Live Editing Sessions - Capture One - 16th December 2021 (HDR, Panoramic Stitch, Curves, Cityscape)

good afternoon everyone uh it's thursday and i'm back in my cave uh so we're not uh we're not back um on a rooftop in london i'm very much back at my desk um and we're gonna go through the next hour i'm editing your pictures uh in that stuff capture one um so version 22 being the current version that's the version that was released last week uh last thursday so we're not gonna obviously we're not gonna dedicate every single session from now on um to editing the exact new features of capture 122 but obviously some questions have come up since last week and since we did the rooftop session on tuesday um so we'll cover some of those questions today and then we'll get back to the normal routine of editing your photos so capture 122 is the current version of capture one's raw editing software by raw editing software what we mean is it's able to take the content that you capture in your camera process that and we can obviously try and improve the image or get it back to what you saw which is the goal um for most photographers so in 22 this is the current release so if you're on a previous version of capture one version 21 20 there's a bit of a gap 12 11 10 9 whatever you might find some things that we're talking about today don't quite match what you see on your screen for most people on version 21 you're going to find everything is pretty much compatible apart from panorama and hdr and auto rotate which is one of the the new features in version 20 there are quite a few differences so you're going to notice some differences in the interface but also in terms of some of the tools available in version 12 and beyond you're really going to start to notice so if you do not have the current version of capture one few options number one if you're not using capture one at all go to captureone.com and download the free trial it's 30 days completely free completely unrestricted see how you go um you'll be able to uh to play with the same tools that we are today if you are already a capture one user and you're a subscriber then obviously you can go on to your download panel on captureone.com and download the latest version anytime anyway if you're a perpetual license so an owner of a license for version 20 21 or even earlier go to captureone.com go to the or your license area and you'll be able to see the options if you choose to upgrade i know a few people so if i look at you know what's in version 22 yep panoramic stitch hdr and and auto rotate they're big ones if you're using a canon r5 or similar there's a few others as well i think the r3 1dx mark ii i think um so canon wireless tethering is introduced in 22 as well and some performance and bug fixes which always are the case if none of those things are relevant to you then maybe 21 is fine so there's no one holding anyone's head next to a gun i'm already ready to pull you can choose when you want to upgrade if you want to upgrade but if you want any of those features you're going to need to switch to version 22. now i referenced the fact that we were on a rooftop so this is obviously in the past now but on tuesday so a couple days ago david and i did a session from the roof of the tate modern and we covered specifically panoramic stitching in version 22. so if you want to have a look at not just the the editing side of it but actually how we capture those images the kit you're going to need if you want to do it well there's nothing wrong with doing it without extra kit but if you really want to go for it then there's some extra bits that you might want to look at and some considerations in terms of how you shoot go on to capture one's youtube page or youtube channel you'll see a link on there to that live session i'll also put after this session a link to it in the description of this video um so hopefully those people that want to look at pano stitching and the considerations when you're in the field can get up to date with that but for now let's have a look um in capture one and we are going to start with a couple of queries and questions and stuff like that um about pano stitching and about hdr because we've had some questions in from people that have either been using it and it's not quite delivered what they were expecting or they're concerned before making that jump i guess so we're going to start with peter's image in fact we're going to start with two images from peter and um we're going to start actually with the hdr so these are two images out of camera one exposed for shadows in other words all of our people get it confused i think sometimes so when we say exposed to shadows we don't mean the darker shot what we mean is the shot that's actually exposed so that the shadows have all their detail so if i go into this shot here we can see in here there's loads of detail in the shadow this is the if i do before and after there's no difference it's exactly the same so this is the raw image and there's no noise there's no worry in the shadows at all we can see everything this shot here is exposed for the highlights so in other words the highlights aren't overexposed unlike in this one if i turn my exposure warning on this shot has the highlights exposed or overexposed this shot does not what this shot does have a problem with though however is the shadows because we're missing some detail in there and if i go to our exposure tab i can pull up those shadows but as i start to do that we might see some noise creeping in so that's what hdr effectively is there to do what it's designed to do is take all of our information here from the shadows and blend it with all of our information here from the highlights so hdr in 22 right click merge to hdr just to recap these options so auto adjust means that when it has merged capture one will make some automatic adjustments to these sliders here on the left to give you a more pleasing result what it believes is a more pleasing result auto align is only useful for you if the frames have moved in between clicking so if you're handheld auto align is great and actually it will do a good job of matching up you might lose some area in a crop as a result of movement but the auto aligns it does a good job of making sure that what was there in image one aligns with what was there in image two three four and so on if you're on a tripod and you know the camera hasn't moved you don't need to use auto align um because it nothing has moved but if we're not sure and in this case i wasn't there we'll leave it on you'll also notice that i'm only merging two shots here so everyone thinks that hdr you need three shots no you don't you need two or more shots for hdr to work so capture one's going to do some little stuff in the background and it will deliver a dng file here now what a lot of people are concerned about is this dng file feels very bright so if the idea was to retain all of these highlights while keeping all of these shadows and if i look at the result it feels brighter than the one for highlights but actually if i look at the two side by side sorry not that one that one these highlights here they're a little bit brighter but there's not actually that much difference what's happened is it's flattened that dynamic range so one of the things if you remember on that that little dialog box was whether or not you'd like capture one to auto adjust and you can see on here it's already made some choices it's pulled the highlights pretty much all the way down well we can go further it's pulled the whites down and again we can go further it's pulled exposure down but we can go further and more importantly i can now pull up shadow so i can make sure the shadows are not underexposed while keeping all the highlights clear and crisp and detailed more importantly now this is the thing that you've got to bear in mind with the hdr output from capture one when you reset all these sliders so let's just do a full reset on this shot so this is the dng output let me turn that exposure warning off it looks way too bright and if i compare that to this shot and this shot well it is a bit overdone but the difference with the hdr output is i've got this huge range that i can use in exposure terms from the brightest parts to the darkest parts and everything in between so you can now with the hdr image pull down your exposure but equally pull up all of your shadows so now i have got a nice blend of detail in the highlights and detailing the shadow without noise going on in these areas down here and we're at well 400 pretty much so you're not going to see much detail in there anyway but it's pretty much noise free in the shadows and that's one of the benefits of the hdr merge of course as peter's done you can do this kind of with layers from one single shot so you can take this shot here apply all of these layers into here do a lot of hdr work in terms of you know pulling down highlights in here pulling up shadows and whatever but you're not necessarily going to fix the noise issue in the shadows in here and it's a bit difficult to see in this shot in part with resolution but there is a marked difference between the noise level in here and the noise level in here for the same amount of um detail the other one is typically if you pull these sliders too much on a standard shot it starts to look cartoony and that's what we're seeing here this is a single shot that's that's a bit too pushed in hdr terms starts to look a little bit fake on here well of course we can pull down highlights and get the sky detail back but while we've got access to all of that dynamic range we don't have to use it all so imagine it like taking your histogram and allowing you access to extra bits on the side that you can pull in if you want it's not the same as trying to get this histogram here and stretching it and compressing it and so on with just the sliders so effectively imagine that dng the output dng is your original photo with an expanded histogram that you can call on if you wish you don't have to whereas a single shot you're kind of stretching data you're trying to grab stuff from the shadows that wasn't really there grab stuff in the highlights that wasn't really there so you end up with clipped highlights and noisy shadows doing it in a single shot that said be really careful because if you overdo hdr it does look wrong um this is okay it's borderline i wouldn't push it any further so on that theme clive sent this shot in um and his concern was that everything comes out way too bright when you merge it so there's a couple things number one i may not in this case need this brightest shot because if i look at this shot here and turn my warnings on in our darkest shot here i've got a few bits that are underexposed these little blue areas down here let's just zoom in so you can see so here's a few underexposed bits a few over exposed bits in the mid tone we've still got the over exposed stuff but there's nothing really under exposed there's no blue warnings anywhere but in the brightest area we've got huge amounts of overexposure and again nothing underexposed so i'm not sure that hdr is gaining anything from this brightest version and if i go to all three and merge these let's just do a quick one with auto enabled um and then what i'm also going to do while it's doing that i'm going to select these two so just the darkest and the mid-tone one right-click merge to hdr so with just the two of them okay so we've got this one here which was the one merged with three out of it out of capture one i haven't touched it it's auto adjusted and then we've got this one which is merged of the two images so that's the three images that's the two and you start to see there's a big difference in the brightness as well as some of the alignment so you know this is your choice but going back to that point you don't have to use a full bracket of three four five any of those those numbers you can do an hdr merge with just two shots if you choose and in this case i'd sort of be in a place where you know that that two version is maybe a little bit safer for us because then when i go into oh i'm sorry that's the uh that's the nikon file um is maybe a little bit safe for us because when i go into this stained glass window let's just pull down all those highlights all the way and the white all the way and maybe a little bit of exposure but now what i then do is pull up our shadows now i don't have this huge overexposure everywhere i don't have this this bright glaring view i think this was some clive's example here and i think this was the merge here um out of the box as it were well i don't have that in this version here i can go into this stained glass window and i'm wearing limited and zoom but i've got the detail in the window i'm not going to have as much detail as i would have in here and there's a reason for that if i had this detail level here blended with this detail level around it blended with this amount of light on the inside it's just gonna look fake so capture one equally is sometimes making some decisions around how it deals with huge brightness card variations between those two different frames for three but to me you know does that look better in quotes than the mid tone yep because i've got the detail in the the windows does it look better than this middle um exposure here and this shadow exposure yes so i'd say that's a pretty decent blend but it does need you to change some of these hdr sliders because these are what allow you to tap into that extra range that dng file now holds so that dng file is taking your frames frame one frame to frame three and making effectively a super histogram of which you only see the middle bit so you use the hdr slider to pull it in and the difference being on a single frame when you pull in the hdr slider it sometimes gets to the point where it's inventing stuff which is where you get noise in shadows and flat highlights with the dng hdr merge it's not inventing stuff it's calling on that extra data that it got from the underexposed and the overexposed and merging it all together so couple questions before we go much further uh michael so referring to tuesday i'm guessing we pacified the weather gods we did it wasn't a perfect sunset but it was dry so that was that was a big improvement on last month um capture 122 does not have focus stacking correct matt no it doesn't um but there are plugins for it so um you can use things like helicon focus so if i go to edit with i can stack images in alicon helicon allows us to go what we call round trip so it goes out to helicon focus stacks it pulls it back we've done sessions in the past on helicon and it does a very good job um but no this release has hdr merge and pano stitching but no focus stacking um man i got frost by my fingers doing doing pannas okay excuse me get some um gloves they make them um black diamond i think make some um i think they're the ones i have um they they are very geeky but um mittens um which have this sort of peel back thing on your fingers so you can use your fingers and your touch screen everything because touch screen gloves really don't work that well um but yeah flip them back over after you finish you'll avoid frostbite so there we go handy tip um daniel does and no does a dng have all the same editing possibilities of the raw file uh actually jamie's answered you it it's yes ish so it is a effectively a raw file as far as capture one's concerned it allows you to do all the editing that you would be able to do on any other raw file but it's not the same as the raw file that comes out of your camera so you can see on the screen here um you've got an nef you may have an arw for sony a cr3 for canon and iiq for phase one the dng is a more generic version of a raw file with all that data in it but it's not quite the same and doesn't have all the same features for some of the embedded stuff in there um keith as a perpetual license owner will i receive further free updates of performance cameras and lenses on 21 very unlikely i would say so there was an issue i think from memory around version 20 where there was an operating system update that happened um right on the shoulder of when they switched from 20 to 21 but there's a general thing that capture one do which is as it moves from one version to the next all camera and lens data stops being developed on the previous version and it switches across to the new one um so yeah if you want if you're going out and planning on buying a brand new camera as of now um you'll find it will probably not be supported in 21 you would need to move to 22 um to get that support uh tony looks like the hdr merge feature will give more scope to make even more detailed selections with loom marine future yes um because you've got well ish so yes but ish yes it will because you can pull more data in um to your visible histogram to be able to to make those changes but beware if i create a new filled layer and go to luma range remember my accessible luma range here is still only zero to two five five so in order to select anything that's in that extended um range i've got to pull it in to be visible or consider it as 255 or consider it to be zero so yes by nature of the fact that i can pull more data in to be included in the luma range yes that's correct but remember the luma range is only able to deal with the visible rgb 0 to 255 and no more um what's causing the smearing in panos it's not happening at stitch points but in the middle of the shots i'm not sure quite what you mean um you might need to send a couple of um a couple of samples in to be honest for us to have a look at it may be that you don't have light fall-off um selected so one of the key things on panos um or panoramic stitches is i'll use this um shot from clive just to as an example um under your light fall off you want to make sure that's set to 100 ignore what it's done to this picture but what that does is it evens out any vignetting in the image and what you might find is without that we covered this on tuesday to be honest in quite a lot of detail without that you'll get this sort of bumpy effect um as the light goes dark to light dark to light um from the edges of the the lens if it's not that that i'm talking about um send us an example we'll um we'll have a little play um tim i do realize that i don't need three frames but it's kind of hard-wired into me to use three phrasally every time um yeah with as the dynamic range of cameras is getting better and better this you know if you think about old school it used to be five frames two stops apart now between frames you know one and three they're covering everything that was in frame two anyway so it's likely that you're going to need less frames and maybe a bit further apart in terms of their stepping to be able to get the full range that you can see so you know some of this comes down to your camera if your camera has a limited dynamic range then you may still need three shots two stops apart or three stops apart if you've got a a camera with a huge dynamic range you might only need two stop or sorry two frames that are only you know maybe they're four stops apart on those two frames and it will still merge but you have to play with your camera in terms of how it behaves in these situations and work it out work it out for you um okay so i think we're covered covered-ish uh [Music] yep for now right so no more questions let's move on um and then we'll cover the next batch of questions as we go so tim to answer your questions tim sent this in to answer your questions exactly the same scenario in this shot so here is our underexposed to our exposed four highlights our mid tone-ish i'd question whether it is mid given given where all the data is but okay and are exposed for shadows now there's nothing in here which is particularly underexposed so i agree it is exposed for shadows but i'd have been tempted to go maybe a little bit further um just to get even more detail in some of this stuff here but for now this is fine and here's our dng so wow it's bright yes now i'm hoping if i'm honest that the the guys in copenhagen will maybe change this auto adjust to be a little bit on the darker side so maybe it takes the midpoint and makes it a little bit less blinding to start with but it really doesn't matter because again we can tap into all of that range so in this shot here that's blended we have all the detail here in the shadow and more in fact because if i look at this capture one's actually pushed it even further to get detail up here but there's nice clean shadows no real noise to talk about in there and let's pull back highlight some whites we've got all of that stuff there and i can pull back our exposure to whatever amount that i choose so if i want this boat to match what it was in the brightest scene i can do that but that's actually a pretty good blend um it's not too cartoony we've got a load of information here in all these highlights that we didn't have effectively out of the blend but i'm not missing any data all the data's there it's just whether or not i choose to access it and then when i do choose to access it i can play with you know we can bump some clarity and structure and whatever but yeah if i look at this initial output it looks kind of scary if i now tap into all the range that i've got this is a much cleaner image than any of these individual single ones for sure so that's what we're talking about with hdr is is just getting access to more data that's that's all it is what you do with that data is up to you but i i sort of i tend to agree with some of the comments about if i have to do minus 100 minus 100 on highlights and whites and pull back the exposure it feels like capture ones maybe over baked it a little bit um just to start with or just and it may be that the data is fine but maybe that mid point that we start out needs to come a little bit lower um but that's yeah that's personal preference i guess um okay let's have a look at esteban so esterman's problem is nothing to do with hdr it's a pano problem and i think i know the problem to be honest um so esterman's issue is when we go and select all of these these were taken from a drone and we right click go to stitch to panorama just wait for it to generate our preview ah surprise capture one was unable to create a preview and it doesn't matter because i played with this earlier it doesn't matter which projection i go for it still says it's unable to do it it's not because the size is too big because it hasn't even managed to to do a projection so then i started looking at well why let's have a look at what the issues are so let's take for example our top row so the way that this works is it's got a midpoint here and then it's gone top down left down up left right up right down and so on let's take our top row this one here this one here this one here we could even take this one no we won't take that one there so the three top rows let's right click stitch to panorama and we get a result now obviously we don't have the light fall off corrected there so we've got a little bit of a bump but it does stitch what about if we go for the middle row well let's go that one that one and that one so those are our three middle rows stitch to panorama and again it stitches not very well there's a bit weird a bit of a weird thing going on the left-hand side but it does find an ability to stitch those shots together um certainly in here so what's going on why when i select more than one row effectively do we have a problem well it's all about in my view um and i've seen this before which is why i'm relatively confident on it but excuse me if we look at the wave pattern so think about what the panoramic stitching um code is designed to do it's designed to look for similarities in the frame and join them together right so let's look at the similarities so number one it's got to fix this bow because this isn't really a horizon especially on a very very wide lens such as on a drone where you're going to get the natural distortion so that may be a bit of a challenge if i fix the distortion so let's go to our lens tools and go to distortion in fact let's just type it in 100 so we end up with a straighter horizon the problem is it starts cropping the images so let's select all of those and apply we can see here on the right hand side all these crops that are happening so now we're losing data and we're losing overlap that's the problem um we're losing this stuff here that actually capture one needs to be able to find out what goes with what and then we come to the bigger issue which is the waves between this shot this shot and this shot are all completely different so we do have a horizon to capture one in theory could look at and say yeah okay we're good but then look at these lines the lines are so bold and so clear that capture one's not able to actually marry up between them because the time taken between frame one frame two frame three well where are we at there are what nine or ten frames in there so we've got nine frames for this thing and in each case the lines in the ocean are different they've moved from the frame before by quite a substantial amount in some cases so there is software that will try and do this and there's probably software that may succeed you may have to choose control points you may have to override and say no no no i mean this bit of the beach here is the same as this bit of the beach here for example i know other tools that will allow you to put control points on but the automatic recognition of that scene is really gonna struggle simply because the key identifiable regions in that image are moving around in between every single frame so it's gonna struggle to work out what you mean um and on this you know if i put in this loading diffraction correction as well we don't have the option of light fall off on this manufacturer profile but let's just select all of these shots and apply those changes go to stitch to panorama and it's going to say probably i believe the same thing so what you've got to bear in mind with some of this stuff is funnily enough if i was looking at this shot here if this was shot as a long exposure where then i know it's difficult with a drone i get it but where the c was effectively then calm and symmetrical across all the different frames not symmetrical but but similar across all the different frames you'd probably find it was able to stitch this okay the issue is that when you start getting too many variances between all those different frames at a certain point capture one struggles which is why it's able to deal with the top row for example so now if you think about what i did to start with this one this one and this one well there's not really much c to match so instead it actually manages to do a panoramic stitch um if i do a little spherical we can stitch it um and it will it will join those three shots together but that's because it's not getting confused by the content down below so some of this is down to you know the software will i'm sure get better and cleverer as time goes on it's going to get more intelligent and do some clever stuff but some of it is about knowing your subject and knowing the content that you're trying to stitch and what that's gonna do same with hdr um if you've got things moving in the scene you know hdr can be one of the worst things you can do even i keep hearing people say we want d ghosting d ghosting is great because it blends um issues within an image but by blend what it's doing is inventing stuff that wasn't there effectively it's trying to work out what it believes is the right content um so just be careful with what you're trying to hdr what you're trying to to panoramic stitch it's not just about the software fixing everything for you sometimes you've got to you've got to work out your subject too um where are we on questions stephen so what are you trying to achieve with hdr photo processing is it just about accessing data or something more artistic um it depends who you ask steve is the issue um some people choose to use hdr because they are going to be brutal now because they cannot be bothered to learn about filters so if you're shooting at sunrise or sunset there is a much more natural way of getting those shots quite often which is to use effectively a graduated filter sunglasses for the camera and you're going to get a much more balanced shot and frame as a result of doing that um to some people they have decided that filters were old school um so they will let the camera do everything for us the problem is that the camera will deliver a much flatter shot as a result of an hdr move or merge then a filtered shot would be an equivalent some people will use hdr as a way of fixing noise so this is a very positive thing which is if i shoot the same scene 10 times the noise pattern in all those different frames will be different because noise is random so as hdr merges all of those 10 frames together the noise starts to disappear because it's effectively averaging out where all of those dots were um so there that's a real positive for hdr in that sense but that's not about necessarily changing exposures that's about getting a noise free image um to some people it is like we've talked about getting access to a much bigger histogram so if i don't have access to a 16 17 18 stop camera this is a way of doing it but it comes with risk because as things in the scene move around you're going to lose access to some of the clarity that you had um and things like that de-ghosting function become really important as things are shifting from one frame to the next um and then the final one and there is there is one that i do buy into certainly commercially there are instances where there is no filter that can help you so if you're shooting for example interiors especially you know hotels restaurants all that sort of activity you're not going to find a glass filter for your camera that's the perfect shape for your window in order to darken down that window and brighten up the room one method is you fill the room with artificial light so you throw in flash a lot of photographers choose to do that and that balances out the outside view and the inside brightness so i can see outside and inside at the same time the problem with flash or with any light is especially if we're talking about windows we get the dreaded reflections so hdr will allow us to have two frames one exposed for outside one exposed for inside blend them together so i can see that whole view of what's in the scenery beyond the window and what's inside the restaurant the hotel the corporate office the whatever so there are some some very valid reasons for it um but when i see people just using hdr to compress the histogram into the middle flatten the image make it very cartoony and and something that you could never have seen with your eyes i i turn off personally but that's that's personal choice um david can you change the auto adjust options to get a better start point at present no um so the auto adjust options are what capture one has coded in i don't know if there'll be a change to that in the future obviously with all um software it's possible to change it going forward um but yeah just uh for now um just remember that it's starting on the hot end let's call it that and then coming back um powell so there's discussion yesterday during dso focus stacking stream that hdr usually allows to increase dynamic range of course some people overdo it oh yeah okay so so go back to i guess stephen's question yeah exactly so hdr will give you more dynamic range just be really careful that you're not producing images that the human eye could not have seen i think you can do that and there's you know there are scientific imagery out there that look fantastic but if you're doing you know if you're producing landscape content there comes a point where it's just too surreal just be careful that you don't you don't switch that um too far okay let's move on a second before we get um to down the rabbit hole um for hdr uh just checking there's no other questions um i think we're okay uh apart from i think both tim and earl asking about all to adjust um i have turned auto adjust off personally um so yeah i uh it's your choice um but in terms of the hdr blending um not not panel blending but hdr i would always prefer to start from a zero point so this point and make my decisions rather than having to hunt around to work out is it the shadow recovery that's done that is it the exposure is it the brightness i'd rather start from zero and make my decisions consciously um so i personally would have all to adjust unticked and then work out what i want to do from there okay um so on to a shot this is this is going to be refreshing a shot of only one frame so no hdr no panoramic stitching um this is uh venegopalance um shot of the flower um a really really clean normal natural shot no bells and whistles no um no extra tools just how to improve this um look and there's a few things in here so number one because we are not using hdr i'm going to pull up our exposure all the way and also pull up shadow so we can see if i were to pull up all of this shadow here this is the noise we're talking about um there's nothing wrong with it you know noise is part of um a camera's i guess character um but yes there's noise in the shadows but we don't want the shadows anyway and that's why um vinegar plants designed or exposed this to basically feature the the rose i think it is a rose um rather than anything else but here's the problem we've got a lot of shadow here and we've got hardly any highlights so how do i isolate the rose without affecting the rest of the shot i don't want to pull the shadows up if i pull up exposure well we start over exposing that rose in the very brightest areas of it and we pull up the shadows if i were to pull up highlights i don't really get anywhere i get a little bit of change but because the rose isn't sat in the highlights so this is a perfect example of where instead of all of our easy to use um tools um coming into play we're going to use the curve and you've got two modes for curve so we can use the rgb curve or the luma curve remember that the rgb curve will also affect your saturation the luma curve will purely affect the brightness values of every pixel so let's just create a variant or a clone of this so you can see the difference i'm just going to move to the exact same amount the rgb curve so at 1 2 8 we go to 160 and then with a luma curve again i'm going to do a 1 128 to 160 and you'll see here so this is our rgb curve this is our luma curve now it's a very subtle difference i'm wondering whether we need to uh just push it a little bit higher just to see so let's go up to 190 128 and with our rgb curve 190 at 128 let's pull these side by side and to zoom in at the same time remember to um to two images just hold down the shift key when you've got them both um on and you can zoom in there excuse me now i'm hoping that you can see the subtle difference in terms of this one on the right being almost more lemony more yellowy because the color has shifted slightly and that shifting of color comes from the fact that the red green and blue channels under this point here are not evenly distributed so if you imagine this is amplifying this point here it's amplifying the red more than it's amplifying the blue for example relatively because the blue started out at a lower amount so we do get a slight color shift whether you like that color shift or not is your choice so if you prefer to see that shift as a result of of shifting curves then do your curve work in rgb it used to be that there was only rgb um available as a curve the luma curve being relatively new so under the luma curve it's lifted up all of the brightness values of everything but hasn't shifted any colors at all it literally just looks at this brightness and it's why on the luma curve itself you don't see the individual red green and blue channels you purely see brightness and that's what it's pulled up here on the left so in this case i'm going to use the luma version of this so that's pulled up the the midtones i'm going to turn on my exposure warning to make sure we have nothing that's overexposed as a result and i'm now going to just attack those very tall or the very top highlights and more importantly our darker areas here and this dark area here we're going to really flatten out to there so you see what happened with this curve from here we've got a couple of bits that are underexposed and that's because they sit in this area here so in other words if my input let's just uh create a floating curves tool sorry not levels so you can see a bit clearer so right down here we can see look input seven output seven input nine and so on let's go to our luma one so down here even though we've done a big change in this middle curve here the the mid section the mid tones nothing much is changing down here if i want to clip the black area so as i move my mouse around i can see these values up here look seven five four this would be zero obviously because it's gonna exposure warning but four five three two a couple of elevens and twelves so it's not completely black what i can do is i can force a clip of those blacks by pulling in this bottom part of the curve and saying right anything less than 14 in this case you can see on the input at the bottom left now go to zero and you can see the impact of that because what it's done is it's made everything that was less than 14 completely underexposed so in other words completely black if i turn off my exposure warning now then we've got now an isolated rose that's lifted in the mid tones and the background has disappeared completely if i just do a before and after so here we can see all this background detail in here but it's all in the shadows and the roses looking a little bit flat here we start to lift the rose itself without affecting down here if we're worried about any fall off in here just taper this a little bit more and it might be that you want to have a selective area so you might want to brush in into some of the shadows instead if we're not happy with how bright or so how vibrant i guess the that flower is let's use the saturation slider so saturation in capture one is pretty forgiving it's going to allow us to pull it up a little bit not too much you know don't push it too far but then we're in a pretty good place you know and if i wanted to really pull up the detail um i mean we haven't got a huge amount of resolution here but if i pull up our structure a touch and our clarity a little bit leave clarity on natural for natural stuff you don't want it going a bit too fake um but there we're in a pretty good place a nice isolated object with the background that's disappeared and it's disappeared because we've clipped those darkest parts of the shadow don't need to brush it in and do an exposure change or anything like that just remove it from the curve so it anything less than in this case 13 is now zero you can see input 13 output zero that's what the curve is for if i look at here's our original so here's our final one this just feels a bit more polished as a result if i want to even up the color in here here's a fun one so i'm going to create a new filled layer so we're not affecting anything if something goes wrong i'm going to use the skin tone tool so not the color editor because in the skin tone tool i'm going to choose an area in here which is sort of somewhere in between our yellow through to our white and i'm going to tell capture one that i want to make everything in this bracket here everything in that cone more uniform in color more uniform in saturation and more uniform in lightness now we've gone over the top here so just just bear with for a second because we can also change its hue we can go more green more yellow but this is a way of allowing us to effectively even out the color that we've chosen with that picker so this is without and that's with again completely personal choices up to you how far you want to push it or not push it but this is one method effectively of just and you can see out here i'm just going to show you here you see it hidden it didn't quite pick it up and the reason is as i move my mouse around if we look at those rgb values it's more into the greeny blue side than it is the yellow really and out here as well look at that 198 for red i'm looking at the top up here 201 for green 2 2 5 for blue so it's definitely in that sort of turquoise area so even though it doesn't look turquoise this skin tone mapping isn't picking it up as i move that around it starts to pick up more of the content of that rose and then we've got the choice we can turn it on turn it off up to you we can back away the opacity of it but we're talking about here we can we can almost edit how that rose appears using the skin tone tool to even out and it's it's not replacing color it's evening out um the differences between the really really rich parts and the really really faded parts okay um so that's the questions um is the brightness slider the same as shifting the luma curve no well it everything that you do in terms of brightness um and sorry not just brightness but many of these tools here contrast is one as well which is actually a curve adjustment so most of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes we capture one is either a color adjustment or a curve adjustment so using brightness effectively pushes the curve to be a hump to the right or a dip to the left that's what it's effectively doing um and it protects the the edges or the the ends um but it's it's a bit more complex than that um and it's a bit more accelerated so it's a slightly different thing but yes it does um it does have that effect um david i would have made two layers isolating the flower from the background then i would have independent control over both absolutely you can um you can absolutely have the the background effectively painted separately or using a loomer range um and then you've got control of the two of them but to me if i if my intention is to make that background black and everything in there is already pretty much underexposed this is a much quicker path for doing that um and it's going to deliver the same result um so yeah i'd uh i'd yeah i wouldn't worry too much about separating the layers in this case where it's a more complex background maybe you would um yeah um brightness like brightness slider effects only in the midterm region no it doesn't um so it shifts the mid-tone region more than the others but it's effectively squashing so it will effect it will drag up shadow it will push brightness of highlights but it will stop them going too far so that it has the biggest effect in the middle but imagine it like a ramp big effect in the middle and less of an effect on the edges to the point where it has no effect at the very very extremes so that's why brightness is a safer slider because it won't overexpose or under expose without really really pushing it but it does affect the upper and lower ends as well it's not just a mid-tone adjustment um jim would you clone or heal the dark bit center left this bit here um i'm not sure i see a bit center left you might have to you might have to tell me where um but yeah no um where are we okay so let's move on to joe's image now i have to apologize because joe we said we would have we would edit this image about three weeks ago four weeks ago then i got a bit a bit ill and then um we had the version 22 upgrade so we didn't get to editing joe's image and to be fair there's only a couple of little edits that we're going to make on it but yes we are now finally going to go on to joe's image um so cityscape with movement at night um lots of lots of light stuff going on and i think from memory one of the questions was do you leave the light in or not let's just turn off before and after so here's our light here here's without the light so what joe's done um if i look at this shot here or the before and after and we go to our adjustments you'll see this top right layer there's a mask on it and that mask is effectively pulling down all of the effect of the light because it's one thing to remove the light through cropping but you've still got obviously the flare that comes out of it and this is a this is a good move to be honest so if you are going to remove it remove the light that is you're going to need to remove the effect of the light as well um you do lose some of this building stuff here and i don't know whether it's a problem having the light in there because in order to crop that light out i've had to lose some of this blur and you know use blur sparingly use it purposefully rather than just you know everything having a blurry line through it um but this gives me a bit more motion this feels a bit more um city-like than this one here which feels like there's something in the way it's almost like something was accidentally passing through here it feels like you meant to capture that movement of that presumed bus or something like that so i'm in a place where i i would be tempted to leave this in um just because i don't want to lose this and i don't really want to be cloning that out and there's nothing it's not causing any offense really um to my mind you've already done the keystone um which is good so we've got a very good keystone on here if i go to the uh the original let's just create a new from scratch variant we can see this was obviously looking up a little bit um and unfortunately with that you do get this parallax effect so um we're getting um sorry perspective distortion i'm talking about parallax too long for pano um you get perspective distortion where things disappear or get smaller as they go away from you so joe's already corrected for that and has done a good job with it um i would be tempted on this to give this a little bit more breathing room just just a touch and and if that means that we've got to go you know a little bit higher or something like that i'm going to actually allow it to crop outside the area this is a bit of a bit of a cheat ish because i'm going to leave you with a task that you're not going to like i want to give that light just a little bit more head space effectively around it now the downside is we end up with this corner cut out here because i've allowed capture one and this is the tick box to do it to crop outside the image when you do a keystone or a distortion adjustment capture one by default will keep the crop inside the limits that that adjustment has put in place if you want to take this out to a pixel editor outside of capture one and fill in this triangle you're gonna need to allow it to crop outside the image otherwise you're going to be constrained within so in this case you'll have to ignore the fact that we've got a little bit of a triangle but in a pixel editor i would either distort that out just pull it a little bit in the corner or use a content aware fill just to fill that triangle in but it gives me a bit more room up here with the light now with the overall image i'm a big fan unfortunately um whether that's right or wrong of slightly cooler city shots um what's going on here that's strange i don't know whether you can see that but my um my white balance isn't affecting the whole image even though it's on background so whether or not there's another shift going on somewhere else maybe there yeah and our base adjustment okay so i'm just going to cool this down and shift away from that green just a little bit so i'm trying to keep these natural in here but i just want it a bit cooler than where it is there this i get it it's tungsten bulbs it's it's a warm light that's coming onto the buildings but if i want to see things that feel like they're they've got energy emotion and stuff like that then cooler color temperatures tend to be um a little bit more um exciting now with this um blur in here you you'll notice quite often especially at night that the the motion blurs that you get have an effect of softening what's going on behind it and obviously because there's something in the way so let's try and fix that or not fix it but let's try and put another option in so you can choose whether or not you want to leave it like it i'm going to put in a little gradient filter like this just up there so it affects here and doesn't affect up here so a new layer up here i'm going to call it bottom right and this affects down here more than it does up here and then nothing up here with that filter we've got a few options number one we can increase our clarity now clarity is going to affect the mid-tones more than anything else but it's not really fixing the the lack of detail i guess in there we could use structure the problem with using structure in a shot like this is structure if i push it too far you'll see you start to get noise and artifacts as well so we can use a bit of structure but not too much instead what we're going to use is dehaze so dehaze slider along here and i'm going to choose this sort of pastel color in here to fix or maybe here let's try and get the right color for the right amount of haze that's probably about right there and i can get some clarity in here by using dehaze how has it done that well it's seen that because i've told it to take this sort of reddish orangey pinky sort of tone wherever you see that capture one assume you need to add in some detail some contrast to get rid of haze and we can see without that layer there there's nothing wrong with it that's your choice but here we get a much more distinct obvious harder line for that movement and again if you don't like that amount well we can always back it away to zero effect 100 effect or somewhere in the middle so i'd be in a place where i'd from a feel i'd come into there um i'd almost also look at potentially in our color editor when we go to our base adjustments layer because joe's built a layer that that has everything filled but in our color editor i'm going to go to our advanced editor go to this sort of yellowy greeny sort of area here not so much the reds and oranges and just maybe pull down their saturation a touch and maybe pull down their lightness a little bit too well now we'll leave their lightness where it was but just to take away some of that real rich green um that i in my head looks a little bit distracting and just keeps it a bit cleaner so that's where i would get to and it also means that this light up here becomes more neutral rather than this really really rich orange now again as an overriding principle that's one interpretation of that shot it doesn't mean it's right it doesn't mean it's wrong it's just what i would do with that shot i might pull up even shadows a touch in there as well but that's where i'd get to on the right that's your original on the left it honestly is your choice but my gut feel would be i wouldn't necessarily remove that light because i lose too much of the energy in that shot but you will have to fill in that that little triangle okay uh claudia so easier to clone out the light than filling in the triangle maybe maybe not so content aware fill in a in a pixel editor will do a really really quick job of fixing that triangle this light the problem with trying to clone out that light is you can't just clone out the light you've got to clone out the entire sort of crown around it all of the light flare and the impact of it and when you start looking at things like this cable getting affected by it you know what do i do do i remove all the cables as well so i think removing the light actually becomes a slightly bigger task um yeah eric why does the upgrade have to be 200 to move from 21 to 22 um because the people that sell it have decided that it is um is the short answer um i don't capture one's pricing they do um you know it's to be honest this this loop gets going around every year um why is it so much to go to upgrade why is it you know why do i have to switch to a subscription you don't um you don't have to upgrade you don't have to switch to a subscription if those are features that people like um then to some people will be worth the upgrade to some people it may not but yeah life's about choices um so i i can't i can't comment really on their pricing strategies it's not mine um but that is what the upgrade cost is um so people need to make their decisions based on that um what i would say just as a bit of a mindset um alteration i guess um i see people spend a thousand dollars on a tripod 200 on a filter and then buy 10 filters i see them upgrade their camera every year and when you look at a filter you say to someone how often do you use that filter and they'll say oh once every five shot or once every five scenes or something like that okay how often do you use your raw editor probably every photograph that you take so i would argue it's probably one of the cheaper aspects of your kit bag um regardless but yeah to different people different um different values are placed on different things but that's how the world works so all good right um other than that i think we're all good for this week so we're back into the editing east stuff uh in the meantime between now and next time you are all welcome to contribute chat away um ask questions have issues um there are a lot of people in that facebook group that will try and help where they can um between now and next time if you want to have uh or want us to have a look at one of your images then feel free so upgrade or upgrade upload them sorry to poor e5.wetransfer.com please include your name if you don't include your name we will not include your images that's very simple we will cover as many images as we can we are as i say getting back to the editing bit rather than the feature review we'll catch you the next time around with that stuff in the meantime that's how to get in touch with us feel free to do so and we will catch you next time we're live in the meantime look after yourselves stay safe and we'll catch you then cheers bye you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 4,866

Keywords: Capture One, Capture, One, Post Processing, Editing, Phase One, Capture One Pro, Examples, Training, Learn, Lessons, RAW, Photo Editing, How To, Guide, Variants, Clarity, Tools, Masks, Natural, Histogram, Processing, Gradient, Support, Q&A, Edit, Adjustments, Contrast, Color, Exposure, 21, Landscape, Curve, Mask, Luma Range, Custom, Style, Brush, Upgrade, Layers, Filters, Adobe, Lightroom, Highlight, Recovery, Sunset, Grading, Colour, Editor, Fix, Radial, Magic Brush, 14.4, Export Tab, Export, Tool, Process, Keystone, ExportTabIsBack

Id: L-y5Pz-mbHA

Length: 62min 37sec (3757 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021