Relight a Photo in Capture One using Layers

hi everybody it's thomas here from thomas fitzgerald photography and today i want to show you how to do a little bit of kind of semi-complex editing in capture one and what we're going to do is i'm going to show you how to re-light a scene using layers and gradients and a few other tricks so what we're going to do is we have this image here which i shot while walking in a park the other day and as you can see the lighting is not great on this and because we can see the light the sunlight is hitting kind of the holly and the branches here but the main subject which is of course our robin here is in shade and he's quite dark so it's one of the situations where um this was kind of as close as i get i could get with the lens that i had without spooking the bird and also the sun was moving quite rapidly and he was hopping around a bit so um it was kind of hard to i couldn't exactly ask him to move into the sun so um but we can fix this and we can actually do quite a good job on it so the first thing i want to do is their overall exposure is um a bit down so i'm going to pop over here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to increase the exposure until the robin looks properly exposed so we're just going to bring this up and somewhere around there is okay and as you can see it's kind of blowing everything else out so it's going to drop down the highlights and don't worry about over here because we're going to fix that in a minute so kind of that's not too bad okay so what we want to do now is kind of refocus the light so that the light is kind of on the robin instead of on the trees and we can do that quite easily so i'm going to do is add a new layer with a gradient so in capture one if you don't already have a layer you can just hit the gradient tool and this will create a new layer as soon as you start drawing so what i want to do is just i'm just going to draw the circle out kind of just past the robin like so and what i want to do is i want a very soft edge fall off and i don't want it to be kind of noticeable like so if i lowered the exposure here now you can see we've got this like spotlight effect and obviously we don't want that so what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag this right out like so and maybe drag that in a bit so we have quite a natural fall off um and if i just lower the exposure a bit more you can see straight away we've got a much better lighting situation going on um so i'm just going to pop back to my original layer for a minute and i want to just brighten the whole thing up a bit more and then again go back to our kind of vignette layer and then just darken that down a bit we could possibly even darken this down a bit more um so straight away that's a lot better but we still have a couple of small issues that i'd like to fix and that is the biggest one is of course if you look back here we still have a fairly bright background and it's kind of distracting a little bit away from the robin um so what i'm going to do is i'm going to create another layer and this time i want it to be a new filled adjustment layer like so and i'm going to pop over here to our color tool tab and scroll down to the color editor and you're probably on basic but you want to go to advanced and this time i'm going to select kind of the color back here like so and what we want to do is just kind of narrow this down a bit so we'll start by lowering the lightness a bit okay so don't worry about it too much for a minute because we're going to put a mask with this as well um and we're just going to tweak this ever so slightly so we got a reasonably smooth falloff because we're only aiming for the greens in the background so we're just tweaking the key but okay so something like that kind of works but as you can see it's doing way too much so what we want to do is just actually add a mask to this so what i will do is i'm going to clear the mask um and then i'm going to add the brush select the brush tool and we're just going to paint in around the robin just kind of the areas where it's very bright and if i right click on the adjustment layer here we can get a feather mask so what we want to do is if we turn on display mask here we can adjust the feathering so just basically burn the mask okay so we're going to go too much because we'll kind of lose a bit of it down here so if i just hit apply there and that's not too bad but it's overall the effect is too much we want something fairly subtle so i'm just going to bring this back down a little bit and we're just going to add some in here as well because it's still a bit bright okay so if i try to toggle this on and off you can see it's a subtle effect but it's again it's stopping the kind of um distracting background from being too bright behind the robin and that looks quite good so the next thing i want to do is i want to actually uh crop this a bit because it's it's um the framing is it's a bit too wide so i'm just gonna we want to get a bit closer basically okay so crop it like so and return we're not gonna do a huge amount of cropping i just want to get it reasonably right um and if i pop back over here now what i'm gonna do is select my background layer again i'm just going to add a little bit of a vignette as well so just again adds a bit more to this kind of focusing effect so what we're doing now is focusing the attention in on the robin and we have changed the lighting so if i toggle the stairs before that's where we started and that's where we are now and as you can see it is much better um but we can do one more little thing to it so i'm going to add yet another adjustment layer so again this time i'm going to go new empty adjustment layer and i'm going to click on the paintbrush and i'm just going to paint over the robin and all i want to do is i'm just going to add some clarity here and we set this to punch you can see it makes the robin nice and [Music] kind of stand outy that's a technical term and i just bring up the saturation a little bit on them as well and i can pop back over if i wanted to be really specific i could just pop back over here to the color editor and go to the reds and the oranges and just bring them up a little bit if you want to do and that's not too bad so there we have it there is a quick way to re-light your scene using layers in capture one and anytime i kind of do tutorials like this i always get comments from people going oh it's too complicated but like this took literally five minutes um and not a lot of editing so the other kind of thing you often hear people as well is what's kind of the practical purpose of this so to give you an idea um let me show you what i did when i was setting this up earlier so um i have another version so basically what i've done here is if i click on this here i have added another layer on top which is basically it's desaturating the outside and it's actually did i have a gradient on this yes so i just have a very kind of fine gradient on this out here what i'm doing is um i'm desaturating the greens and i've kind of a desaturation overall so this kind of to give me a more winter type look and then we can just finish that off in photoshop so if i pop over to photoshop you can see here's the image here's one i made earlier and we just add some layers of texture on top of that and then you can have yourself a nice little christmas card and then if you want to just crop it again to the front of the card something like that there you go that's how you make a christmas card super quick super easy and uh yeah i've done most of the work in capture one and just kind of the last little bit in photoshop so there you have it there is a quick tip on how to relight a scene in capture one using layers i hope you found this useful if you do you know the drill please like share and subscribe and thanks for watching and see you next time okay bye [Music] you

Channel: thomas fitzgerald

Views: 949

Keywords: Capture One, Capture One Pro, Capture One Editing, Photography, Photo Editing, Photoshop, Capture One 21, Capture One Colour Editing, Color, Relight, Lighting

Id: OasGU3DjM5Q

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021