Live Editing Sessions - Capture One - 29th October 2020

hello everyone uh thursday gang uh back to the thursday gang rather than the monday gang which was confusing people so um hi all of you um from wherever you are most of you are sat in rain like i am at the moment um but there we go uh let's have a couple of questions um that were in the commenty stuff so let's just have a little look one of them was bruce's um from monday's session so uh what kind of helicopter were you in um it says a that one was a eurocopter so an ec120 um and were the does on or off so it depends on the helicopter so that yes the doors were well they were open in that case um so if you're in something small like a um r44 or something like that or even r22 if you want to go really small um you literally take the doors off and fly um on something like a eurocopter you can fly completely with the doors open which is what we did or you can fly faster with the doors closed get to where you want to shoot and then just clip clip and then on and uh slide the door open rather than removing it removing it in flight is a bit of a challenging way to put it um so there we go um that's bruce's question uh and then the other one where were we uh before we get going oh it's from um dick about flattening the layers and we'll cover it in a second but the answer is no you can't um so it it it doesn't actually save you any file size really um and we'll talk about that in a second um so let's get into uh today's session so as normal for those of you that have been on for a few times you know that we are using the current latest release version so no betas no weird versions or anything like that this is the latest production version which is 13.1.3 please if you're on uh the latest version so capture 120 13 depending on whether you look at software or marketing material make sure you've done the point updates the point 1.3 it fixes some bugs it also adds extra camera and lens support and all that other stuff um so please make sure you're on the latest one if you don't have capture one at all go to captureone.com download it for free use it for free for 30 days um there's no restrictions on it's not like these trials where i don't know there's a watermark and stuff like that it's just a free version of it that you can use um and uh if you don't have it at all that's a good way of going forward if you do have it on an older version bear in mind and you'll have heard all the rumors already out there and we talked about on monday there is a new version coming out so have a look at offers that are going to come up um hopefully um on all the upgrades but for today we're on 13.1.3 which is today's or as of now current version so let's get into capture one uh so one let's go back on to the layers question um so dick you were you disappointed um in the answer but i'd question as to why you need to flatten the layers because so the actual capture one file is effective there is no such thing as a catchy one file in that sense you've got the raw data and then you've got the layers or the adjustments that are effectively made to that raw data and that's stored in either the catalog or the session file depending on which way you choose to organize so if you wanted the flat file out then you'd export it as i don't know tiff jpeg whatever whatever takes your fancy um that's going to be a flattened version so that's the version of your file which is the combination of your raw file and the edits but that version if i say that i was a 16-bit tiff if my raw is let's say 20 meg my 16-bit tiff is probably going to be around about 180 to 200 makes something like that um so that's the flattened version and you can't then go back into the edit the capture one file is tiny you know it's it's a couple of meg at most um because all it's storing is the adjustments and the um and the file itself if however you want to um export as effectively one file to give to someone in capture one instead of um exporting as a tiff um in this sense what you do is you go to your export menu and you choose originals and under originals you can choose to export with whatever names and so on as an eip and the eip file is basically the transportable version it's like a suitcase which has got the raw file and the adjustment built into the one eip file and then you can give that to anyone else with capture one and they can open it up um so eip is effectively your portable version of capture one's adjustments on top of the raw file and there's to be a lot smaller than an exported tiff which is a flat version of the file so hopefully that sort of helps a little bit um but if there was another reason just let me know during the session dick and we'll we'll have a look at it okay so we're gonna start today with brian's shot of a mountain and i'm not sure whether this was the one that he brought up in the facebook group another way um or whether it's a different one however we've got two versions of the same mountain so this one and this one i'm personally drawn to this one even though i'm going to crop it and the reason is this one i feel like we need some more space around it so it's a really nice shot of the mountains sunrise sunset i'm not sure which one but i want to give it a bit of breathing room um off to the side um pretty much down here so what we're going to do is we're going to start from this version here check that our lens profile is loaded in which it has but 5.6 we're not going to load into fraction correction it's probably not going to do any harm but we don't need to you can see capture one in the lens profile has already put on 100 distortion so it knows that on that rf lens um on the camera which i'm presuming is a eos r or an r5 or rp okay on that lens with that camera capture one's decided that you need some distortion correction if i turn this off you'll see that it pinches back in so effectively it's a punch correction to bring the uh to bring the frame correct and make sure all the lines are straight bit difficult to see in a mountain i get that so if i go to my crop tool i'm going to choose so at the top you've got crop and we can choose one of the presets you can add your own aspect ratio if you want or if you want to stick with what you've already got you can go to original you can use unconstrained and use the keyboard modifiers things like the shift key and so on to override the handles but if you want to stick to the original crop factor just leave it as original and then it means that as i pull these handles in it's going to keep them um in the right way so i'm going to crop this in to about here i'm going to lift this up just a touch this moon ironically is a little bit annoying because i wish that was a bit more in the frame so we've got a decision to make effectively um so in terms of artist artistically do we like the moon right on the edge of the frame and the print no we don't was the moon there yes it was so it's a bit of a tough call to remove the moon but it's actually a bit distracting in this shot if only it was a little bit further in um now i don't really want to get into the position where we're moving the moon um certainly yeah whole new or a whole uh whole count of worms if we start playing around with the moon and the stars and stuff like that um but in this framing here and we'll come back to the moon in a second it just feels a bit more open than this tight frame here now there are a couple of things we might want to look at in this shot so number one we don't have anything that's massively overexposed if i turn my exposure warning on up here nothing in there we can check the exposure warnings working by ramping it up and we can see around these lines we've got it there so we don't have any exposure or overexposure in the shop we don't have to worry about my highlights which is great but to me and i think we talked about this a little bit in the um in the facebook group brian on another show i'm sure is your shot anyway um this is looking a little bit green um the the snow down here and it's just where it's sat in the shade so to me i'd sort of be tempted to try and fix this um so in my head uh let's choose our white balance picker and let's just try and choose the snow okay it's not done a bad job now we've lost some of the blue tones which is a problem but it still kept it relatively green and look at that shift on white balance it's gone from five thousand and something i think it's just i don't know 6 337 right the way up to let's just go again uh let's pick a bit down here 10 520 so it's a massive shift towards warm which is a little bit of a problem so we need to go somewhere in between we've talked about this before the white balance picker is great on a standard day with standard daylight no golden hour no shade no nothing like that because all of those things change what looks what appears white in your shot so we can't really use this picker when it comes to things like sunsets it just doesn't work so instead we've got to do it by eye and actually my preference is always to do it by eye anyway and remember these two scales we've got kelvin which goes from cold so blue up to warm so orangey yellow and then you've got tin which was originally to factor in or to counter balance color cast that comes in filters so tint goes from green to pink and it's basically because pieces of glass that you put in front of your camera are either going to have a pink tint or a green tint and you can use the tint slider to counter it but we can also use the tint slider to remove any green hint effectively in shadows where we've got a white balance shift like this so let's have a look at overall up here i'm pretty happy with this guy might want to go a little bit cooler and it's this tint i'm just going to change there and if we go to before and after just with that change you'll see now what i mean by this just felt green it feels a bit too green tint and a bit too cold whereas on here with this switch actually this is now maybe a little bit too pink even so we can probably calm this down a little bit there to keep it neutral and one of the ways that we can see that it's neutral actually it's still a little bit blue but as i move my mouse over the screen this readout up here is giving me red green blue and luminosity readouts so as i move my mouse over the white snow we can see it's a little bit blue which actually explains why the auto white balance would have pulled that all the way up let's get back to that ten thousand now when i move it over here we can see it's evened up a little bit 92 88 94 it's a little bit more even than it was when we pulled it back down to how it was shot here look at that that skew to 112 blue versus 88 green red at 83. so that's what the white balance tool is actually doing it's effectively getting all of those numbers to be equal to make them white and that's why you get that massive swing so what we're going to do is we're going to just warm it up a bit we're not going to fix all of that blue tint completely but we get it there so it's looking a bit more neutral um so let's just have a look there from there to there i'm happier with this but now we've got the other tweaks that we can make uh one question uh jd i'm going to pull it up just because um you said later in the session but i'll forget that you asked the question um capture one released a version 10 keyboards that still work with version 20. um so it does um but you're going to be missing some of the buttons so what happened in version 20 is some of the keyboard shortcuts changed i think you're talking about the logic keyboard um i used one for for quite a while actually they were actually really good um but in version 20 you had things like the y key and the q key that were introduced with some of the new um tools and they haven't been updated on that logic keyboard so unfortunately it's um it's a little bit out of date now unless you want to remove those keyboard shortcuts um so yes it will still work with version 20 but you're not going to have certain functions um clearly labeled let's say on the keyboard this will obviously work if you press the white key okay um so and then where are we allen's just asked why not correct the white balance on the mountain with the layer um simply because this one is a global white balance change and i'm going to do it to the whole background i can do it on a field layer if i want to so i can create a brand new adjustment layer that's filled here and i could do the white balance change um that's personal choice in in my head logically i tend to do the overall global stuff on the background layer because i know that that's going to be the same for the whole image from that point onwards when we get into local adjustments then all of those ones are built up as a layer over the top okay um sand june's just asked uh what's the uh the fourth number so uh well yeah fun one so you've got red green and blue and that's out of a scale of zero down to two five five um so two five five being the most red the most green the most blue and zero being none of it so it's effectively the the value of rgb the gray number is the luminosity so effectively a form of average of those numbers it's not quite the midpoint if you look at the numbers that don't quite work out at the midpoint but it's the same thing as if i switch down here in curves you see this curve here you've got this um there's a slight bearing so i just want to pick on another picture so we're going to go to this picture just to see the difference no no not enough giving you a preview of what we're going to go through there we go um so this one we've got quite a lot of different see between the red and the green and the blue channel so if i move my mouse over here we can see we've got one two eight one two or one seven one two two seven the luminosity so effectively that the grayscale version of it is 164. and what that's referring to is if i took all of these values here merge them together and switch to a loomer curve rather than a loomer version of the histogram that's what it looks like and that's the readout that you're getting at that point so it's telling you a form of brightness so luminosity reading to that effectively brightness from 0 to 255 without any color sway or influence or whatever um that you get with that okay so let's go back to our mountain um so we've got our global change there it's already feeling a bit warmer um what i want to do then is pull up some of this stuff down the bottom now the temptation and the default i guess for us now because we're all used to it is let's use a filled layer and turn our mask on go to a luma range and we say well we only want to adjust the dark parts of the mountain yeah that looks pretty good let's put a bit of a softening into that as well and then with that we could effectively pull up our exposure but i don't like the effect that's going to give us because the effect feels unnatural and by unnatural i mean it couldn't have been created in the camera there's no filter that you have in the camera that can draw a nice jagged edge that perfectly matches that mountain so it doesn't really make sense if it's done that i would personally prefer something a little bit more subtle so the way that i'm going to do it i'm going to create a brand new layer an empty layer with a gradient mask so we've got obviously two ways of dealing with gradients one is in the field you typically cut light with a graduated filter so you have the darker part of the filter on the top lighter part on the bottom and you let more light into the bottom than you do to the top i don't know whether brian used a grad filter on this but let's assume not because we've got this massive variation between these two but instead i can do it in software so i'm just going to draw a graduated filter that comes from down here to up here because i want whatever i do to fall off naturally as it gets near the top so even though i'm going to focus purely on the shadows and the black on in terms of the sliders i don't want to have as much of an effect up here with that as i do down here because i want this to fall off and look natural at the top of the mountain i don't want this to start looking cartoony by over doing it and then all of a sudden the background sky is is a problem okay so oh yeah so pablo was saying i was thinking only in global blacks you know you can of course you can so let's do that globally let's just go to a completely filled layer um i'm just going to call this grad bottom so here's my filled layer now if i pull up shadows for example and pull up black well black is going to affect this darker part of the image anyway so let's just temporarily undo that so we can see down here this is dark this is this is fully in the uh in the black section of the slider as i move my mouse around you get the orange bar on histogram that's telling us look at where it's where it's actually that bottom sort of five percent this is going to be affected by the black slider up here bit lighter it's more in the shadow slider so as i affect the shadows and bring them up it's going to affect the mountain more as i pull up the blacks it's going to affect down here more but you see how false this looks it it just doesn't it doesn't look real um and it's because we've flattened and crushed all of those shadows all the all the contrast in this image and then it just stops all of that that crushing just stops the second we get beyond the the shadows and into the sky so we've got a hyper realistic sky because it's real and a hyper unrealistic set of shadows and i don't like that so instead what i would do is yes that's a method but instead of doing it all the way up into all the shadows we actually have it fall off as we get nearer towards the sky so we don't notice the blend as much so if i pull up the shadows just a little bit again be really careful with this and the blacks just a little bit in fact that's too much there even to there that's enough now with this base and going back to i can't remember who asked um about it but with this base we can play with our white balance a bit more so if i want to warm the mountain down here we can if i want to cool the mountain i can but of course it's going to fall off as it gets nearer to the top of that mountain peak so i'm actually going to warm it up a little bit and put a little bit more of a tint on there so that to me and that's like let's actually be fair so let's do a 20 and a four on the other adjustment layer so if i set this one to 20 and that to four if i look at the differences between this one and this one this one just seems to fall off more naturally as you get nearer and nearer the top of the mountain and then i don't notice that difference into the sky this one just has a sort of flattening effect over the mountain and it's subtle don't get me wrong but it does make a difference when you're looking it on a wall okay uh so let's just get rid of that one so that's our graduated bottom filter so on there we've got our white balance has been slightly warmed we've got a slight um shift of tint up to about uh up to a couple of points more the shadows have been lifted the blacks have been lifted and what we're also going to do is add a touch of clarity now because it's all sat in the shadows down at the bottom we can be a little bit aggressive with this we can put some structure on too but let's just have a look at without and with so that's without and that's with again without and with and again just with clarity i want that clarity to fall off before it gets up here the reason being because i don't want to see halos over the top of my mountain where there's a big discrepancy or disparity between the dark mountain the the bright sky so let's uh uh yeah so i also said he spotted this thing um oh i think he's following this thing or are you talking about another one another sunspot no i think we're talking about this one on the right hand side um but anyway yeah i like this one um little sun coming through a little peak um and that's one of the other reasons why i've kept this whole piece in there okay so that's then lifted everything we've got a lot more um texture and detail in that bottom part of the mountain and then we can play with the sky a little bit differently so let's add a new empty layer and we're going to call this one sky with our sky again to make sure that it feels natural and falls off we're not going to paint a perfect mask around the sky we're going to do this so we've got literally that top part of the sky built in and it drops off as we get further down now with this part of the sky what i'm going to do is go to our color editor and we're going to do something a little bit weird we're going to go to our skin tone so skin tone was designed to even up the color in someone's skin into the name but we can also use it on the sky we've done it a few times before i'm just going to do it again on here so i'm choosing this area of color so anything that sits inside this arc and i started by picking somewhere on the sky with that little picker tool and then i've got two sets of sliders the first slider says what to do with that color the second slider says how uniform all of the colors in the arc need to behave so let's have a little place if i increase the saturation on the blue and decreased our lightness in fact we could even play with the hue so we can make it a little greener it's very subtle a little bit pinker let's just leave that where it was but we are going to ramp up the saturation and i'm now going to make the sky more uniform in saturation in lightness so look at this difference here unfortunately it's clipping the mountain as well we might have to remove that in a second but what it's doing let me just temporarily undo this so you can see so there's without there's width so if we get this mountings we're going to remove that in a second but without and with and what we've done is we've made the whole sky just lift a little bit but not just one color within the sky effectively this entire arc of color so anything that falls within this arc we've then said to it boost the saturation by quite a way actually 22 pull down the lightness let's pull down a little bit of the luminosity in it we're going to push that a bit more but any color within this mask here based on where this original dot was placed needs to be really uniform it needs to be very similar to its neighbors so the hue needs to be almost the same saturation needs to be equivalent across the entire range of color and the lightness needs to be mostly the same as well so that just has a way of smoothing out any discrepancies in color saturation any of that stuff in the sky now i mentioned we've got a bit of an issue where that's actually affecting the mountain why well because some of this stuff was blue we knew that so i'm going to right click on here and say rasterize mask so that makes it no longer editable as a gradient we literally have a mask there and then in here i'm going to choose my eraser brush and we're going to make sure we're up at 100 so i want none of it but a really really soft edge and i'm just going to erase out the mountain from that color mask there so now we don't have the mountain affected by so if i do my temporary undo and redo we can see it's affecting the sky but not the mountain cool um is there maybe there's a bit of a temptation i could put in a bit of a exposure drop on it so let's just pull that down a bit makes it a bit moodier for sure um and we could pull in our highlights just a touch but i'm really conscious of not making this whole image look too dark so what i might do then over the top of this is do a filled adjustment layer and with my filled layer if i want to i can play with levels just to tweak the image a little bit brighter if i really wanted to and that'll be it pretty much um so um mobius the the arc sliders next to the color wheel um so we covered that on monday's session so i'll go in i went into it on more uh in more detail on monday um but just as a quick example here so just so you can see so these arc sliders effectively the further you get out from the middle the more saturation so zero saturation through to 100 saturation of this color and then the sliders these arc things tell it how much latitude or how much margin it's got to play left and right of this hue so the hue is the position in the middle left and right is the extent of the other colors that we want to include in that arc and the further you come out this is fully saturated through to no saturation in the middle okay uh what steve why did i not use the advanced color wheel uh which is the one we're on at the moment um because the advanced color wheel gives me a lot more room to do more saturation shift and more hue shift but it doesn't have that extra set of sliders about uniformity we'll cover in the another one i know we've got an image of later but effectively that gives us um so yeah that's the question so the skin tone um version is effectively the advanced color wheel but with a reduction in the amount of change you can make to things like saturation but with the added benefit that we can tell all of the colors that are in that arc to behave more uniformly than you can on the advanced one so if you look on the advanced one we don't have that option to do it and that's why to me the skin tone thing's a bit of a it's named wrong it was designed originally so that if you have blemishes on skin or variations in tone on skin you could choose a skin tone and effectively for one of a better phrase flatten out the tones on the skin and make them more uniform but it also works on sky it also works on water it also works on green grass and all the other stuff okay uh let's just have one final little before after on here so again all of these things were really small changes but do you now see what i mean by this mountain started off looking quite green so when you first look at it it's like okay that's fine when you start tweaking it and you see how green this is to what would be all and remember as well we didn't actually push it all the way up to be completely white if we look at our rgb values at the top it's still shifted towards blue as one two two blue versus 106 104 for red and green so be careful with the fact that your eyes will adjust and see snow as white when actually maybe it wasn't uh maybe it wasn't quite there okay uh so a couple questions is it possible to create a linear gradient mask that only covers part of a frame i.e it covers the middle third vertically not quite sure what you mean nick so in terms of a linear gradient mask it will always go from 100 to zero percent you can change the the fall off of that um but what you'd have to do effectively so if you wanted it to stop for whatever reason i'm not sure why but um let's create a new layer so you can see so just do a test gradient and i'll just show you this is going to ruin the image so don't don't judge the image but let's just turn our mask on so if i did a gradient like that this is always going to be 100 this is always going to be zero and so on what i'd have to do if i wanted to stop it there would be rasterize that mask get my eraser and effectively either do it through lines but you know i could do that uh let's just turn off my before and after to there so there i'm just holding down the shift key in between each dot um and then i could it's a bit messy to do um because i can't fill this erase hole um i could do it that way um if that's what you mean but i may have misunderstood what you meant um so yeah uh i'm not sure exactly why but if that's not what you meant um let me know nick in the comments but if it is what you meant then yes it's possible to do it but i'm not sure what effect you're gonna get with that mask because if i do anything with it it's just gonna look really weird as a fall off but yeah um okay so uh one other question where were we uh can you show us the lightroom defectors how you dehaze and capture one since there is no dehaze slider um oh so is a very current conversation so d haze um i'll put my position very clearly i don't believe there can be one dehaze slider um and that goes for uh lightroom as well as other products the reason is and this is where it's a little frustrating because people seem to want a quick fix for everything haze doesn't come in one form so the haze that comes from street lights at night is different to the haze that comes from um the sun in the morning or the fog in san francisco or the pollution over shanghai all of those different versions of haze have completely different properties and completely different ways of removing them so that it just if someone says to me there's one slider that does all of this with no intervention from the user whatsoever i just don't believe it and so far in every one that i've tested i can do it better manually and and would continue to do so so i think there's a place for those sliders and i think as a quick starter for 10 it's a good way of seeing how clear we can get the image but typically you're talking about changing the curve you're talking about changing the um clarity um within an image and if you go onto our youtube there's a section on youtube um for pro tips and in there is a d haze um video it's about 20 minutes long and it covers exactly um how to do it better in my view um than a lightroom slider so have a look um have a play but the one thing i would say is it depends on the haze so what you'll do is you'll over time you'll learn that certain haze needs a different approach to others to get the clearest clearest results okay so uh let's go on to our next shot which was jerry's um so jerry asked me to look at this shot and i'm i'm sort of struggling a little bit because i'm not sure what our subject is on this shot um and we've got these cars in the background here which are a bit distracting we're not quite level so it looks like it was taken slightly off so we're going to do a bit of keystoning for sure and i might have to do an extreme crop to make this um really stand out so let's just run through it very quickly here's our horizontal keystone tool so up here the default is going to be vertical when you choose a keystone from capture one we can choose four-way keystone or horizontal in this case i'm not worried about the vertical lines it's the horizontal lines we've got this leaning in here and this pavement going away here so we're going to use these lines and i'm just drawing the or moving the dots so that this line matches that pavement and i'm going to move this dot so that it matches that roof now try and do this as far away from the center as possible because it means that small variations when you might get it slightly wrong don't have quite such a big impact um due to the angle let's hit apply okay that's done a good job we've now got our level roof um so this looks a bit more uh a bit more purposed and i'm going to leave with our original crop in place and we're going to do quite a heavy crop on this shot i think so i'm going to lose this gap here we can't lose all the gaps we just lose all the photo if we do but what we can do is come into sort of there that sort of works okay so this feels like a better shot um i'm still not entirely sure what we're trying to draw the viewers attention to but what we can do is obviously recover some of these highlights here and sort out down here so i'm actually going to do this on the background there because it's pretty global that we're doing this so number one let's pull our highlights in and whites in as well so if i go to a before and after so we can see that's before that's after so the camera captured all of this extra texture in here but obviously with the light it was blown out well we can recover that back within reason um using these two sliders we can pull up shadow again but that's going to flatten everything so remember with shadow and we talk about it quite a bit shadow and black recovery have the effect of flattening an image because what's happening is you're crushing all that contrast into the middle of the shot so you really should decide which one is the driver um in the correction so are you trying to pull up things that are in the bottom five percent of the histogram if so use the black slider if it's all of the shadows the bottom 25 percent of the slide of the histogram use the shadow slider but try not to use both of them together because if you do you're sort of cartooning on top of cartoon it doesn't really work so in this case a little bit of shadow recovery a little bit more black that works and we can pull a bit of contrast or a bit of clarity up and some structure to get some of this stuff here uh where the edges and textures have some detail in and then that's sort of where we can get to um so i'm sort of in a place of you know it's improved over the original we've got more color in there we've got the highlights back we've got everything recovered um it's certainly a very different crop um to what we had so if i create a new variant and show the oh sorry and let's just reset there we go so there's our original there's our final um but i'm not sure what we're trying to leave the viewer to see um and that's a bit of a struggle for me on that shot okay um barry sent in this shot and actually was really useful um with some of the shots that you guys send in um you've started including the eip so what that file i was talking about earlier the the capture one portable version of the um the file um is really really useful because i can see not just the raw but i can also see the edits that people have made and we can see the layers and everything like that so going back to i think was it nick's question um i can't remember um sorry um but whoever it was that asked it earlier um going back to that question about you know can i flatten the capture one file i wouldn't um i would keep if anything what i would do when you're finished and you're happy with the final image export the eip so that's you know right click go to export but you go to originals rather than variants um and that includes all the so effectively the raw file plus all these layers and adjustments and then if you export a flattened tiff make sure it's 16 bit if you can to keep all the color range in there but effectively those are your two outputs from capture one so the eip in this case i can see what barry's added in and i can see our original image and i'm going to say that the the edited one has one problem well two issues um that i can see with it that make it a bit uncomfortable in my eye number one we've got a bit of a saturation boost going on it's shifted it to be more blue let me just go and compare here so the that blue has become really saturated um which you know can happen you can have days like this i've seen them um but from the original there's quite a big variant but more concerning to me um and i'm just going to go on to our before and after look at all the detail that we've lost so let me just zoom into here so we can really see so here's all this detail with all of this foliage and the the hor frost i think it's for frost someone said um that's landed on all of that vegetation so you've got all of those little ice crystals and everything like that and all the texture in the snow here but then this has been such or so punched in contrast that we lose all that detail um and to me that's a bit of a shame to lose so while i get that this gives it a bit more punch i wouldn't have done it to that extent um because it just feels like you're you're punching too much to the point where and if i for instance if i look for some reason my um huh interesting one of my keyboard shortcuts is uh let's reset to what i didn't want um so as i move my mouse over here we can see you know these are really really close to the edge they're almost in the clipping point um whereas down here they weren't they were in the upper highlights um they weren't quite that punchy as highlights so we've got two options one is i can start from here but two we're probably going to do it from barry's adjustment and we're just going to tone some of them down a little bit so um if i turn this layer off and on we can see that that contrast adjustment is the biggest thing that's an issue here with this layer because if i turn this layer off everything starts to sort of calm down a little bit everything starts to feel a bit more comfortable again and all it is is this curve um so this is a standard s-curve to a certain extent you know it's less curved here but what's happened is we've punched all of these highlights here so the stuff that's in the top one third of the image and you can see on this curve what barry's done is it's pulled it up so we get that big contrast but that big contrast comes at a price which is we've lost some of the detail and the texture down here so again let's just turn it off and on and off and on it's just too much so we could calm down the curve but actually what i found is the only thing this layer is doing is that curve so i'm going to turn it off um i don't think we need it because the other thing as well with this curve is this bottom part here you can see was affecting this lake down here i think we can do this another way so i'm going to delete that layer and that's why we've got our global adjustment which strangely actually calms things down so as you see when i turn this on we get more detail back which tells me something's gone on somewhere in either the background or it's not in our curve maybe it's an rgb no um so there's something yeah there's something a bit weird what's going on here this is a bit of a mystery isn't it so there's our original there we are there is it perhaps with our film standard no because if we go into there this is going to be set to auto hmm okay let's try sending this into auto so for some reason this raw and i can't quite work out immediately what it is that's done it but for some reason this raw even the background with no adjustments made to it has had some weird contrast addition so if anyone can see it because i can't um let me know but otherwise we're going to start from here i think um because this global adjustment here has brought everything back so it's brought some clarity back it's brought up our highlights and stuff like that um but the background without it doesn't have that which is a bit strange so let's do what we should have done let's start from here um with this actually i like the crop that barry chose um i don't know whether it was a two by one but let's assume it was um so we're gonna come up to roughly the same sort of position in fact it must have been maybe a three by two but let's come into there i think uh we can go to there okay so that feels like a nice crop it's good it's very similar to what we had in barry's crop as well but with this we're just going to make sure that we're protecting all those details so let's go into here and let's think about what we want to do to protect those so number one we can pull down the whites a little bit and pull down our highlights the reason i'm doing this is similar to what i did last week on the one with the rocks that i showed you from a helicopter which is almost putting a bit of a fire blanket over those highlights because what i'm then gonna do is use levels to try and punch the image a little bit so remember contrast and levels effectively take that histogram and they pull things so contrast literally goes to the middle and it says right everything everything brighter than one two eight make brighter again everything darker make darker again and that's how it does contrast levels we can do it a little bit more granularly but also we've got a curve that we can play with as well so in this case as i pull down our highlight level that's going to make everything get brighter so our input versus output when i do that the stuff that's already near to 255 up here so if i just go up to here at 249 248 246 that could clip so if i were to undo this let's go up here we're a little bit higher again so we're at 251 250247 so effectively by pulling down these highlights and the whites are protecting them that gives me a little more latitude to be able to pull in the overall levels and the overall shadows if i need to protect these shadows as well of the image and that just gives us an image that just pops a little bit more but you see we haven't lost any detail in fact we've gained some so if i go back into this snow area here there's our original there's our version with those adjustments so the image now there's our original again there's the version so the image now pops but it's popping in a way that hasn't pushed any highlights off the end they're not overexposed it hasn't pushed any shadows off the end so they're not underexposed by using some of the hdr tool against this level adjustment and it just gives me a bit more latitude to be able to pull even more of this up a little bit brighter some of you in on the facebook group were asking about the middle slider so effectively it's the same as the um as the uh top and bottom um i've seen um photoshop we used to use it was gamma you could put in a zero point whatever adjustment but if you don't touch the middle slider it will move proportionately to the change here and the change there and then you can adjust it and fine tune it a little bit if you want and in this case i'm actually going to make it so that our image ends up with a slight bias towards the darks so we've got an overall lift an overall punch and an overall increase in contrast but we're pushing most of the tones back down a little bit so we've got our highlight points as the contrast points and everything else with all of its full detail which looks fantastic on top of that i can push up brightness a little bit i can afford to do that because again i've protected some of those highlights with our hdr tool and then on top of that you notice i'm doing all this on background which is not normal but that's where we're at um so with our clarity tool we can pull up a little bit so let's just do a before and after so that's without clarity change that's with the clarity change very very minor in fact almost um perceivable to a certain extent um but our structure changed let me do it to 100 so you can see structure will pull up all of this detail in that frost but too much if you overdo it so let's go into here so without that let's go with that it now looks a bit blurry if anything with over sharp so structure and clarity and we say this quite a lot use them sparingly so try and use as little as you need to have an impact but no more so there with our before and after let's have a look at the difference so you see how everything's just got a bit crisper and when we're talking about frost and frozen stuff and ice and snow it's really nice if you can get it to a place where it's nice and tight and sharp and crisp but not so you're causing the viewer's eyes to bleed do not do it too much we could um i can't remember who asked it it may have been jed i think on facebook last last couple days was asking about why not use the sharpening tool we can do it with the sharpening tool but in this case it's the texture i want to bring out and structure does that out of the box pretty well anyway we could do it with sharpening but i'm not worried about edges and lines they're all sharp anyway it's the texture i'm trying to get out and that's what structure does really well and then we can look at that difference up there if we want to increase our blues for example well let's go to our color editor oops and i'm going to choose the advanced one so rather than making a uniform it doesn't make sense to make this uniform because there is there is difference in the sky you've got the cloud going through it um so in this case i'm just going to stretch that out there and with this i can punch that hue a little bit now bit of a tip if i pull the sorry the saturation if i pull the saturation up you see how that goes all rather quite putrid pull the lightness down to keep it natural so saturation you really don't want to be pushing too much but if you do push it try and pull lightness down as well which keeps it more natural and what you're going to see is i'm doing this to a much smaller extent than i started but it does have an impact so if i temporarily undo that's without and that's with the change we can see that it has had a change now if i go onto this one here which is the arc that i created let's just put our saturation up too much don't worry we're gonna fix that now with hue i can change the feel of this to be more towards the pink side so if we look at this wheel so we can shift the hue around to the pink or if i shift it the other way it goes more to the green side so in this case i'm going to shift it slightly just slightly towards the pink side i'm going to pull that saturation right down again so that we're not overdoing it for sure and that just then gets rid of any of that again sort of green tint that we've got going on um in certain spots now if i just move my mouse over the snow i just want to do that one check that we did earlier so look at those numbers at the top two five five two five five two five or sorry two two five two three five two two three that's telling me that's pretty much neutral white which is great news um we don't have to do much in the way of white balance change if we did want to well we can do that manually and all i'd be tempted to do is just to knock out a bit more green and we get to there now one final thing i might and this is down to personal choice i might put a very very soft gradient mask on there and just knock that exposure down a little bit we do have our lens profile loaded in it doesn't have distortion correction need on it there might be some diffraction but to be honest i'm not seeing much of it out here and actually our structure has fixed that right up anyway and there we go so we go from there flat to here a lot more crisp but what we don't have and actually we ended up i actually uh removed unfortunately the version that barry sent in but i think it was this yeah so in this version here just do that that so we can focus on them on their own so in the version that was sent in with the adjustments it's just too powerful it's just too strong is too much contrast in it for my eye i want it to feel more natural and that's where we get to with this if i create another version of this but the original so we go from original here to the edit that i've just done and now you'll see when i go to this bird and it's just a bit too much um it just hurts a bit to me that's a wonderful photo it's a really nice photo it's really well captured and they're just small changes we're making to really um emphasize things i could if i wanted to um we could spend a little bit of time up here on the trees so if i do up here a little bit of a mask um we may as well leave it at 100 for the sake of this and just in those trees we could pop in just a touch more clarity um so we could make them pop a little bit more that's a nice addition um but you don't have to do that the key is to keep it looking natural um and for me that to there is a nice um nice way of enhancing it um here we just go a little bit a little bit over um so yeah that'll be where we go okay so uh that's that one and then we have gondola if i spell i said your name wrong i apologize but we'll go with that one for now um this is a shot from namibia i think um it's really really nice um scene we're just gonna add a little bit of drama to it basically so we've got a manufacturer profile loaded in remember if so the order i guess of hierarchy effectively we've got um the correct lens loaded in automatically wonderful use that lens profile um and and edit from there if not and you've got a manufacturer profile flagged in there it means that the camera has embedded the profile for that lens and camera into the file wonderful use that as well then if you don't have either of those use the generic one and make any adjustments from there what i wouldn't recommend unless you've tested it is choosing another random lens that seems very similar to yours because each lens even the difference between a 2.8 version of a lens and an f4 version of lens can be dramatic in terms of the result that you get when you do any distortion correction so your exact lens ideal manufacturer profile great if your exact lens isn't loaded in generic and then worst case scenario but you know you can play with it you can have a try but load in a similar lens but i wouldn't i'd stick to generic person so in this case we've got the manufacturer profile loaded in i'm going to go to chromatic aberration because it doesn't know this lens it's automatically done our analyze which we'd normally do manually anyway i'm not worried about diffraction i think we're pretty good out here yeah we're nice and sharp that's good there's no real sharpness fall off to worry about anyway so with that we're gonna go straight to our exposure tab which is where we spend most of our time we have got a little bit of light fall off which i can't of course edit on this version so around here with the vignette so i'm actually going to use a it's a dng it's not helpful for us either but um with our vignetting we can actually brighten those edges just to flatten out the image you see the difference so if i go to before and after we can see this has quite a heavy vignette whereas here we've flattened out those edges and they will become the same brightness so let's go on to our color editor again i said we'd come back to this skin tone so about trying to make all of this sky uniform so let's go on to a oops new filled layer so we want to fill everything and adjust everything with our skin tone tool go to the picker choose somewhere in the middle of all these tones we're going to expand this arc now if i had other blue stuff down here we'd want to remove it so we don't affect it with the color editor but actually we don't the only area blew up is it goes up here so i'm not too worried if the mask goes over other areas if i was worried of course i could go to the erase tool just do it and remove all of this other stuff so that we know if we are doing any color changes we're not affecting anything else in the image but actually it's going to be safe in this case anyway so what i'm saying is this whole arc here is what i want to affect and with it i'm going to boost the saturation a touch i'm going to pull down its lightness a touch but most importantly for anything in this arc i want it to behave uniform i want it to feel effectively flatter as the sky and the reason is because i want to draw the attention to the ground for all the texture so if i turn this off you can see there's variation in the sky turn it on and we've flattened everything it's become the same hue the same saturation the same lightness roughly i'm going to pull the saturation down a bit so i think it was a bit too much as it was there but do you see the difference if i do a before and after here there to there completely personal choice if you prefer not to do it then don't it's just to me i want to bring all the focus down here into this texture in the bottom so with that done let's go back to our exposure tab now we can have a bit of fun because i want to make this feel a bit more like a sunset and a bit more dramatic a bit more vivid so whereas in the previous shot with barry we had a lot of stuff that was out here on the edges of the histogram let's just go back to that shot in fact so you can see so on our histogram we've got stuff up here in the highlights and stuff down here in the shadows that i can hurt if i push the contrast too far whereas on here in gondola's image we've got a huge amount of room up here where there's no data there's no data in the highlights there's no real data in the shadows either so with our levels tool down here and again we can do it on a separate layer if we want to so let's go to a filled layer and we call it levels i'm just going to rename this one to be sky so we don't get confused so with our levels layer which has everything on there to see your mask press m on the keyboard remember and press enter to get rid of it but with our levels tool um set on one particular layer i'm just gonna pull this down here and pull our shadows up now remember what the levels tool is actually doing it's stretching the histogram and you can see it do it up there live so if i undo and redo so what it's doing is it's mapping that histogram and it's saying right if you were 210 before you're now 255 and obviously if you were 209 then you might be two five four point something or whatever and so on if you were six before so not quite black now push yourself to be zero so literally black on the black to white scale and those stretches allow us to add contrast and it's it's a version of what the contrast tool does but the contrast tool up here is a very very dumb blunt instrument what the contrast tool does is it takes pretty much the midpoint of one to eight it says right anything brighter make yourself brighter again anything darker make yourself darker again you'll see in here that i've made the the highlights or the the lighter parts of the image have a much more dramatic map a much more dramatic change than down in the shadows and the shadows have only moved six out of two five five so anything that was six is now zero in the um highlights and the whites this is 210 up to two five five it's a huge shift now in the contrast tool it would have done them evenly from that midpoint and that's why we don't tend to use the contrast tool unless you have a histogram which is smack bang in the middle um and that's what you were going to do with levels anyway but what we've already got now with this change is something that's just a bit more stark a bit more high contrast and then i'm going to do something weird which is unlike normally we'd always try and make sure it was mapping exactly what was there i'm going to artificially change our white balance here and i want it to have a bit more of a ready tone about it uh where are we with the image straps from steve sorry would the image strengthen when cropping a bit cut apart from the left over here um potentially um depends whether you like that negative space or not um one thing i have noticed however and i think it's come from my color editor overzealousness is we've got this stuff oh no it's just on the preview thankfully okay i was worried then so in the preview we've got these weird dots there that were appearing one point actually um i can't remember who was asking someone was asking on facebook the other day um about single pixels so when you see a hot pixel on the camera and the fact that when you fix them 100 um it doesn't it still chose as broken when you went into the full view so fit on the screen with capture one there is a slight discrepancy between your preview that's been generated and looking at the image at a hundred two hundred three hundred even sixty seven percent so at a hundred percent this looks fine back out at the preview in order to do that previewing it's got a little bit dotty out here which doesn't really make sense um always rely on it being a hundred percent um if it's correct at 100 that's what you're gonna get the preview is literally that it's a preview it can be a bit annoying because you think that something's gone wrong or you think that something's not quite right and you need to fix it when actually you zoom into 100 and you don't um but that's a that's a bit of a challenge um so as andy's just said i have to say congratulations for the last two of just a great couple of shots yeah they are um and if and genuinely this one here i love this shot i'm not exactly sure where it was pit polder i'm not sure but um it's a stunning location it's really really nice um so yeah cool on this one um so we've altered the white balance we've effectively reddened it a little bit and we've warmed it up a little bit um not too much and again it's all about doing that in variation oops sorry i've done that on the sky didn't mean to do that um let's go back on to our where was i oh yeah on our background um so with our background layer i'm just going to make sure we've got that arid stark sort of deserty look um in there then we've got debate as to whether or not you want to do that with the sky so we might as a result of shifting the white balance and now go back to our color editor advantage of it being on a layer and say actually we don't want to saturate it quite that much and let's just make sure this is looking good and again look at that difference out here when i go into 100 we get this lovely fall off in the cloud uh when i come out we get this horrible preview so always rely on the 100 view not the zoomed out one um where are we oh she said i want to get rid of the twig that goes into the sky in the middle um this one um if we if we mean that one okay um healing brush will do it but i may struggle with that um so let's have a look oh barry's just answered uh where you live fraser valley of bc nice um might have to add that to a list but we're all coming to barry's house um so let's just have a a little play with this again a bit more so number one i want to add some drama into this shot so we said that we could do that effectively through changing some of the white balance some of the level stuff but now i want to do some specifics um in the area so let's add in some shadow so with our shadow i'm just going to literally pick on a rough brush doesn't really matter i can go to a slow opacity and as i paint in with opacity every time i let go of the mouse and paint in another go what we're going to get is an add to that layer so each layer is or each each click is almost 20 some of you will remember from one a long time ago there's some complicated maths in how it does it um because it's an inverse equation but there's our mask and with our mask what i can now do is pull down exposure there now we get some nice long shadows as an effect with our background i can pull up the overall brightness in the image that's looking pretty nice and actually with the background we can afford to add in a punch of clarity a bit of structure it's looking pretty good um i might want to pull in let's just do a rad left i'm going to put in a very very subtle very subtle graduated filter into the left with a small exposure drop just so that we're picking up these lumps here and again just do another similar one right and it's a really really subtle amount um but i just want to pull not even that much down to there maybe i'm going to stretch this it's really soft just like that and that's kind of where i'd get to um so if we ignore the preview issue um we go from here lovely played lovely location lovely shot um it's captured really well we haven't lost any data and that means that we can play with this a lot more um and and that's really the key as long as you've got all the data that you want in your histogram you can play with these things to your heart's content but to me that's just added an extra bit of drama so what we've done is we've uniformed the sky a little bit so we've uh we've settled it a little bit more than it was we've added in some extra drama and contrast with our levels tool we've pulled down this area here selectively so our mask here has just switched to a grayscale mask so you can see there we're actually pulling up these lumps separately and that gives us a bit more drama a bit more shadow work going on and we've added in a little bit of fall off here on the left and right just to make sure that we're pulling all of our focus onto these items here which gives us a big difference in terms of the amount of drama from there to there don't worry about this stuff out here on the horizon when we zoom in that's all gone it's just a weird uh weird preview thing but there we go so that's it for today uh everyone um oh i didn't get to delete the weird stick i don't know what stinky mean um we'll play with it separately uh maybe later on i'll have to come back to it but yeah there we go so we go from a really cool shot of the mountains it's just been brought basically a bit more um natural a bit more um neutral we could get rid of that moon if we wanted to with the healing tool personally i'd be tempted to leave it in but if you really wanted to well let's just pull that down there and go [Music] click moon gone okay but i wouldn't i'd leave it in um really nice shot of the mountain we've got jerry's um shot of uh it's not a cathedral isn't it santa fe i think he said jerry something like that um again a crop helps this image it gets rid of the distractions of the the cars and everything on here and look at the detail that you brought back in the highlights there just from using that one highlight slider in hdr uh barry's shot of the frost out in british columbia is a stunning location really want to go there when i can um but again keep it natural and protect those highlights don't lose detail where you don't need to and then finally this one where we've just taken it from there and really nice soft light but we've just added in that punch of drama um that sort of makes it stand out a bit more okay so in the meantime um we will if oh if you want to have the conversation about the twig the twig that i can't find um then go on to the facebook group uh we'll try and pick up where we left off um for things like um how to use the clarity tool how to use the sharpening tool how to dehaze there's a whole thing on dehaze on these youtube channel um pro tips thing so it's on the channel you're already on but they're sort of 15 to 20 minute bite size things on a particular subject just have a little play with those and that'll help you quite a lot send in your images as raw files please um we will pick up again next thursday so same time as normal so 3 p.m in the uk next thursday some of you i know are changing your clocks um this weekend so that may mess things up a little bit we'll try and get the times published correctly for you all and in the meantime if anyone needs to get hold of us that's how to do it and we will see you in seven days time cheers everyone bye you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 6,385

Keywords: Capture One, Capture, One, Post Processing, Editing, Phase One, Capture One Pro, Live, Examples, Training, Learn, Lessons, RAW, Photo Editing, How To, Guide, Competition, Win, License, Variants, Clarity, HDR, Tools, Effect, Filter, GND, Neutral Density, Graduated, Masks, Natural, Histogram, Processing, Gradient, Support, 20.1, Features, Q&A, Profile, Lens, Edit, Crop, Levels, Adjustments, Contrast, Pack, B&W, Colour Mask, Color, High ISO, Noise, Reduction, Clone, Heal, Keystone, Black and White, City, Convert, Night, Light

Id: EB4QhCsaYlM

Length: 64min 31sec (3871 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020