PHOTO EDITING BASICS: Creating COLOR CONTRAST with complementary colors in Capture One 20

hi everyone this is kasmokwa from digital art classes welcome to my channel where you will find photo editing training and educational videos to help you grow as an artist and photographer if this image looks familiar to you you are right because we have been working on this image in one of the previous videos where we were talking about contrast tim requested a follow-up video on color contrast so today we will take this photo that we've been working on previously and we will focus on adding color contrast so this is our starting point and we will be working towards this result let's get started okay before we jump into capture one and before we start manipulating with colors let's take a quick look at adobe color wheel and let's explain how do we create color contrast in an image so if you are not familiar with this tool i would recommend it to anyone this tool is free and it's very very helpful i'm going to show you how you can import your image inside this tool and how you can analyze so now we are just looking at a color wheel the colors are random so here you can select different color harmonies now we have selected analog use monochromatic triad complementary and so on and so forth so what is color contrast in an image how do you create color contrast so basically the color carmony the simplest color harmony that represents strong contrast in an image is complementary color harmony so as you can see here colors that create strong contrast are colors that lie on the opposite sides of the color wheel so in this case randomly adobe color will just display the most common complementary color scheme and we have the blues on one side of the color wheel and on the other side of the spectrum we have yellows so this color harmony is very often used in the cinema it's so-called cinematic color grading but the contrast the color contrast of course doesn't apply only between the blues and the yellows you can turn around these colors and you can experiment further so you can create color contrast between magentas and greens you can do the same between cyans and oranges so that's basically how you can analyze your image and how you can explore the possibilities so let's jump back to capture one and i'm going to take a screenshot of the original photo this will be our starting point so i'm just going to very quickly take a screen grub and jump back to my adobe color wheel and here let's move over to the second option available here extract theme so here you have this button select a file and from here i'm just going to take the screenshot that i have just captured so here we are that way adobe color tool analyzes the image that we have just imported and it picks the five most prominent colors in our image it believes that these are the five most important colors and i think that this representation is quite close so we can manually manipulate with those control points but i think that they represent the colors quite well so maybe we can pick one of these brighter tones so i think we can take it as a base so now we can move to the color wheel and you can see that these very colors are now mapped on the color wheel so we can analyze their positioning so if you remember we were talking about the complementary color harmony and to create a color contrast we need to have colors that are positioned on the opposite sides of the color wheel across the color wheel so if we analyze the samples that were just created by adobe color tool these colors are positioned quite near one to each other on the color wheel so we don't have any strong color contrast in our image so if we jump back to the image we can see that it is quite harmonious however it is lacking color contrast it has plenty of luma contrast we have a lot of dark tones we have mid tones we have quite strong highlights the image is very dynamic the composition is very dynamic but in terms of color if you just take a look at the color samples here it is harmonious but we can't say that it has strong color contrast so now we can try to think which colors we can push into which part of color wheel to create color contrast so i would stay with these gray and sort of cold bluish tones where they are and i would try to manipulate i would try to push those brownish tones those warmer tones towards the yellow so this is how i can plan my color grading game so i've made the stone brighter since it was very dark and it was hard to get any color so of course i'm not going to achieve such a strong and saturated colors but taking the analysis of the image that i have just imported into adobe color tool i can see what can be done in order to contrast the existing colors in the image stronger okay so let's jump back to capture one and let's start working on our image in terms of adding color contrast so this is the starting point i have already created new clone variant of this image where i have deleted all the layers that are not needed because we will be adding more layers when working on color and there is a limit to the amount of layers that you can have in capture one i believe the maximum the maximum amount of layers is 16. so let's start working on color i'm going to add new field adjustment layer and we will be working with color editor so let's just pull our tool out let's hide the browser so here we are and let's jump right into skin tone we are not working on a portrait so you might be surprised why i'm going to use the skin tone tub so the name can be quite confusing because it suggests that you will use this tool for portraits for working with skin tones but don't forget that its purpose is to even out colors so whenever you are working on a portrait you would use skin tone you would use this tab to even out the color of the skin so for example when you have a portrait and the hands are visible or there are some color patches some color shifts this is perfect to even out colors and today i'm going to show you that you can use the skin tone tab inside the color editor in landscape photography to create very beautiful balanced color grading effect so just a few words why i'm not going to use the advanced tab so in case of this tab you will have the freedom of working just inside this one tab and on the very one layer that we have created here you could sample different colors and you could be shifting those colors you could be adjusting these colors however the image is very dramatic it is very dynamic we have plenty of luma contrast we have very strong shadows we have strong highlights we have very dynamic lines going on here and basically i believe that this image will benefit from harmonizing the colors we don't want to have more colors added and i feel that it will look way better when we reduce the amount of colors and when we push them towards basically two main groups and that's what i've done in the final image so let me just quickly jump back to the browser and then let's take a look at the image that i've been working on so this is the result that we will be working towards so basically it would be very hard to achieve this result with the advanced color editor so as you can see here i have simplified the color palette so if we take a look at the original image so here we have plenty of grays but we have let's just quickly zoom in we have some of those warm greens where you have those little trees we have those brown colors here you can analyze the color by looking at the color readouts so here we have this very strong color accent where we have the road so there is a lot of going on and if i would be just shifting those colors individually we will be creating more colors and this will basically add more chaos to this image so if you compare this image with the one that i have been working on you can see that i have simplified the color palette that i went towards blues versus yellows so i have warmed up the hat rock i have added more yellow to the rock i have shifted those oranges that are visible here in the road and i have pushed them towards the yellow so basically my aim was to create stronger color contrast by sticking to the blue tones that were already present in the image or maybe i have shifted those grayish tones towards stronger blues and on the other hand we have yellows that create the color contrast so then i shifted those sort of orangey pinky tones towards the yellows so first of all simplifying the color palette and then shifting colors and this can be done with the skin tone tab so let's go back to the image that we will be working on and let's start sampling our colors i'm going to hide the browser so let's move back to skin tone let's maybe position it here that way it will be clearer our working space so i'm going to be naming layers by the names of colors that i will be sampling so i'm going to firstly take the picker and sample somewhere around here first i'm going to add the blues and then i will be working on the browns to add more warm tones to the image so i'm going to sample let's say somewhere around those rocks so this is the color that was sampled and i'm going to rename this layer and call it blue one because you can sample only one color when you are working with skin tone and that's why we will have to add more layers but believe me it's worth it so let's click on this icon this will include the whole saturation range within the color sample if you want to see what is selected you can click this little button here and that way everything that is grayed out is not selected and the areas that contain the color that we have picked are visible here so we can see a lot of blue here in the shadows in the mid tones and here on the sky and on those hills visible far behind so let's just switch off the preview and let's start manipulating with the color so first we will be working with amount and this will allow us to go closer towards the color that we are after so by manipulating with the hue we will be pushing this little circle here this little point here near to the center of the color wheel represents the sample that we have just taken inside the image so if i would push the hue slider towards the right hand side let's go for stronger saturation so we will see what is going on here we can see that by pushing the hue slider towards the right i'm adding more magenta so this is the opposite direction that i want to go for if i go for the other way i will be pushing my point towards here upwards inside the collar wheel and adding colder tones going more towards the blue and this is what i'm after this is what i want to achieve so let's reduce saturation and when it comes to lightness i'm going to maybe make it a little bit brighter but actually not at this point not yet so now we have adjusted the color and we can jump to the second part uniformity so this is what i meant when i was talking about simplifying color palette so basically what this will do for your image is that if you have tones within this scale starting from cyans and going all the way through the blues towards those colors on the border between the blue and magenta if you will push hue slider towards the right this will unify the hue so basically the all those hue scatters within this selection will be pushed towards one common hue this is super helpful when you are working on complex images and when you want to get rid of unwanted color shifts and when you want to unify you when you want to unify a color inside the image so this is working on uniformity when it comes to the hue and you can as well touch saturation slider so this will push sort of all the hues inside this selection towards similar level of saturation let's take a quick look before and after so before those tones are way less saturated let's focus here so before the sky those hills are super greyish not much blue is over there and if we switch it on you can see that we have a bit more blue so this is the first layer of working on blue let's make another step so don't make a mistake don't sample again on the very same layer we have to create new field adjustment layer and let's just rename it let's call it blue number two and here we are going to use the same tool skin tone our color picker so let's sample again in the rock let's include the whole saturation range and let's manipulate with the color feather so let's go for strong saturation so we see the effect so this is adding magenta this is adding blue and this is what we want so we can go for negative 5 for the hue when it comes for saturation let's go a bit down lightness i'm going to maybe increase a notch let's now jump to uniformity when it comes to hue i'm going to go all the way maybe maybe around 94 and saturation i'm going to go for a strong value as well so now if i switch these two layers you can see the shift that we have created so this is after manipulating with the blues and this is before so we can slightly increase saturation here we can increase lightness and then we can fine tune this value so i'm going to jump back to the first layer blue one and actually go here for negative five so let's now focus on the other color so if we quickly jump back to our adobe color wheel we've been working on those blues let's now focus on adding yellows on shifting colors in our image towards yellow so if i hover over the image around here and take a look at the color readouts we can see that we have plenty of red 120 95 for the green and 91 for the blue so we will be adding more yellow will be going more towards orange look here so don't forget to add new filter adjustment layer i'm going to change the size of my layers tab so more layers will be visible new filter adjustment layer and i'm just going to rename it to brown one skin tone tab color picker and let's pick our color somewhere here let's click on this icon to make the whole range of saturation included i'm going to pull this tool out so we'll see the samples here underneath let's position it around here so i'm just going to check first if i push the hue slider towards the right let's go for maximum saturation so that way the color gets super strong but we see what direction we are going for so if we go the other way this is adding more magenta so we are going downwards inside the color wheel if i go this way i'm adding yellow and this is what i'm after so let's reduce saturation let's maybe increase a little bit and let's increase lightness and let's now jump to the uniformity and let's go for stronger uniformity for the hue and stronger uniformity value for saturation let's take a quick before and after on the brown so this is before adjusting the color and this is after so if i zoom in you can see that i managed already to get rid of those greenish tones inside those areas where we have the tree present so again this is before we have way more tones here the colors were scattered and if i switch this on this unifies my tones let's now add another field adjustment layer and let's rename it let's call it brown tool and here let's sample again skin tone tab let's sample again somewhere here and let's go for the right hand side so i'm adding yellow and let's reduce saturation and let's increase brightness something around here and let's now jump to the uniformity so i'm going to go quite strongly on those values and this simplifies the color palette you can see that before we had plenty of different colors we had some purples we have some grays we had some oranges and now basically the image gets divided into the blue part here where we have the sky and the rock and the right bottom corner is including warmer tones closer to the yellow i want to go for a color closer to the yellow so i'm going to add new filled adjustment layer and rename it let's call it brown three and here again skin tone picker and let's sample again somewhere around here let's go for hue towards the right hand side let's increase a bit saturation and let's increase brightness so we can fine tune later on with color balance however you can see already at this point that with lightness you can make those color stronger the brighter the color is the more strongly it will appeal to the viewer so let's now go for uniformity and i'm going to go quite strongly as well on the hue and quite strongly as well on saturation okay let's hide our color editor tool and when i look at the blue color i'm not quite happy with this view yet i would like it to be more on the cyanide side so let's revisit our blue layers and let's open the color editor again so here we have hue negative five but okay let's create another layer and i'm going to sample around here so let's create new field layer i'm going to rename it and call it blue 3 and let's drag it down so things will be tidy and organized so let's now jump over to color editor and here let's sample maybe here around those hills let's include whole saturation range and now let's manipulate with the color so if i go towards the right you can see very very clearly that i'm warming up the tone i'm adding magenta but if i go the other way i'm adding more cyan to the blue and this is what i want this is what i'm after so again if i go towards the right this actually creates quite nice and harmonious effect but we are working on color contrast in this video and i want to go for color contrast so i'm going to go for negative 5 when it comes to saturation i believe this is way too much i can always find unit later so something maybe around 14. we want to create a balanced effect so if we take a look at the image as a whole we can see this strong element here this strong accent and i want to introduce something strong here as well to a bit balance out this road so let's maybe keep saturation as it is and let's go maybe for stronger lightness let's experiment so this is the maximum and this is if i would go for lower value no we have the aerial perspective here these hills are very very far away from the place where i was standing so it won't be looking natural if i would be darkening it out and this will be actually flattening the image so we have the aerial perspective here and those places that are far away from you will be always brightened so i will increase lightness a notch so in terms of working with color editor we can leave it for now and now i'm going to show you one more step we will jump over to color balance and this will allow you to harmonize things further in terms of color and in terms of luminosity because not many of you are using color balance to further fine tune luminosity in your images so let's create new filter adjustment layer and let's just rename it to color balance so in terms of the master tab in color balance here we would introduce a color cast over the image but i don't want to do this i'm super happy with the color contrast that i have created so we have this yellowish brownish rock in the first plane and we have those cold bluish tones in the rocks far behind in the background so by adding something in the master tunnel we would be unifying these colors and this is not what is needed here so let's jump over to the shadow tab and here we will inject a bit of cold tones inside the shadow so i'm going to just add a bit of blue inside the shadows so we can see that this very very subtle operation added more depth to the image and especially in the foreground because it created another layer of color contrast here inside the rock so let's zoom in and let me quickly switch off the color balance layer so this is before where the shadows let's just take a color readouts they were already cool we have 23 for the blue 18 for green and 6 for the red but if i switch on and if i check now we have 27 for the blue 14 for the green and one for the red so we can make the shadows even colder we can introduce more color however i want to maintain the realistic view so let's not overdo this let's jump over to the midtone tab so let's see what works here if we go for cool tones this very beautifully increases the effect of aerial perspective we have the middle plan getting cooler and more distant but the road is very beautifully contrasting and we have that those rocks that were lit here that they are warm and yellowish let's see if we go for warm tone so this is quite pleasing but i would go for the blue tone right now the image gets too warm to my liking and we are losing those blues because this part is sitting definitely in the mid tone so if you take a look at the histogram in the graph here if i hover over the sky you can see the vertical orange line moving inside the histogram so that way you can judge what luminosity range you are targeting so you can see that this line is sitting perfectly in the middle of the histogram so this means that we are working with midtones but if you would be just judging by looking at the image you would say that okay i'm in the highlights because this part is definitely bright in comparison with the rest elements with the rest of the content of the image but histogram will always tell you the truth so we are working on mid-tones and by warming up mid-tones with color balance we are losing our blues that we were working that hard here in the layers tab with the color editor so let's get back to the initial plan to the initial idea and let's add a little bit of cool tone inside the mid tones and here i would like to as well brighten the mid tone so very often we are using the color balance tool to inject specific color inside our selected luminosity range but this tool is super helpful as well if you want to fine tune luminosity range so if you use the slider positioned here to the right you can either brighten your mid tones or darken so if i go down i will be darkening the mid tones i'm flattening the image as well so i will definitely go in the opposite direction and introducing more light more spaciousness inside the picture so let's now jump over to the highlight and here i will definitely want to warm up the highlights so i will add something between yellow and orange something maybe cooler so remember we are working on color contrast i believe something like this will be sufficient so if we just zoom in and take a look at the road so okay this works really well and i would like to brighten the highlights as well so in particular i want to make those areas that were lit and have those nice warm tones those on the rocks and here near the road i want to brighten it so let's push the slider upwards so that we are making our highlights brighter so that way by working with color balance and with the color editor we've been shifting colors in our image let's jump back to our starting point so now if we look one beside the other you can see that with those few steps we've been going towards quite a big difference in terms of color so you can see now when these images are placed one beside the other how we have shifted those colors so here we have those grey stones remember always take a look at the color readouts because eyes get very quickly deceived and you can just get used to looking at certain colors and it's very hard to say if the color is neutral gray or if it's something warmer or colder a very good idea is to take short breaks when you are color grading your images but here when we have finished working on color you can see the difference you can see the result so the rock here something completely different here it's blue here it's more on the magentas side way warmer and if we take a look at those rocks here these are quite similar but because we didn't have the blue tones everything was way flatter here it was harmonious but we didn't have the color contrast so now here by introducing the blues by strengthening the yellows by getting rid of the pinkish orange tones we have simplified the color palette and we definitely achieved more color contrast in the image so let's zoom in again and pan around if you're getting value from my videos i would be super happy if you like the video and if you subscribe to my channel if you just hit the little bell you will make sure that you won't miss any of my future videos and i would like to encourage you to request videos if you have any specific questions if you would like me to go in depth on some subject that might be difficult for you please in the comment area request a video and if i find that your request is interesting and might bring something interesting to the viewers i will definitely analyze the subject and i will record a video on it at this point i would like to mention few words in general about color grading color grading is a super personal and super subjective process there is no right or wrong color grading so today we have been working on adding color contrast to the image on creating color contrast and that's why i have specifically shifted those colors to achieve the complementary color harmony and to go for the blues versus the yellows however this is my idea for the color grading for today if i would be color grading this image tomorrow i might create something entirely different and that's why i'm saying that this process is entirely subjective so some of you might prefer the original version of the image which i like quite a lot as well so you might fine tune these colors you might go for maybe stronger highlights here introduce more of this orangey color that is visible in the road to harmonize the image so basically you might take the same image and create at least five ten different color representations of the image so here when we've been working with the color balance tool we've been working with luminosity as well we've been adjusting luminosity we've been making the highlights and mid tones brighter so just with this very tall you might make the mid tones darker and this would create different effect as well because as i've mentioned before the brighter the color is the stronger it will appear the stronger it will affect the viewer's eye it will always pull the attention towards itself the stronger the more saturated the color is so by subduing the color but making is it less saturated or by making it darker you will change the color contrast across the whole image the whole concept of color grading is quite complex but it's a very beautiful subject and it gives plenty of room to experiment it gives plenty of flexibility and as always the beginnings are quite hard because working with color is not an easy subject but once you get a grip you will be working faster and it's really very very satisfying to color grade your images and to create different color versions of one image if you would like to learn more about capture one if you want to take a really deep dive into the subject i would encourage you to check out my comprehensive course on capture one i have covered everything that you need to know even if you are just starting out with capture one so here you have the link in the upper right corner the link will be as well available in the description you can check the course curriculum and you can take the free preview of the course so today we have been focusing on color contrast this was kasia's mokwa from digital art classes thanks for watching and don't forget to leave me your suggestions for next videos thanks for watching and i'll see you soon

Channel: Kasia Zmokla

Views: 2,222

Keywords: digital photography, Kasia Zmokla, Digital Art Classes, capture one color editor skin tone, capture one color editor tutorial, color contrast photography, complementary color scheme, complementary colors, complementary colors photography, complementary color wheel, complementary color theory, capture one pro 20 tutorial, capture one pro 20 landscape, capture one pro 20 color editor, capture one pro 20, capture one color grading, capture one workflow, capture one 20 tutorial

Id: rr3g_iqQlpA

Length: 36min 39sec (2199 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020