Live Editing Sessions - Capture One 15th July 2021 (Masks, Masks, Luma Ranges & Masks!)

hello hello everyone uh welcome it's thursday again uh so we're gonna edit again for another hour in capture one so capture one being that software up there with the logo um for those of you that aren't familiar with capture one it's a raw editing um package um so you can take your images from raw we'll process them through capture one um and hopefully improve slash fix um enhance whatever um your photos so you're sending in images every week for us to edit and we'll go through as many of them as we can today so welcome everyone that's on live for those of you that are complaining about the heat you're not allowed to complain about the heat if you don't live in england without air conditioning so it may be 39 degrees outside but if you've got air con that doesn't count um whereas the rest of us here are dying in heat in a country that is still designed as if we want it to get warmer um anyway so welcome everyone that's online for those of you that aren't and are playing catch up later on we're going to be editing in version 21 of capture one so the current release we say this each time but the current release is version 21.2 if you go to the about screen in your capture one you're going to find that that's actually called 14.2 it's the same thing one's a marketing um version so 2021 being the the year and 14 being the actual software version so hopefully um you're all up to date if you are not up to date on the latest version if you have a perpetual license so you've bought your license for version 21 you can download version 21.2 for free and 21.3 for whatever numbers come out next before you get up to the next version if you're on a subscription you can go into your account on captureone.com and download the latest version at any time no problem if you bought a previous license and did not subscribes you're on version 20 or before that it was version 12 and 11 and 10 and so on and you want to follow along with the exact tools we're using here you've got to look at an upgrade so if you go into your account again captureone.com you will find the options that are available to you to either switch to subscription some people like that some people don't or to pay to upgrade the latest version either way if you're using version 20 or 21 either one of those two you'll be able to follow along with most of the stuff we're doing today older than that you might struggle certainly with some of the tools that we're using so with that all said that's all the intro stuff done i think um please make sure that you are commenting and um and i guess heckling um yeah heckle heckle away um as we go because what we're going to be going through is my version of what i would do with the images that you've sent in that's not necessarily the same as your version or if you see something that i've missed or you think actually we could try something different by all means suggest it um put it in the comments box there's a little uh delay between you typing something me seeing it and me being able to respond to it because of the way that the wonderful internet works with streaming um but hopefully we can make this as interactive as possible otherwise it gets a bit dull because i'm just ranting at people with their pictures um so let's get started let's start off with roland's shot um so roland sent this shot of a heron in and i'm actually going to start off on a bit of a downer with everyone um because roland's challenge with this shot um and just if i do a before and after so you press y on the keyboard in capture one you can see the before and after you can choose to do it full screen by holding down up here and and choosing which version you want or the default being the split bar which we can obviously move left and right and see the raw or as close to raw out of camera that was there through to the edited version that roland sent in and it's really handy when when you guys send in an eip um you're able to show me the edits that you've already done because i can see all these layers and everything that are in your edits rather than just looking at the raw of course send in the raw and we can we can edit away but it's useful to see where you um came up so in this uh shot roland's concern was the heron doesn't stand out enough from the background and if i look at the before it's probably more obscure after it's certainly convinced certainly um less uh confused with the background it certainly improved but whether or not we can get it any better i guess is the there's the challenge with this and this is where we we start on the downer which is i and i suspect maybe i'm wrong but i suspect um we have and i include me in this got all too complacent and reliant on expecting quick fixes with masks when i look at roland roland i'm sorry i'm going to pick on your picture i'm not picking on you it's actually because i've seen this on numerous different images that have been sent in over the last probably six months when i look at the layers i'm going to press m on my keyboard so i can display the mask that um roland has put in and that mask shows me we've got some darkening on here so almost half a stop of exposure darkened around the heron we've got a vignette as well around the harem with even more darkening but we don't have this extra layer and let me just show you this is roland's actual edit and this is the version that i've had to play with before and i'll show you why in a second because we rely on luma ranges now a lot to control our masks so we expect for example if i have a ground and a sky well it's very easy i can click on the whole image go to my luma range up here and say well i only want the bright stuff or i only want the dark stuff or i only want the stuff in the middle and that's a very easy way of separating out two objects in an image so we stick with that we use luma range a lot now for sure we can also use things like a color range so in my color editor i can select let's go to advanced in here to create a new layer i could maybe select this color on the bird and say well actually let's just view only that range so everything else goes black and white and i only want that slice of color i don't want any green stuff and i could from that color range in here create a mask layer from that selection of color but as you can see in this shot i can't choose a color range because the heron is the same color in some places as the background i can't choose a luma range because let's just get rid of this color range here so my whole area is masked luma range well let's try and isolate the heron and all of a sudden i'm either missing parts of the heron or i'm getting all the background so i can't use a luma range either so what we then do is as has been done on here we use a standard radial filter so a gradient and we'll paint a bit around the bird if i go back to previous versions of capture one we didn't do this we drew a mask and we had things like auto mask which help so the auto mask will help around an edge and we can refine it we've got refine edge or refined mask which also helps but we kind of don't want to spend the time doing that anymore and i think we need to get back to it so there may be improvements in masking that happens over the feet or in the future that we can see but in terms of the core fundamentals of being able to select an object if that object is very different to the background be it through color or be it through luminosity it's easy we've got tools in luma range and the color tool to be able to isolate those objects but if it's not guess what you got to do you've got to start drawing and this i spend the reason i did this earlier is because i don't want you guys to watch me for 10 minutes just going around the edge of of um feathers and all that sort of stuff but this is a drawn mask and no matter what tools are out there there will always be a scenario where we don't have enough difference between the subject and the background to automate some of this stuff regardless of any you know whizzy bang stuff or anything like that being able to draw masks and being able to use control around the edges of things in your pictures is a skill that you need to have if you're going to separate out subjects from backgrounds you just have to have it and it takes time and it takes a little bit of effort but once you've got it and we'll take this one as an example i've now got a bird layer which i didn't have before that bird layer we can increase our now we're not going to do this obviously but i can increase the contrast but completely independently on that layer i could lift the shadows up or i could actually bring the shadows down on that layer which actually introduces a bit more separation strangely i can increase clarity just on the bird or decrease it if i want i could actually use dehaze on the bird to define it a little bit more so i've now got this ability to completely separate the adjustments i'm making on the bird from the background i can't do that with a vignette because yes it's going to make adjustments out here and not on the bird but it's also not going to make those adjustments here here here here anywhere if i start doing this stuff so you know we're painting around the bird quite roughly yes it helps to separate but it doesn't isolate the subject and there's a difference between separating or suggesting a subject versus isolating a subject and in this case if the key to the shot was let's isolate the bird from the background absolutely this is you know this is really important to be able to do so i would just just genuinely try and get to a point where you're comfortable um you know being able to draw this stuff um and i'm seeing let's say more and more we're all relying on the automation we're all relying on luma ranges we're relying on color editor get to know auto mask really well get to know this tool in here which is refine mask because that in itself is a whole different um well it can be a game changer when it comes to things like feathers and things like rough edges of things as well so get to know those tools also get to know funnily enough as who was it's just mentioned joe's just mentioned there we go get to know the ability to create copies of mass and do different things it's one thing to be able to brighten that bird but having drawn the mask on the bird i don't want to have to redo it so i'm going to create a new layer and say background and i can copy that mask from bird and i can right click and go invert mask and now i have the opposite mask on the background and actually to joe's point with this one now we could if you wanted to reduce clarity on the background a little bit so that adds a bit of let's be honest fake bokeh or fake out of focus area in the image but i've still kept the bird completely clear with clarity because they're on two separate masks so this layer is affecting the bird on its own this layer isn't affecting the background and the bird it's just affecting the background if you're going to do this be careful at the edges make sure you don't get any weird ghosts happening if you're going to do clarity on one and no clarity on the other but you can see with these two layers if i just come out here and just remove these two layers that's where we started in fact let's just clone this variant so we can compare so the one on the left is where we started the one on the right is where we've ended and even though when you're zoomed out there's not actually a huge amount of difference because we're zoomed out when i start to zoom in we can see how isolated this bird is compared to the one on the left and and bear in mind as well we've only done this to a small extent if we really wanted to push it pull down clarity here we could pull down our exposure on the background a touch don't don't push it too far it just looks fake um but on here we could up our clarity on the bird on the right and if we wanted to we could maybe improve exposure and contrast just a touch but just on that bird layer so you're actually in a place where we can absolutely separate out objects it doesn't matter what the object is we could we could choose to separate out this ripple here if we wanted to but you've got to draw the mask you've got to be able to draw masks not just rely on the program to automatically select a range of brightness or a range of color and and so on um so now that we've got the mask an answer to roland's question so can we separate it out yes we can we can do a few other things actually in this i'm actually going to reduce the vignette on that background that was placed in because i don't need it now because i've got the the detailed background mask and i can also reduce some of this desaturation on the background here and rely on my actual background layer let's just pull this one up big so the whole layer of background to pull down if we want to a little bit of exposure a little bit of saturation could pull down our shadows a touch more as well that all helps to separate the two out um so where are we d-pack's just saying uh paulus just said with every new release we're expecting a nuclear button yeah it sort of feels like that and but but actually the tools are there and they're great so if you have a scenario where you can separate out a subject and a background using a loom range use it it's great but if you don't have that ability it doesn't mean you can't mask something it just means you've got to do it another way so uh deepak saying increase noise reduction in the background layer to smooth it yep we can do um so in in theory what we can do we can do uh we don't want to keep any details it's not going to have a huge impact there's not actually a lot of noise in here in the first place um but some other things in here so reduce saturation in the background we've done a little bit of that what i wouldn't want to do is make it selective um so you know the old was it the the red rose at a train station or whatever you know we've got to be careful with it but yes you can and just just do it to a a small extent don't push it too far um all right deepak saying reduce clarity in the background layer yeah so exactly that so in the background we've now got our clarity down on the foreground of bird we've got our clarity up that's sort of helping um where are we uh roger would be great to see how you drew a bit of the mask well i can show you painfully um let's go on to the one that we're not uh keeping there so here's our mask on our bird and literally so i can show you uh here's my eraser i will go in to exactly that sort of level and erase around the edge so actually the easiest way to do this stuff when you're masking honestly on on here is let's go get our brush and soft brush use the size to control the edges rather than the hardness the reason being i can be more accurate around the edges with a smaller brush that's soft because i still have a feather at the end rather than a larger brush that's harsh because that larger brush that's harsh is going to leave a jagged line at the edge so that's not as effective when drawing masks as a soft smaller radius brush so we'll go over the edges like that and it's easier honestly on these ones to go further than you need like in here actually i probably went over a little bit fine switch to the eraser press the e button on your keyboard you can have a slightly harder eraser if you want and then just take out the bits that you don't want and the beauty is if you go too far with the eraser so let's say i do here and i can see too much of the feather oops command z command z for those that want that version of the letter um and you can just undo so go beyond what you need and then erase around the edges and it's easy to undo the bits that you don't want um jerry good reason to invest in a tablet yeah it it depends so for me personally a lot of the the stuff that i do is based around um just get that comment off sorry it's based around landscape stuff so we tend to do more global adjustments than detailed stuff like this if you're shooting wildlife if you're shooting portraits if you're shooting even some street stuff having a tablet so being able to go around with a stylus um is a much more natural motion than doing it with a mouse you can do it with a mouse i did all this with a mouse earlier um but maybe a tablet can help um when you're doing detailed masking for sure uh tony good boy i spent the last few weeks practicing drawing masks honestly it if you don't have in your mind or your tool set the confidence to look at something and say oh that's fine i'll just draw a mask you're gonna miss the opportunity to make certain changes to the images and and that that would be a shame because those images can be really really enriched with some decent mask drawing the final thing i do on this shot um so this is roland's um bird shot still i'm just going to pull that saturation back up again this is going to sound a bit um weird to suggest but i'm going to crop it very differently as a almost panoramic um and i would come out to maybe here because i like this change from this blue along here all the way up to the bird on the right hand side and in doing that we end up with a darker bit on the left so what i'm going to then do is call a new layer left hand side nice little soft gradient so all the way along there if i show that mask press the m key we can see is a very very soft gradual fall off and i'm just going to increase the exposure a little bit because i want to balance that bird i don't want the bird looking like it's um it's illuminated through through no reason and again if i don't want the bird to seem that different to the the background in terms of brightness because i've got a separate layer i can pull it back so we can reduce down maybe i don't know to there oh sorry tony i've got your comments still on um you can reduce down to there um and to me that sort of that balance then just just feels a bit more complete than messing or maybe filling the frame here if we fill the frame it becomes by nature quite confusing because of that background which is what we've tried to to separate out um by going a bit wider maybe we get a more balanced shot i don't know that's going to be personal choice but i kind of like this water on the left hand side as a as a way of balancing it out but you know that's how we would would uh emphasize the bird against the background a luma range isn't going to help you a color range isn't going to help you literally drawing a mask around that bird is what's going to do it okay um well we roger so i tend to use a small hard brush for outlining objects yeah so you can what i see quite often is the second someone wants to go into detail they'll switch to a harder brush and hopefully what you just saw is leaving the size where it is but just changing that edge to be hard you just end up with a very very very binary mask if you control it sounds stupid but if you control the hardness of the edge by the size of the brush rather than the actual hardness of the brush you'll just have a smoother mask in general um because the argument would be if the edge is that hard so let me give you actually a live example when we're talking about this if the edge is that hard like for instance here then auto mask will do a good job for you anyway if it's soft like here on these feathers you don't want a hard brush around that you're going to have to almost feather it out and actually in this case we've actually got a bit of from memory i remember when the we did this yeah a little bit of feathering out there so there's actually some not exactly 100 opaque stuff in this mask um just to make sure that uh we have a nice soft transition where the soft feathers are um paula because the background and bird are quite similar color wise can we make it or you can make it almost abstract yeah you can um and that's where you know the default here i guess is to see whether or not we can um you know make it uh more separated more more clear the other option is you could actually make it into a bit of a you know hide and seek or hunt the bird if you wanted to um but i won't do that today so this is a great shot roland um like actually capturing a bird in flight like that is pretty difficult the best of times so well done um but that question of you know how can i make the bird stand out more it's literally by by a case of masking it um yeah separate from the background okay on to lee's shot so really cool mountain shot um with some sort of epic storm coming in in some way um so in this shot here i mean the tweaks that have been done by lee so far they're relatively minor which is good um you know there's nothing um nothing major to change with the original image here i mean that's pretty much what i'd expect to see during a storm so the question is whether or not you just leave it as that or whether you can i guess push it or enhance it a little bit more so i think in in general terms the closer we can get to out of camera in general the better we would hopefully all sign up to that that premise um certainly when we're trying to enhance something we might want to focus on a feature of the picture which you know the light just needs a bit more enrichment or we want to get more detail out of some of the shadows or something and that's possibly what we'll do here but the goal here has to be to keep it as close to what we saw out of the camera as possible so in the edits already we've got some clarity um loaded in so all reasonable amounts normal amount of clarity decent amount of structure remember so there's one of the um pro tips that we have the videos that are sort of 15 minutes or so long we'll cover in there so if you search on this channel you'll find clarity and structure and sharpening all described think of it in terms of clarity affecting the effective contrast as a micro contrast adjustment and sharpness of areas and their edges so the boundaries between two different edges structure being more detailed so if you think about clarity would define a tree structure would define the leaves so the the detail the textures the the edges and all that sort of stuff and then sharpening the main sharpening tool here you've got a lot more control over but ultimately with sharpening you can get down to let's call it the veins on the on the leaves so it's about it's about levels almost of sharpening so you go from areas and making them pop so with contrast which is clarity edges and textures uh making them sharper which is structure and then sharpening which gives you a variety but typically we use that for tinier or smaller sharpening amounts so structure in this case is giving us a little bit of detail in these trees but not a lot it's not a lot been added on here um just if i go without and with we get a little bit of sharpening but but not too much we do hit a limit so for example this is a shot on a gfx 50 so 50 megapixel camera you're not going to see leaves at this level on a 50 megapixel camera you you need to be a you know 100 plus in order to see the individual detail on on the leaves at this focal length of that distance so when you push um structure in this case too far let's go up maybe up to there right we're not enhancing this picture at this point we're just adding lines onto it we're creating stuff that that wasn't there so there's without and there's with this isn't finding the leaves in the trees this is just looking for any sort of edge and and whacking in a bit of brightness and a bit of darkness to make it look sharper so be careful not to try and get more than the camera saw by using structure it tends to be a a thing that people try sometimes of you know what can i get out of this picture by by sliding up structure and increasing sharpness so we'll try and avoid that but what i would be tempted to do in here is to get some more enrichment out of this this forest and the way we're going to do it actually is with dehaze so there's already some dehaze loaded in onto this shot um already by lee and we can actually add a new layer so foreground dehaze big big brush really really soft um so we've got a nice soft edge on it and i'm just to paint in all of this foreground star turn off my auto mask otherwise it's going to try and work out where the mountains are um i don't have to follow the line of the mountains um depends on what we want to really bring out but i'm going to choose a dehaze shadow tone now of maybe this sort of mid green here and i'm going to pull up our dehaze into there maybe i want to go a little bit uh darker to get more detail out so all that layer is doing is effectively creating an area of i guess um more vivid or deeper vegetation in in this case we can pull it up a little bit more actually in this case now that's having an effect that's not great down here at the bottom because it's actually pushing it to be too dark in my view so all we're going to do is with our eraser nice soft eraser again quite a big brush pull down my opacity and i just want to show you so by doing it once with a lower opacity that gets me one layer of less click again second layer of less and all that's doing in the foreground is just releasing some of that darkness in the foreground so all of my dehaze is now happening here in the middle of those mountains it's stronger here less so down here and none obviously up at the top but then we go from there to there and it just looks a bit more um the wrong word i guess for a photograph but gloomy in the foreground but with that same um layer we can then actually pull up a little bit of shadow it gets a bit more light in there and we could pull up a little bit of saturation as well don't push this too far if you push it too far it's going to be pretty horrid contrast be careful with this is a great effect for a storm but remember that contrast tool what it's doing it's going to take the mid point of our histogram and it's going to darken down shadows lighten up highlights well as i move my mouse over this picture let's look down here look at where this sits it's in the very much left hand side so we use the orange bar on our histogram to show us where things are so up here we've got things that the contrast tool will make lighter here just about it's going to make lighter down here hmm it's going to make it darker and it's going to make it a lot darker so if i really want to put in some contrast what i can do instead we'd always talk about an s s-curve here well the s-curve traditionally in people's heads is i'm going to leave it on your rgb but they would click in the middle and we'd make the light parts lighter the dark parts darker there's my s-curve you may as well have used the contrast tool instead we are going to use an s curve but we're not going to do it from the midpoint we're going to do it where all of our data in the forest lies so i'm going to leave the top exactly where it was by anchoring this point here and now i'm going to create a mini s curve down here so i can rise up some of our mid tones leave our shadows pretty much dark maybe even a bit darker there and we can see so there's without there's with we start to add contrast in but i've got the ability to control where that contrast is coming from and actually if i wanted to i could flip it the other way so i could do an s curve where our shadows get lighter and our mid tones actually get darker and what that does is it starts to bring out this part here pretty nicely in fact so it is an s curve it's actually a reverse s curve but it's not affecting this top part of the curve i'm leaving that part of the curve where it is the curve that we edit here doesn't have to be the whole width of the histogram we quite often with with curves we tend to look at that histogram and think right we need to do that with the highlights that with the shadows within this shadow area we've got brighter shadows and darker shadows well we can lock the top part of the histogram by putting in anchor points and then we can play with this part of the shadows and put an s curve into just that bit of the shadows where we say we're going to lift up the darkest parts and pull down effectively the upper mid tones and this is something that you cannot do with hdr we can lift shadows with hdr we can lift black as well we can push them down too we can pull or push highlights on white but what you can't attack with the hdr tool is the mid-tones and where a lot of this stuff sits either in the mid-tone or the upper mid-tone tones you can see on the left hand side on the histogram all of that activity you do in hdr isn't really going to affect it we need to pull it in using a curve so that's our sort of extra foreground layer we go from there to there but again this is down to whether or not that's what you want it to look like and if you don't want that much flattening because that's what this has done effectively we've pulled up the detail in some of the shadows squeezed down some of the detail in the mid-tones it flattens the image so with all that done i'm actually going to back away this layer to maybe only half so i don't have to go into each of those tools and do it all one by one but i can just bring out more of this detail by pulling down the opacity on that layer that's got maybe a bit too much of an alteration on at least just answer the question so how far would you open up shadows not as far as i first did is the answer so to me that's too flat you lose a lot of the fact that you've got a there's almost like a valley through here so the second it starts looking too flat just be careful so by all means use that those tools but then pull it back maybe to there that would sort of work for me i'd then be tempted and it's it's just a case of playing um so you can use a style brush to do this obviously you've got your burn and dodge stuff in here in fact we'll do it that way you could create a burn layer or we can just go to our burn style brush check the flow you might want it a little bit lower even than they've already got as the default this is going to create a layer automatically for me called burn and i can start painting in effectively just see the mask in here a darkening of the exposure now for anyone's confusion the burn darken and dodge brighton tools in the style brushes so these came in in 21.2 i think i remember the 21.1 or 21.2 either way um the style brushes some of them do a lot of complex things the burn and dodge brushes are literally just an exposure change they literally pull it down by point two of a stop i can increase that to a third of a stop use a low flow and you can start darkening areas and all i'm doing is actually drawing in some of this valley a little bit stronger just to get a bit more depth in there i guess up here with this blue i mean the blue sort of works but it's a bit too saturated almost compared to the rest of the shot so i'm actually tempted to just do a little bit of a um desaturate blue um with a gradient just into this top corner so i've got my nice soft mask on this layer i'm going to go into our color editor so i'm not going to do it through saturation i'm going to do it through the color editor and in fact we use advanced choose this blue and through there i'm going to pull down that saturation just on the blues now unfortunately that's also sorry view selected color range was gonna say why has it turned everything else gray um i thought it would grab something else but with just the blues we can start to pull down that saturation a little bit and and it's just maybe it's a personal thing but without that layer this just seems too too enriched and just be careful with that when you use the burn tool or reduce exposure one of the effects can be that the colors start to look a bit deeper a little more saturated they're technically not more saturated but as that term tone gets darker it gives the impression that there's more color in there than there was so sometimes you may want to then desaturate certain areas after doing it out here with these light trails this is where i just want to spend a tiny bit of focus just to finish with so light rays i'm going to create with that layer a quick mask a very very very rough mask so i'm just gonna increase our flow a little bit just to get a bit more solid mask in there and i'm gonna use our clarity tool now with clarity in here i'm also strangely and this is maybe not going to make sense when i first do it i'm going to pull down highlights and pull down whites so what clarity is going to do is we said just now it enhanced it enriches contrast it's a micro contrast adjustment it's going to look for areas and it's going to make the area that was slightly brighter than the area that was darker brighter still and the darker area darker still so it's a way of separating out those those layers and light rays which is great but if you imagine you've got a bright area already and clarity that makes it brighter we start to risk exposure so i might want to sometimes when i'm doing this with clarity and with structure on these rays before we start doing that is actually pull down our highlights and our whites almost to protect them from going too bright so that's without and that's with and it's just a case of protecting those brighter areas so they don't get hit too much and that's all that layer does so we go from there to there but you can see the amount of detail we get out i don't want to do clarity on the whole image there's no point we're trying to focus the viewer on what's going on in that valley that storm cloud that's coming down here with all this this really cool rain and light rays from up above if i do this on the whole image i don't separate out the subject again i'm now just i'm making everything crisp and and harsh and so on so separating out the light rays is one way of doing that so we go from here and again remember the first thing i said we want to make as few adjustments as we can to the out-of-camera look but we go from there to there and if we don't like the level that this has been done to because these are all on separate layers we can pull back some opacity so looking at this that burn i want to pull back maybe about a third the blue desaturation is fine the light rays i'm happy with the foreground dehaze we already pulled back um to around 50 so we go from there to there and again this is just then down to personal choice if we like this extra little lump in there well maybe we add a bit more to our burn layer um so maybe into there because that's wiped some of it out that sort of helps just add in a little bit of texture not over there into there and we end up with a moody scene um and from before to after which is always our check make sure that we haven't gone too far away from what was there in camera to what you're producing out there and if you have by doing it on different layers you're in a place where you can back all of these off independently and it's not going to hurt you at all um lee where are you would a different crop help um possibly not to be honest i mean if we look at the full image what we've got in here is a whole lot more foreground but you know maybe that's that's not a bad thing but it's not exactly doing a lot um and the sky up here maybe not um if i were to change our ratio let's just go unconstrained and we go to the full image personally i like the full image um the the this one the letterbox view maybe is a bit tight we don't get quite the amount of context from the sky up above remember that on some of our layers like the burn layer we only drew over certain parts of it so if you're now going to expand the crop just make sure that we've also increased some of the areas that we burned in otherwise that's not going to make sense um just make sure we're over here it's good so that's our wider crop out here maybe maybe we go to a what was your first crop of two by one maybe so maybe a three by two that sort of works quite nicely to my eye um you know maybe that's just got a bit more context of these clouds i might want to reduce um this darkening on the left hand side here so just pull off flow down my soft brush and just reduce that there so we don't have a random dark spot um but overall you know that that sort of works finally if you really want to worry about the contrast in this um uh what should we call it overall um adjustments so if we really want to make sure the contrast is popping on it we can of course pull a little bit of levels work in to there so that just makes it pop a little bit more um be don't be tempted to use too much clarity we've already got two layers of clarity on if we add some more that's going to make it a little bit over the top but yeah maybe from here it feels a bit enclosed so now you look at the wider version this one here it's got a lot more context i guess than this one that feels a bit enclosed but i don't have a problem with that crop um i think it works just as well um what you could do if you depends on your your view on vignettes but using a bit of natural vignette that's based on the crop maybe helps again it's more and more again pushing the viewer up this valley into this storm up here maybe that works um but yeah certainly going from there to there we're gonna we're in a much more enriched place let's call it that out in the distance um and the foreground is a lot more uh more detailed but again all of this has been done on layers so we can decide how much later we we really want to um we really really want to include in that shot um and just back them away if you don't like them really simple okay so let's go on to michael's shot i think we ended up here last week um so my michael's uh note came in um very triumphantly pointing out and quite rightly that we haven't used clarity on this one we haven't overdone clarity we've used d-haze instead um but and the question was you know is it is it okay is it has it been overdone or whatever and my gut feel is to say yeah absolutely this is overdone um and to be honest sometimes we have to look at the raw to work out whether it has been overdone this one i don't need to but if i do look at the raw so press the y key or go to before and after up here there's our original here's our finished um and this is with all the adjustments and there's some weird stuff going on so it's not a case of um i guess visually you know if this is the look that we wanted there's a there's a certain sort of kodak film look about this stuff when when films um you could buy films that were very high contrast um very enriched in colors and it's not far off of this but there's some strange stuff going on and i'll show you the the warning signs of when something's overdone so first off let's look at the detail here i'm seeing all of these you know real digital artifacts here so these these pixels and you know we're being very unfair we're going into 600 percent but i'm seeing what was a relatively smooth line over this guy here and then the jacket and whatever else to be very very digital so we're seeing you know noise where there wasn't noise it was just a shadow here um all of a sudden we're introducing these colors we're seeing these dark lines light lines or halos as we call them so those are a very big telltale signs of something's been either over sharpened or over hdr'd we're seeing these very binary um pixels here for the highlights and so on so that's that's first one for me second one is look down here at these trees so we go from here where this is a natural is it's just in haze it's it's ironically the d haze to here but it's in haze so that's giving it a color cast of this sort of bluey color um but here in the finished version the shadows still have the color cast in the blues and it's from memories there's a little bit here of shadow lifting up to greens so that doesn't quite make sense um in my head but maybe it's gone a bit more to the green area um but if i were to pull this back down we're back into more blue i guess but overall regardless of of what i do with that pull down um we're still in a place where this seems unnatural it's an unnatural color for those trees especially compared to these ones out here if you see what i mean and i think from memory yeah these trees out here have got a mask on them that corrects for that these trees don't so that's another one we've got to be careful of next up out here look at all this noise we've introduced so there was the original shot there's a bit of noise in there for sure but it's nowhere near this level here and it's not just noise it's also digital artifacts so it's it's those patterns that we see it's the the little um squiggly stuff that doesn't really make sense um when you see it uh appearing here sorry here bearing in mind the original didn't have that stuff in so from my view it's just too much of it that's that's the problem so the individual steps you know using dehaze not a bad idea at all on the background it's at 100 which is pretty pretty punchy um but it's not a bad idea to use dehaze on this shot it's just you know is that the right thing to do not so sure i'm just going to come back to this one in a second because that was one i was playing with before so let's have a look at going back to what i said previously so if we go back to lee's one my point was we can always step back in everything because they've been done on layers well the same happens with michaels we can just step back on some of these adjustments so with our sky here the sky has been added to it's got a little bit of blue up there from the greeny color here we'll leave that in the trees here which has a luma range added to it which is the other um the other fun one so if i go to show our grayscale mask we can see this luma range has been used to try and get to the trees and exclude the other stuff going back to what i said earlier forget it let's get rid of that luma range so if we're going to make that adjustment to all of that distance out here we're not going to exclude parts of the luma range because by excluding this bit up here and you can see where it's where it was originally in there so this was the painting originally and we've used the luma range to exclude the sky but you've also as a result of excluding that excluded here excluded here excluded here because it's luma range has no idea of shape it doesn't know that that's a tree that's the horizon it doesn't know a line or anything like that it's just looking for brightness values and if this value up here matches anywhere close to these values down here you're going to exclude it without intending to so i'm going to go back to our mask go to my paintbrush a little bit big now for this one um and in fact i'm going to go to our eraser um probably a softer raise relatively small and i'm just oops just going to turn off my before and after just go along here don't worry about that horizon not being perfectly right remember as things go out into the horizon they start to lose contrast so if anything what i'm actually gonna do is start to soften out this mask by erasing parts of it so using a low opacity mask just clicking and clicking so that the mask fades off as it gets further and further into the horizon because that would make sense i'm then going to use that same mask with a brush soft brush to fill all of this foreground because if we do want to fix that blue tone out there we're going to do it we're going to fix it but we're going to fix it on all of the background not just the light bits the dark bits and those are the reasons why we're seeing that weird shadow stuff going on so now we've got everything affected oops sorry too much it's going to fill in some extra out here so everything affected by that same set of adjustments and with that done we're now going to back it off so we might choose in here to do a bit more dehaze if we want to that works but what i'm certainly going to do is just back away some of these changes in here these trees in the foreground we've got a bit too much maybe shadow going on um so let's just see where has that happened is that in here maybe a bit of lightness change a huge change in there strangely oh it's this color out here i'm going to reset that a little bit um so where else are we getting that from why are these turning quite so dark is it our d haze yes it is so our d haze again i'm just going to back that away then actually and leave that a bit more there so it's a bit more natural okay next one the background layer and our background layer has this really strong dehaze so it just like clarity dehaze on top of dehaze you actually end up with a compound effect that can look really unnatural so be careful if you've got dehaze on one layer and then you've dehazed on top of that unless you're going for a different shadow tone which can be the case but if you're going for a different shadow tone it may work i'm just going to choose this shadow tone in the trees here and then pull this back a little bit there good um this levels change here i'm just going to back off a touch just so we're not quite so bright and that's probably where i'm going to get to and probably no further the next thing i'm going to change is actually the crop so let me just uh go into here i'm going to go to my crop make sure we're set to two by three which we are and i'm going to go wider if we're trying to show that this is an amazing view let's show the view let's show the context of the view and the fact that these people are looking at that view and this crop here will give us a nice sort of banding so you've got the the rich bit in the front the the background going off into the distance out into the haze and then a bit of the blue sky that's a nicer in my eye um sort of view or viewpoint out it gives us the impression that we could be stood there as well looking out over that same view now the only thing that remains is this disparity between this color here and this color down here so all i'm going to do is just put in a gradient layer new gradient layer it may actually be oh no i don't need to do that because i think that's part of our yes our grading in here so i'm going to shift this grading to be a little more green a little we can change obviously our um our saturation here so a little less saturated a little darker and maybe yeah we still will so i'm going to create a new foreground layer with a very very soft gradient up to here and i'm going to pick on our color so i just wonder whether those are so the greens in the in the background have been been altered i thought that might be the case there we go um so let's just lower the saturation on there i don't need that foreground layer as it turns out just going to lower some of these bits lower that lower that and stop the greens being quite see yellow and i know and i know the temptation in this which is we don't like this blue out here if you don't like that then by all means add a new gradient blue reduction oops i'm going to start it here because that's where i want 100 to apply and stop it down here and with that what i can do well actually let's start let's use the dehaze for a start and we can just use that a little bit but just be so careful with it but more importantly i'm going to go on to my blue color editor and i'm just going to bring down the darkness of it and i could if i want to bring down saturation by a touch um into there and then overall with the picture when it comes to our background the mid-tones we're just going to move them away from being blue now not too much if we go you know green yellow whatever but you know i can get rid of some of that blue up here and then use clarity to just bring back some of the detail overall in our background i can pull uh what have we got here some shadows but actually it's on these people in isolation so i'm going to create a new got lots of layers going on new layer called people create a very very very soft small 100 layer don't worry about going over them in huge amounts of accuracy it doesn't really matter because all we're going to focus on is that black here and the shadow a little bit and i again i'm making sure that we're not pushing it so far that we get all that noise back but to me that's the more natural scene i know the temptation is to try and get all of this looking like a you know colorful postcard or whatever but using these or dehaze to that extent on the foreground um you know you can see yes it has helped for sure it has helped with the the foreground overall but if you push it too far it's really not going to help you long term um the blue reduction as well remember we have got one other tool which is our white balance so we can separate out the white balance here we could add in a touch of saturation overall not just on the blues and we get it back pretty good um jim clone um yeah so if if we wanted to add some hair we could i wouldn't um let's keep it real um but yes you could uh you could clone out the hair if we want to get rid of this pylon raymond's just mentioned it then yeah absolutely let's create so a new healing mask so let's create a quick small healing mask here i'm just going to heal out there hopefully it's guessed it right didn't get it too far wrong it's pretty good um and we've got a little dust spot up there as well so again healing mask or the q key they do the same thing um and we're just gonna click on there get rid of that dust spot too i think that's the more natural look for this shot than where we were and you know going from before and after here my gut feel is it's still a little bit over the top but if you know if we wanted to get to that level of detail that's the way i'd do it um i just wouldn't push all of these things quite so far in fact we'll just back away some of these a little bit just to help um yeah joe's just made the uh point mute the foreground a little bit it's still too bright yeah it it's it's that it's that saturation i think in the in the foreground let's just pull back this here and reduce our contrast a little bit maybe even produce a lower exposure maybe that helps us a bit um what we can't really it doesn't make sense that you've got something so vivid and then it sort of fades off so quickly into the background but you know i think i think that's a slightly better way of doing it than where we started from um but again just be careful not to push it too far just like with clarity dehaze you don't have to use 100 you can get away with smaller amounts in fact smaller amounts that the more targeted a little like we did on lee's shot here so you know targeting certain things with different shadow tones and different tools can be a lot better um there's a way out but you know use the tools by all means but always do it again going back to the other point always do them on layers so the the downside to this one here michael at the moment is a lot of your changes are on that background layer if they were all separated out onto other layers what we could have done is just picked on that layer and just said well okay we'll just reduce or add entirely up to you layer by layer rather than having to go into each of the individual tools and try and and tweak so yeah that'd be it um but from a crop point of view just going back to that i wouldn't keep this this tight crop they're too close to the edge here if we want to show that they're sat looking at a view show them the view show show the viewer the view that's the uh that's the goal with it okay maybe we've got some quick thing just quickly so this is one of leo's shots um actually leo sent in some last week i think um the question was can we make this tower more vibrant than than it currently is and the answer is kinda no um you've already done some work um in terms of of pulling up when you've recovered this sign um not sure what the layer mask is but this one here on the background you've got the shadows pulled up you've got clarity and so on pulled up to try and bring this this tower up the problem you have is for instance here um if i move my mouse around here at sort of twos and threes out in the background we're at twos and threes i can't really separate out this using strangely a loomer range what i can do is separate it out and i'm going to do it very roughly i'm really sorry but we're going to do it very roughly from a time point of view i can mask of course so with a mask let's just create a new layer and call it tower click here once hold down the shift key click again ah without auto mask on click again click again and again so each time i'm holding down the shift key to create straight lines between these points very quick way of doing it and let's go all the way down to here here here here i'm gonna have to find a way of calling that off quite neatly so this is gonna be as i say a little bit rough but you'll get the idea once that gap is closed right click fill mask so we've got our mask nice and filled for the tower that was easy no luma range required if i'd done a luma range you're going to lose the middle of the tower because this is the same luminosity as the outside but with that tower what i can do of course is pull up a bit of exposure i could pull up a little bit of clarity i could pull up a bit of shadow as well if i wanted to but with all of those tweaks now i'm just doing it on this tower so you know can we separate out the tower yes you can but not using the ways that we traditionally now use which is using a loomer range or something like that you've gotta draw a mask which handily brings us back to where we stopped it funnily enough today um we could even use dehaze on that tower interesting um so that's a way of doing it you saw how quick it was to draw granted a rough mask around that tower but we could refine the edge on it and get it very very good very very quickly so drawing a mask is going to get you where you want to be if the two areas are too similar that was where we started obviously with roland shot if the two areas are very similar it's really difficult to separate them out using luma ranges or automated tools like the color selection you've got to be able to draw those masks we drew masks in lee's shot here um just the full mask there but in terms of the light rays and in terms of the um the burning around here and the foreground dehaze so again all about masking you've got to be able to control those masks michael shot here use those layers to back away some of those changes if you see those things that i showed you earlier we've gone too far so if you see those artifacts just just step back yeah and there we go so that's our lot today um hopefully that all made sense for those people that have sent images in for those of you that haven't or we wanted to discuss any of these things further on go into that facebook group so the group is open for anyone to join in um it just needs approval so it can take a little bit for uh for you to be okayed um as it was just to stop spam stuff more than anything but do keep sending your pictures in obviously that tool hasn't changed so it's still paulie for live.wetransfer.com please include your name when you send in a picture without your name we can't edit it we need to know who you are when you send a picture in by all means send in your adjustments as you've seen today they're really helpful because we can see what you've done and where things are going in terms of the direction of the photograph there is no session next week one thing so next week there is a bit of a gap we will see you in two weeks time so on the 29th of july for the next one of these sessions hopefully um you can all make it if not then catch up later on but in the meantime this is how to get hold of me us everyone and we'll see you in a couple of weeks cheers everyone bye you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 3,836

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, Upgrade, Layers, 21.1, 14.1, Luma, Range, Clone, Filters, Adobe, Lightroom, Highlight, Recovery, Reverse, GND, Wildlife, Sunset, B&W, Conversion

Id: izuQSOXh32M

Length: 63min 16sec (3796 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021