool so it doesn't shift the histogram what it does it effectively squashes it so again just like we talked about in the previous image if you start squashing content into the middle of that histogram that squashing is getting rid of contrast and this image we've just spent a lot of time adding contrast into it so instead of the brightness tool we are going to use the exposure tool by pulling up the whole image by was a third of a stop so point two nine we can now pull down the rest of the image especially the outside by say one point two nine so one and a one in the third stops if i don't like how dark this bit is remember this is a mask just like any so i can if i choose to go to my eraser click once it's going to say do you want to rasterize the mask what it means by that is once i do this and rasterize it this stops behaving like a circular radial mask so if i go back to the radial mask i don't have my controls back it's now behaving as if i drew it and the result of that is with my eraser if i put a low opacity in maybe down to there i can now selectively remove parts of the image from that radial mask your choice how much to remove but let me kind of get to there maybe i want some more in this one well remember this one was caught by the radial so i was using the radial kind of to be lazy to a certain extent but i can add extra stuff in so let's go back to my brush not magic brush just a normal brush nice big brush really soft edges low opacity i'm going to leave the flow up 100 that's personal choice don't have to do that and i'm just going to add in some extra parts of that mask that we drew and if we look in a minute at what i've just done so what i'm doing is just clicking in a way that adds a little bit of um i guess softness to the edges i'm going to switch to show a grayscale mask and you can see what i've done so what started out as a really really neat oval effectively i've now added in on this edge i've added in on this edge i've got specific little spots where we've added and deleted different parts of the mask and the result is that i've now got a very specific targeted mask over that tree that i didn't have before if i don't like how much this has changed i can obviously back that away a little bit i'm gonna so one of the other reasons for doing this on layers rather than on the background is that we can obviously back away some of the changes that we've made if it's becoming too much of a difference between the two with the rest of this mask so remember i've masked the external part of it so let's right-click in fact sorry let's create a new mask so we did this last week wasn't it so we're going to have a tree mask and a not tree mask so here i'm going to copy the mask from our tree and i'm going to invert that mask so now i have a mask that covers the tree that i want in focus i'm just going to erase a little bit more to the right uh or are we nice soft one there there we go good and then with that one i'm just going to zoom in a bit because you should zoom in when you're doing this stuff and pull up a little bit of structure and a bit of clarity just to focus on that tree uh question from diraj so the difference between opacity and flow um there is if you go on to the playlist that we have called pro tips you'll see one about brush control and we go into a lot of depth about brush control however in a very very quick whirlwind fashion let's just go through a quick lesson in sorry didn't mean to clone that i want to reset that quick lesson in opacity and flow so with my grayscale mask enabled i'm going to create a new layer so you're not going to be able to see anything because well this is the grayscale mask there's nothing drawn so here's my brush i'm going to set my opacity to 100 and my flow to 100 i'm going to use a let's say a medium hardness on the brush and draw a line so we can see that that has drawn 100 line soft-ish edge but 100 in one go so when i click and hold across one i get one big line that's solid if i change my opacity to let's say 30 draw that same line so click once hold down and go over that's drawn 30 if i click once hold down and go over and go back again and go back again i'm back again and back again it doesn't matter how many times i go back over that it's never going to increase beyond 30 let me let go of the mouse click again it's adding effectively another 30 percent doesn't matter how many times i go over it holding the mouse down it's only ever going to add 30 let go click again another 30 percent again go over as many times as you want but it's only going to add 30. and again you get the idea and again so it needs a mouse click to add opacity one at a time flow different so i'm going to set my opacity to 100 and flow maybe down to let's keep it low 10. so same line draw across and keep it held down and keep it held down and keep it held down keep it all down with flow every time i go over the same spot it's adding a bit more with my mouse held down and it builds up until it hits the ceiling that i set for opacity so one is a single stripe effectively with each brush stroke it adds a layer of opacity the other is flow which is with every time i go over the same spot it's going to add 10 10 10 until it hits this ceiling and the way you use them together let's go to 50 opacity and let's say 20 flow so now over it and over it and over it and then it hits a certain point and that point so it doesn't matter now how many times i go over it unlike this one that hits a hundred this one the most it's ever going to hit is 50. so you've got a flow that controls how many or how how much is added with each overlay that i use the brush for up to a maximum of opacity if i set an opacity that's lower than 100 that's the most it's going to go regardless of flow regardless of how many times i go over it it's going to hit that and stop with opacity each my each brush stroke effectively even if my flow is at 100 and my opacity is at 20 it doesn't matter how many times i go over that spot it's never going to hit above that limit there 23. click again another layer click again another layer and again so opacity per click flow per stroke effectively hopefully that makes sense if it doesn't though go on to the pro tips videos that we've got is about a 15 20 minute video that will cover exactly this and you'll see so let's just turn off our grayscale mask and zoom out oops right back to our picture um almost finally we're kind of there now with the not tree i actually want to warm this up just a tiny bit so remember i can change my white balance independently of the rest of the shot too i might want again it all comes down to choice i might want to play with dehaze a little bit not on the not tree though on the background so play with dehaze just to crisp this up a little bit and if i don't like that difference again with our white balance well we can just shift that why are we getting uh shift in there that's a bit weird isn't it oh do you know what that's what's confusing me i named them the wrong way that's why it's going warmer and colder so what i want is the not tree bit i call this from the wrong one we'll actually call this one tree and we'll call this one not tree focus there we go confusing me with my own my own changes so tree i'm just gonna cool down a little bit not tree focus probably warm just a touch to there so to me that's kind of where i'd end we might want to add a little bit of a gradient up top a really really really soft gradient just to back this off a little bit and again make that a nice long sweep so we don't notice the gradient creeping in we might want to put in an extra little bit of dodge and burn if i didn't want to do it myself i could do it with our style brush so we can go to our burn brush here which is preset um a really really low flow going back to uh deroga's question so every time i go over this it's adding a little bit more into that flow and what i'm doing is just isolating that path through into the forest a little bit and just getting rid of some of these highlights that are on the edges oops make everyone a little bit sick by moving the window sorry um so with that change along here that just gives us a bit more depth into that scene but going back to what i originally said this is choice this is personal choice this is about how you want it um effectively to feel that's the original and and we could absolutely just go into here and say right well let's let's fix our standard stuff so let's uh let's pull back some highlights let's add a bit of clarity into there let's add a bit of contrast let's reduce down here and we probably get a pretty sympathetic view of what was there to me i kind of like the feeling of something like that a little bit more especially with the woods so that's personally where i would go to but again i wasn't there i don't know what it looked like um i'm to a certain extent playing with that grading that we've done um with the forest um but yeah and to matt's point yeah amazing how she had it changed the mood of the scene entirely so it's the same raw data we we haven't changed the raw um this is literally that data that was there in the first place just with some little tweaks and and that's a pretty big um change it's probably one of the bigger changes that we'll do you've then got a question as to whether or not you want to play with you know cropping and stuff you know maybe that's a nice sort of tight crop but with trees i kind of like the tall tall crop that kind of works for me i think um there we go so yeah play with um play with that one oh um well i'll send you the eip so you can you can take what i've done and make it better um right move on to eric's shot so this one unfortunately eric is going to be quite quick um based on your your question so um the question is so this is a panoramic um that um eric has sent in it's a combination of several images um obviously you can see from the the sort of 180 degree angle across it it's been stitched externally and then brought back into capture one the question was can we fix this bright spot in the middle the challenge with this um is and you know if you look at what the guys at capture one are talking about you know yes yeah they've announced in terms of what their they believe priorities in terms of photo editing are and then includes you know can we improve hdr can we improve things like panoramic stitching and whatever else but at the moment in capture one you have to edit each individual image separately when you do that it means that you're getting um slight deviations for instance if i've got one shot here that stops on the left um of these clouds so let's imagine i had uh a sort of break point for this image that was here on the left hand side i've got a bright area on the right hand side it's a bit dark on the next image maybe on the right hand side we've got a bright area and the left hand side is a bit dark so it can be difficult to put in things like gradient filters because it's changing between the images so the the short answer is you know can we fix that stuff after it's been um manipulated in a stitching program possibly not as well as you'd like we don't have access to the same dynamic range in terms of exposure pullback we don't have access certainly to white balance in the same way if i change the white balance on this shot you know we're not going from blue to to yellow we're going from green to pink i guess and tint starts behaving funnily as well so you lose some of the tools as a result of bringing it back in as a png that's not actually however my biggest concern my biggest concern with this one is the amount of sharpening that's been done um and i don't know whether these were sharpened as an individual frame and the pano stitching has just used whatever sharpening it was given or whether it's been sharpened again but this is over sharp um it's we can see there are now artifacts of sharpening over here we've got these halos over the edges of the forest on the top these shouldn't be pixelated um so it's been over sharpened at some step in the process so for me eric i would potentially go back to some of the originals if it is in there if not then in the stitching software reduce that sharpening down and maybe look at whether or not you can you can put a gradient filter in to help with that sky if you can't and we're stuck with this then a new layer and this is probably the best you're going to get use the radial filter pull that radius all the way out we can either invert it or we can switch it around but either way really really soft because we don't want it to be obvious that there's a massive great big radial filter on there and with that you know if we use exposure it's not going to do quite such a good job as the raw brightness is probably going to be a better fix for something that's already been manipulated we could potentially try our deep sky brush so let's make a bit bigger here and you know this may go wrong but we'll see that might ah doing pretty good that might give you a lot more clarity over this cloud so i'm doing it very rough at this distance but you can obviously do it a lot cleaner when you're zoomed in although it hasn't done a bad job if we wanted to exclude for instance the bits that i've brushed over here don't forget you can still apply a luma range onto a style brush so we've got deep sky on here i can go to my luma range go to display mask and i want to include everything bright but start to remove the darkest parts out of here the problem being that sometimes on a non-raw file the luma range doesn't behave quite as we've experienced sorry as we'd expect i've seen that a few times but that's doing a pretty good job there apply that so it doesn't now include the stuff that's on the horizon that we don't want inside that mask and we get to arguably a better place just get rid of our guides so there was before there's after but it's not going to give you the same amount of control as you would have doing it in the raw edit in the first place you could go into here into your color editor we could pull up some saturation down some lightness i'm on that layer remember which has got the um the area all over it but again it's just not going to be as good a result as what we would get if we'd done that on the original raws to send into the stitching um process um joe where are we uh what about the burn brush yeah we we can try it um you can probably sense from my tone that i'm not holding out much hope but yes we can try the burn brush so up here we can burn down in here the problem with the burn brush remember is it's not just going to burn the sky it's also going to burn the clouds so we go from clouds to nice and fluffy and white to being quite dull and and gray because we've burned the entire area so you're in you'll end up trying to burn around the clouds and stuff like that it's just my worry with these things is we start chasing the impossible and you're better off sometimes just going back a couple steps fixing it at source um and then and then moving on from there uh poorly yes it's a png file so it's uh it's having sent out a load of individual frames out to an external stitch um bringing it back in as a png file as a combined stitch so it's done a good job of joining all those files together but unfortunately what we're now seeing is um the result of having you know bright areas and and dark areas um across as you know i'm guessing the sun was up here so you know you're seeing literally the sky changes brightness as you go but because this is no longer a raw we're quite limited um in some of the tools that we would normally use to fix it but yes burn unfortunately joe isn't gonna help you because it it does it indiscriminately it literally just burns every single value and lowers it down the burn brush just so you're all very clear is nothing more than exposure minus 0.2 that is all it is it's not doing anything other than that it's not clever it's just a quick way of doing a quick reduce exposure kind of like we did with earl's shot here um but in here i was sort of brushing in and then pulling down exposure by 1.29 and the burn brush does the same thing by point two but just in little increments so it's a shortcut um right lucas uh where are we sorry one question from simon color balance highlight reduction uh potentially um so if we pull down in fact no ironically it's not a highlight that's the problem um so it's actually i think in the mid tier here the sky is actually in the mid tones um the highlight would be the cloud so actually there is an argument that says we could pull up the clouds as a result of using that that color balance tool yep um but that's not going to help us with those mid-tones and if we start pulling down the mid-tones we start to affect yeah just too much um the tip that we used to use a long time ago it's using the skin tone tool so let's just create a new layer skin tone tool i'm going to caveat this before we do this which is the answer is go back to the raws full stop um that's so what we're doing the moment is experimenting um with stuff that's not gonna yield the best result but if we have to if we're stuck with that png then yes we could potentially let's take the skin tone tool um i just need to make sure we're brushed over oops on that low flow brushed over all of this area here and we've chosen the blue in the sky here and we're going to tell it to keep all of this blue uniform in saturation and in lightness and in color to a certain extent um we could increase that saturation reduce that lightness so we're getting smoother for sure yep it's good call carol so that's before that's after but look at what's happening with the clouds um because they're also in part on that blue spectrum they're picking up some of that light so we're losing some of the definition then um as a result and that's what i refer to when i say you know just be careful that we're not um chasing something that just would be easier to go back revisit it with a tweak you know use the skin tone tool to even up um all of the the the stuff in the sky on the raws for sure um that would be a good move um just to get that balance correct and then then apply it to the rest of them but um doing this from a png is going to be painful right uh lucas's cave let's call it that so luke's question was about split toning this and we'll do that in a second um but also there was an issue where you could see i think some red color in this water down here and i can see where it's coming from sort of pinky red stuff in there um but in in general terms so his question was is the approach right i guess which was let's first of all create a new filled layer so i can do this and an undo the approach that you wanted to use was can we pull the shadows down to be cooler to make it look more like a cave yes can we pull the highlights to be a bit warmer yes but here's my first problem the first thing we've got to do on this shot is fix it so i can see what's going on so what i am gonna do and and we're gonna just talk about this a second shadows up is gonna lift everything in the bottom colors or bottom tones up into the middle black up is gonna pull the very darkest parts of those tones up into the middle that's what i'm probably going to use on this shot if i use shadow everything just becomes a lot happier but that's not the feeling of a cave so i don't want to use too much shadow lifting because that's going to pull up the lower mid tones as well i just want to see some of the detail in these darkest parts here so i'm going to pull up the black there that gets our rock detail back i don't need to see every bit of detail in the rock but i need to see there is some detail there otherwise it's it's just flattened blackened got this person out here whether we heal them or not we'll decide later i guess um but overall that's given us a sort of bluey tone to the the cave and some warmer highlights but i'm sat thinking do we need to do it in color balance or could we just do that with white balance so if our overall feel is to get this cooler then let's get it cooler let's get back to there okay now on top of that white balance change so we haven't moved much we've gone down by about or are we 600 yeah and a little bit of a tint change now with that overall change which incidentally will have helped with this reddish color down here because remember with the white balance change everything shifts not just the shadows midtones or highlights so with that change we can now pull our shadows to be a bit cooler not too much just down to there we might want to reduce their brightness a touch but just bear in mind we're almost undoing what i did with the hdr tool so just be careful that we're not you know flip-flopping between the two highlights let's pull them a bit warmer like you said so let's go maybe out towards the yellowy orangey sort of color and mid-tone so what sits in the mid-tones well it's actually the water that's the interesting bit so if you look on this histogram here where are the mid-tones in the middle where is the water in the middle so i can control our watercolor almost separately to everything else so this light up here is in the highlights but it's the mid tones which are changing the color of that water so if i move the mid tones to be blue pink red or whatever that's the color the water is going to and that's what doesn't help you so just be aware that even though your eye looks at this and says that water is bright the bright water isn't necessarily the same as a highlight a highlight is something that sits in the top quarter of your histogram this water does not it sits in the mid tone so just be careful that when you're using the color balance in fact it's making not much change the highlights will pick up some of this because it's not binary it's sort of a ramp so it sort of covers the top quarter and then fades off midtones covers sort of here to here and then ramps up and the same with shadows so highlights will affect other areas of the image but it's not in isolation of anything else so i'd sort of maybe get to there and not much else in terms of pulling up this cave now beyond that if i wanted to then look at what we can do out here we can use a loomer range so i can create a new filled layer so we'll call this one global adjustments this one we'll call highlights and with our highlights i'm going to choose luma range click on display mask and i want to see everything that's not the cave so all of this stuff we're gonna have some problems with some shadows down there but i can use a fall off that will help and apply that with this mask now applied i'm not sure why that's taking quite so much time to think about it but it did weird um with this stuff applied going back to um eric's sorry lucas's first point is we can warm up those highlights using actually white balance rather than the color tone tool so we go from there to there we have got that cool cave wall feel about it in fact we can sort of yoyo these a little bit so we can cool down the overall image a bit more we can increase our brightness just a touch and then go back to our highlights and warm them up a little bit if we if we want to that's the key thing um but this is down to you then in terms of personal preference this to me has gone a little bit muddy as a result of that so actually where i would be is almost taking on this layer are what we call highlights taking our mid tones which is where they sit and increasing them a little bit and maybe even just offsetting that color there so we pull our mid-tones back down into that bluey-green area if they start to pick or pick up any warmth from that uh white balance change but that's where i go from there to there it's not a huge change it's sort of from there into there but it feels like um it's now that sort of cold dark cave um rather than uh here and also pulling up some of the detail on the left um rory derek might work in black and white it could do um if i were to just very quickly just conscious of time uh pick up maybe a neutral black and white here um we could uh pick up a bit more clarity in there a bit more structure as a result of it being black and white maybe that adds something i personally like the color i think it adds something to it um but you know between the two up to you um i'm not too um precious about it being black and white or color but my gut feel would be the colors probably the the better cool okay so that's it for us today so that's lucas's cave um eric you may have to go back to the raws to fix that problem if that's not gonna do what you want it to do earl's trees which are quite a lot different when they started and gilgs five boats which are actually five buildings so we've all learned something today including joe so cool right um so that's it for today um obviously between now and next time um you are all welcome into that facebook group so facebook or you can search for it it'll come up um we've got a new set of um series stuff um that we're gonna work on in the next couple of weeks which is quite cool so those of you that are in that group will get to see um what the plans are for that if you're not you're welcome to join um or you'll see those those series start to pop up in the future but between now and next time we we see each other or i see you or other way around um obviously we've got those pro tips guides so like i mentioned to i can't remember who it was um sorry um but we've got the pro tips guys i was um diraj that will cover things like brushes and clarity and and so on in specific cases um so that 15 20 minutes so use them they're free just use them and learn stuff um and then if you want your image to be edited then send it in ready for next time so paul reforlive.wetransfer.com send us the raw or send us the eip with some edits done um include your name please if you don't include your name we can't include your image it's that simple and we will take as many of them as we can and work through them from next time onwards and next time i think we're going to start with paula's shot just a bit of a heads up cool right in between then and now take care and we'll see you next i think week but if not then next time check online and you'll see it cheers everyone bye you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 5,713

Keywords: Capture One, Capture, One, Post Processing, Editing, Phase One, Capture One Pro, Examples, Training, Learn, Lessons, RAW, Photo Editing, How To, Guide, License, Variants, Clarity, Tools, Masks, Natural, Histogram, Processing, Gradient, Support, Q&A, Edit, Adjustments, Contrast, Color, Exposure, 21, Landscape, Curve, Mask, Luma Range, Style Brushes, Custom, Style, Brush, Upgrade, Layers, Luma, Range, Clone, Filters, Adobe, Lightroom, Highlight, Recovery, Sunset, LUT, LUTs, Grading, Colour, Editor, Fix, 14.3, 21.3, Radial, Magic Brush

Id: cESCu6X38F0

Length: 64min 44sec (3884 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021