Make your landscapes POP in Capture One 20

in today's video i'm gonna show you my top tips to make your photos absolutely pop in capture one pro 20. we're gonna turn this raw file into this finished image so here we are over in capture one and this is the shot that we're going to be looking at it's an image that i took in mull earlier in the year it's one i'm really really pleased with things i like about it these great tufts of green grass forming nice foreground we've got nice reflections on the water and it leads up into these hills in the distance we've also got some lovely fluffy white clouds that are already popping in that sky but there's a lot that we can do to improve this and one of the first things that i will always do is really think about the crop and how i can refine that composition further because yeah i've got some nice elements going on in this shot but i just think we can tighten things up so first of all i'm just going to actually grab the straighten tool i'm just going to draw a line across the shoreline and that's just going to neaten things up and make sure that my horizon line is good and straight uh next i'm going to get go to the crop tool and i think for this i'm going to try a five it's already set to five by seven um and i'm going to bring that in because that's going to just uh slightly bring it down at the top and bottom of the frame because there's quite a bit of wasted blue sky at the top and also quite a bit of these wasted pebbles at the bottom so i do just want to narrow that frame it's just thinking about how you can tighten up your composition in this instance i definitely don't want to cut off any of the clouds here and i certainly don't want to cut off the the grass at the bottom so i think a nice point is basically to have the rule of thirds uh the top thirds going right across that shoreline and the bottom is just going across this grass here so it pretty much is is in line with what uh what it should be i might bring it in slightly in the left just to make these uh grass tufts sit a little bit more in the center of the frame something like that i think looks good bringing those lines back up i think that is a really nice composition now again it's just about tightening things up and paying attention to the scene so i'm going to apply that crop there we go now the first actual bit of editing i'm going to do on this i'm not going to touch the exposure or anything just yet first i'm going to do is go over into our styles and presets now i know you might be thinking oh you're just going to apply a preset and that's it that is not making your images pop well don't be put off by the idea of using styles and presets they can be incredibly powerful tools but it's all about how you use them so capture one does have a good amount of its own styles and presets and you can download various ones from other places the thing to do is not to just go through and think oh okay i like this and click and then export your file what capture one allows you to do in a way that lightroom doesn't is for you to layer up those effects and more importantly to tone down the opacity of the different layers it means that you can really build up a very different effect than you would get by just clicking on one preset in this case i'm going to have a little look through i don't think i want kind of the darker greeny ones i actually think some of the sunbound ones is going to give a a different a different look to this something a little bit warmer a bit more it's not the autumnal feel i think this was taken in end of august beginning of september okay for example i really like how this one this calabria dark looks i love kind of the warm tones that we've got from the grasses it's turned into more of an orangey we've got a lot of sort of uh pop from that sky but it's far far far too much so what i'm going to do is right click on that and then apply to new layer now we go back over into our layers we can see that that is now here it hasn't applied it to the background it's on its own layer and because it's on its own layer what we can do is we can grab the opacity slider right now it's set to 100 and we can bring it all the way back down to zero so it hasn't applied at all and we can just dial in exactly the amount that we want until it starts to look good and for me somewhere around 30 percent i think is all it needs and you can turn that off and back on and so what you can see is it's given those grasses a little bit of a warm tinge to them they're not quite emeraldy green they're a little bit more yellowy green we've got some more tones on the mountains in the background it's subtle but as soon as we start to take that further up it gets even more yellowy and more cyan in the sky and starts to look very unnatural so for me around maybe just maybe 35ish is exactly the right point obviously you can adjust to your own tastes but the great thing is with using styles and presets on different layers is that you can build up the effects by applying different ones on different layers and playing with that opacity for each one balancing them out so let's say i can go back in here and we can have a look through some of the other ones especially go further down and maybe have a look at some of the seasonal ones because these have some really interesting toning some of them are quite dramatic that one is obviously very very dramatic um so this one actually really like what it's doing in kind of giving us a steely blue sky rather than that vibrant blue so let's actually do the same thing again right click apply to new layer we go back over and we see that we've now got two different effects being applied on different layers and again we can grab that opacity slider ramp it back to zero and it isn't gone back to raw it's now showing us the 30 calabria underneath so we can now build up this opacity probably to about the same sort of level maybe 30 percent so now we've got two different effects applied that are affecting each other different color balancers going on different things from each and so we can turn that on and off and we can see that it's just adding a little bit more light onto our grasses here pay attention to the the mountain in the background some of those details looking a little bit more sculpted and the sky as well it's it's starting to add that steeliness that we saw before which i think is looking really nice then of course we turn them both off we go back to our raw file so in just applying these two different effects in on different layers we've already got a really nice looking image but i do think it's made things quite dark around here so i'm going to go back to the background layer and i'm just going to bring up that brightness and i'm going to go to a high dynamic range down here just bring up that shadow maybe a little bit less than that something around there and maybe even can bring up that black point and as we do if i just pulse that up and down you can see in that bottom left corner there's really dark stones which before we're pretty much well not invisible but difficult to see certainly we can bring a lot more light back to it which just is making our image look a lot more balanced we've not gone so big on the high dynamic range it doesn't look like an hdr image it's just kind of just taking the edge off we can maybe do the same and pulling those highlights back a little bit actually you know what no i'm not gonna leave those where they are i'm gonna show you the next tip and that is using selective edits i'm going to start with a linear gradient mask but crucially i'm going to do this on a new layer so it's pressing that plus button it's bringing in a new adjustment layer i'm going to rename that linear gradient i could have named it sky because it's going on the sky so i'm going to grab that tool and drag it in like this do we already have i've actually of course that is the other one i know what's going on uh if we press m we can see where that mask is going to be applied and basically anything that's red is where the mask will have an effect and then as you can see it feathers out to where it isn't being applied at all so it is a great way of editing the sky without affecting the rest of the image press m to hide the mask and now we can do all kinds of edits on this because it's on a new layer it's not affecting anything else it also means we can go back and change it later on so i want to make the sky pop i want to try and get a little bit more separation between the clouds and the blue i'm going to do that first of all by increasing that contrast somewhere around plus 15 i think it looks decent also gonna up the clarity now a lot of photographers watching this will hear the word clarity and go oh no not clarity and i totally get it i'm totally with you using clarity often in landscape images is not a good thing and it can be really quite amateurish in seeing images where someone just whacked up the clarity so all that detail looks really crispy and for example if we go to our background layer and we just ramp up that clarity yeah it's not looking good it's looking like my first edit before you really kind of learn the subtleties of how to really get the best out of the shop but that's kind of the good thing about using it with selective tools is that you're not applying that effect everywhere we don't want clarity on the stones we don't want it on the grass so by just using it on that layer it's allowing us to just put it in the sky and as i do again i'm going to pulse that up and down and just pay attention to as it as the clarity increases so much more of that detail comes out those clouds become more defined they become more separated from the dark blue sky behind them so i'm going to go quite high i'm actually going to take it to 40 i think looks good and now if we turn that layer off and on look at the difference that has made on the sky it is huge suddenly it really has a lot more impact it jumps off the screen looks really cool but again if you don't really like it if you think you've gone a little bit too far you don't need to go back and play with clarity individually in the contrast you need to balance things out you can just grab that opacity slider pull it back down you can pull it all the way back to zero or you can find a balance in between i do think maybe i've gone a touch too far so i'm going to bring it down just to 85 just to take that edge off slightly i think that's looking really nice while we're on the topic of selective layers i'm going to create a new layer this one i'm going to call brush and as the name suggests i'm going to grab our draw mask brush you could press b and right clicking on the screen will bring up your brush settings so we can make our brush bigger we can also make it harder or softer feathering the edge that's going to allow it to blend more naturally with the background and the flow what the flow means is the percent that is being applied with each stroke so the moment is set to 10 that's 10 so every time i brush with the effect it's only applying 10 of the effect that's also going to allow you to paint that effect in more and more rather than just applying the whole thing in one go so it's great means you can really subtly apply effects and so what i want to do is basically do a little bit of dodging and burning and i want to increase the exposure on this and i want to paint that into the grasses here a little bit here a little bit here paint around the stones a little bit more again i just want to try and bring those out a touch i want these to be a bit more visible a bit more obvious in the frame i want them to look like they are part of the image rather than just something that i happen to get in the shot and by increasing that exposure on them individually is going to help that happen i might just take the highlights down because they are a little overpowering that's not really doing a lot though is it maybe the whites that's also not really doing a lot it's pretty much all in the exposure all right that's fine so maybe i just don't go as far with that it's always a case of trying these sliders seeing what they do and then deciding whether or not to keep that effect or not let me bring down that brightness there slightly because we still want to keep some of that contrast so we don't want to eliminate all the shadow around here it's the shadows around these tufts which is giving them that sort of rounded shape so it's going to paint in a little bit more with an exposure around here i'm not going to go on the water yet because i'm going to use another one for that i'm just going to try and fill in a little bit of this shadowy detail around here because it is quite dark i think it looks good so new layer i'm going to call this one water and again i'm going to brush the effect in but this time i'm going to press m to see the effect and i'm going to brush the effect in first before i start doing any of the edits i want it very much on the water all around here so i can edit this sort of pool independently from anything else in the image and that's important because i want to do things like increase the clarity again but i don't want to be applying anywhere else i don't want it in the sky we've already put clarity there and i don't want it in any of the grasses or the stones as i said before so what i'm going to do now we've got that uh that mask painted in i'm going to increase the exposure increase the contrast and increase the clarity and the reason i'm doing this is because i want that reflection to be more obvious as i start to pull the clarity up pay attention to again how much more that detail really comes out starts look amazing i think something around there is looking good we can play with the other ones play with the black slider a little bit bring that down um shadows i'm going to lift slightly and maybe maybe a little bit on the brightness too so it really has brought out a lot of nice detail there if we turn that off turn it on the difference is huge it's really adding so much more uh sort of pop and impact in the shot but it hasn't affected anything else in the scene it's looking really really nice but i think again i think that is a bit too much so i'm going to grab that opacity slider just bring it down the thing to do if you're not sure about this is once you've done some edits is just take a little time away from your computer screen go and get a coffee go and look at something else and then come back to it and if you come back and you still look at it and go oh yeah that's a bit much then you know you need to turn it down but sometimes when you're staring at the image certainly if you're trying to maybe edit i took a thousand pictures on this trip um from marlin only three days so if i was to sit down and just try and get through all of them in one go you'd kind of lose sight of what looks good and doesn't anymore and you end up coming out with some quite intense edits that in hindsight maybe you wouldn't have done so it's important to take those breaks okay i'm going to zoom in quite a bit onto the mountains a new layer yes another this one mountains and i'm going to get a brush and i'm going to oops let me just move back up um i'm going to make a smaller brush size something around that again with a fairly low flow let's turn it down to six percent increase exposure a little bit increase the white a little bit and increase the clarity just a small amount because i'm going to be trying to bring out some more of these details but i really don't want to throw texture and contrast everywhere i want it to be very very uh specific and by using these small brushes and painting these details in that's exactly how we're going to do that in fact i can maybe maybe a little bit more contrast actually we painted around here basically anywhere where there's already a nice highlight i'm trying to emphasize that highlight that's kind of how dodging and burning works as you paint light in where there already is some light in you and you want to emphasize what's there it's not about taking these shadows down here and making them look like highlights that's just going to look like a very weird hdr effect it's about trying to just give a little boost to what is naturally there in this case i just want it to there already is this side sunlight coming in i just want that to be a little bit more obvious give it a little bit more of a kick and so this is the way i'm going to do that just by painting this effect in i'm not going to go any further because across here it's it's very shadowy if i start trying to paint in light there i mean that's quite subtle but i can tell i want it to be very much focused on these areas here again now or maybe a little bit on that bit of light and that's it a little bit here there too and now we've got that mask painted in if we press m we can see exactly where it is we can continue editing so we can increase the brightness we could bring up or down the shadows and she might bring it down a little bit gives it a bit more contrast a bit more pop but up those whites that is subtle i'm going to ramp that right up to the top why not what about the highlights are they doing anything not a lot but that's fine and we can see what happens if we add a little bit more clarity actually you know what a little bit of extra clarity in there really does give it a nice little kick it's subtle again we turn it on and off when you see it flicking on and off like this it might be a little bit more obvious what i've done but if you're just looking at this on instagram you wouldn't be flicking it on enough would you of course not so it's um maybe not something you would really know has been done the other thing i might do actually is also slightly warm up the brush using the white balance just to help give it a bit more of a of a warm glow this is a sunset light coming in so down here it's colder up here we go warmer not too warm it's becoming very orange it doesn't match with the rest of the tones on the mountain something around there i think looks really nice if we turn it off turn it on off and on what's that weird effect that's coming in i don't know it goes away not seen that before there we go maybe that's because i'm also recording this who knows who knows okay let's go back and take a look at our image this is looking really nice i'm very very keen on what we've got here so far let's have a look at our before and after this was the raw file straight out of camera and this is where we've taken it and you can see it's all in layers all of this is editable we can go back to that linear gradient we can tone down the exposure and make it a very very dark blue sky let's not do that or we could tone down the opacity all together and get rid of that tool or ramp it back up we could go back to our presets we can increase that opacity we could decrease it and get rid of it all together i liked it at the 35ish point that's the beauty of working in layers like this in capture one and it is absolutely my favorite thing about working in capture one is that you do have these layers available so the last thing i'm going to do is just do a little bit more correction of the colors i just think we can give this a last extra little bit of pop and i'm going to do that using the color editor but i'm going to do this on another new layer so i'm going to click the new layer and i'm just going to do call that color edit but right now this is an empty layer if we click m nothing happens because there is no layer so what we need to do is right click uh not on there on the layer right click and just fill the mask so now we press m as you can see now whatever we do in these different tools is going to affect everything on this layer we can ramp the contrast right up but it is on a new it is on a new layer so we have a lot more control we can refine it we can get rid of it we can turn it down perfect exactly what we need it's going to go down to our color editor and uh first thing i'm going to do in fact let's just start off in the basic side because i think it's easier to visualize our tones in this way in just seeing the simple colors here and it is i think a slightly better way of working you can go into the advanced and use the color picker and choose a blue and then you can refine it and do whatever but let's keep things simple for now so i'm going to start off and i want to change up the greens i want to take uh them from being sort of the the remnants of the emerald green we've got and i want to push that a bit more towards um and yellowy orangey green if we just sort of go right up and down really there aren't a lot of greens in this we may have more um yellows but it is kind of taking off a bit of that sort of emeraldineness that is on the on the edge let's go to our yellows grab that this will have a bit more impact in fact yeah you can see that there's a lot of yellow i don't want to go all the way to the bottom because then everything has just gone orange and i don't really like that effect i like it more on the mountains in the distance less so on the tufts down here so what we could very easily do is do two different layers of color editing one for the mountains where we do push it into an orange and then one for these foregrounds where maybe we leave it somewhere like here where it's not gone all the way orange but we'll see how we'll see how we go i quite like leaving it there for now the oranges we can grab and we can move those they can go all the way down often that can go quite pink but there isn't enough orange to really do anything too much in fact it is a little bit pink so yeah we're going to go about halfway down and the blues i do think we could push those a little bit to the left if we go too far it goes very cyan very instagrammy frankly um we don't want to go that far but at zero i can see a little bit of a sort of a purple color cast if we start to push it to the right that's when things get very purple so i think just a little bit down minus five is kind of all we need but we can play with the blue further and just bring down that lightness um in order to give a bit more separation between the cloud and the sky it is overpoweringly blue because of course if you darken a color it does look more saturated so we can compensate by just bringing that saturation back um a little bit as well something about there i think looks pretty good and that's given us quite a nice toning to our image um i'm going to go back up and we can turn off that color edit layer and back on and you can see that has made a huge difference to our shot now i do feel that um i don't like the orange on these in the foreground to the same extent so it's easy enough for me to bring that mask back up i can get our brush no i can't i can get uh sorry i can press e for the eraser mask and that is bringing up as you can see a brush tool um which i can make uh it's got a low flow i can make a bit smaller and then i can just paint away that mask on these bits that we don't want it we can undo that pressing m so basically just said no no no don't don't do that much toning to those green grasses because it just looks a little bit fake but i do like the orange on the mountains in the background and so now we turn that on and off it's toned the blues in the sky it's tones the yellows and the greens giving that nice sort of autumnal colors on the mountains but we haven't gone so yellow with the grasses in the front that it just looks really weird and fake but we've also got more oranges in the in there that's a bit too zoomed but there we go a lot of a lot of resolution we're probably okay look at the difference it's making on these rocks they've gone from being uh quite a sickly green color instead we've got warm evening light coming across them which is great and again it's all on a new layer so we can edit it as much as we want but that i think is my edit done i am really happy with how this looks it hasn't taken all that long and everything is on on different layers so we can always go back and change it up so that brings me to an end i really hope that this has been useful to see how i would use these different tools in capture one to turn what is an okay but a fairly bland raw file into something a little bit more impressive something that you might actually want to post on instagram or maybe even print out and put on your wall if you have enjoyed this video do please please hit that like button subscribe to my channel if you don't already and i will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Lanxon Photography

Views: 1,547

Keywords: Capture One, Capture One Pro 20, Lightroom, Photoshop, Photography, Landscape, editing, how to, tips, tricks, tutorial

Id: NFFvA357kfc

Length: 26min 19sec (1579 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021