The FILM LOOK with Levels Adjustments?

what is up everybody welcome back in this video I have a little tutorial for you we are going to look at levels adjustments and some really powerful things you can do with a pretty simple tool and most of you might be familiar with levels adjustments if you're in an image editor it's a tool that allows you to make global adjustments across your image in two ways one you can adjust contrast in the image how black are your blacks how white are your whites and what does the contrast of the mid-tones look like and it also allows you to manipulate color and the second part when you're talking about color is something that I don't see a lot of people doing there's some really powerful things you can do and so I want to jump right in before we get into the ninja moves here I do want to talk about the levels adjustment tool and how it works so right now I am in capture one and if you were working in capture one also you were going to find the levels tool over on the left hand side is all of your adjustment tabs and if you go to the exposure tab which is this fourth one over you were going to find it if you scroll down you'll see the levels adjustment down here and if you don't see it here you can add it if you right click anywhere in here and you can say add tool and you can go up and select levels so anyway once you have this up this is what it looks like you have a histogram that runs down the middle and there are three lines here and these are the adjustments that we are going to make now typically when you were in image editing there are three areas of the image that we refer to on a global scale there's the shadows and this is the darkest part of your image we have the highlights these are the brightest parts of your image and the mid-tones fall between and typically when you adjust your mid-tones that's how you're going to adjust the overall global contrast of the image and so that's what these represent over on the left hand side this is your shadows and you see those in the histogram and your mid-tones are in the middle your highlights are all the way on the right you're gonna see this little orange arrow that jumps around like a seismograph or something in the middle and what that's doing is when I move my cursor over various parts of the image it's showing me where that is on the histogram which could be useful if you're trying to figure out what there's some shadow detail that you want to recover highlight detail or something like that or if you know a mid-tone point that you want to move to the other thing to note here is in capture one the histogram that is on the levels tool is static it is not dynamic if i zoom out you're gonna see that there is a global histogram up here this one is dynamic so for instance if I crush the living daylights out of my blacks here you're going to see that that histogram flattens out where's the one that is the overlay on the history or so levels tool stays static so that is really nice too because you can see if you've swallowed some shadow detail it's not moving around on you can see where it is to get it back so this is how this works basically you have these three lines in here and on the bottom are these little hooks that you can grab onto and move and if I move these for instance all the way over on the left this is my shadow so if I move this in what's going to do is it's going to darken up all the shadow detail in the image I'm going to do something really drastic with it until you take it over to where there's pretty much no dynamic range left and if I move the one on the right towards the center you're going to do the same with the highlights you're really going to brighten up that image and start to blow out highlights and then the one in the middle typically we use this when we adjust mid-tones to control contrast and so if I move this to the right you're going to see the contrast in the image increase and if I move it to the left you're going to see the contrast in the image decrease so it opens up all the highlights and the shadows together at once and if anytime I need to reset this and capture one there is a little reset tool it's this little arrow that goes back here and I can just click that or if you want to do a quick before and after and I'm gonna do a lot of this in this tutorial I can hold down the option key or alt if you're on the PC and then just hold down the reset button and it temporarily resets it so I can just do a before and after kind of thing which is very handy to have and those are on each one of these tools actually so it's really cool if you just want to turn off your levels adjustments you can do that and so what we are doing is we are making levels adjustments on this global level here across the image there are two more handles on the top that we can control - there's one on the left hand side and if I move this over what this does is this adjusts my black point output level and so what I'm doing is you can see how the image starts to fade out and look milky it's raising up the output level for the blacks in the image so it's going to make sure that they don't go below a certain gray and you can do the same for the highlights where you make sure that white is not exactly pure white this is particularly useful in printing so if you're printing an image on paper and you've got like a white background and you still want to see where the edge of the paper is where the matte would lie then you can make it so it's not exactly a pure white so that's one thing it can be handy you can also brighten up your image if it's too dark using the output levels but we're actually going to use them in the color adjustments - so now that you kind of see how the levels tool works here you're gonna notice that we have had this little RGB tab select this whole time that means that we're doing it globally to all three color channels we can also do this on a per channel basis so we have red we have green and we have blue so what this does is it allows us to make adjustments on a per channel basis and so what we can do is only affect the red Channel or the green Channel the blue Channel and this is where a lot of power comes into play so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to select the red Channel what I'm going to do is I'm just going to adjust the mid-tones so we're gonna adjust the contrast in the red Channel now if I decrease the contrast in the red Channel you are going to see that in fact the image does become very red because I'm adding a bunch of reds into the mid-tones if I increase the contrast so if I move this towards the right-hand side you're gonna see that it does the opposite you're gonna say Ted that's not red that is like light blue actually it is cyan and what you're seeing here is that actually we have two colors that we're balancing out in each Channel and so the opposite of red in our RGB model here would be cyan the opposite of green and the green channel would be magenta and the opposite of blue would be yellow so we are actually able to manipulate six different colors and achieve a balance between those not only on a global level but also just in the shadows just in the highlights or we can affect the mid-tones or we can mix and balance there and and this is where this gets really powerful so let's say just with our example image here this was shot this outdoors and it was in autumn and let's say that I want to make this feel warmer or cooler well there's a ways we can adjust this if I go over to the blue channel and this is where a lot of the power is going to happen if let's just say we're just going to adjust the highlights so the light in here it's kind of towards the end of the day and we've got kind of a yellow light coming any way and I really want to cool it down I want this image to feel a lot colder what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add some Blues into my highlights and so that's probably a little too drastic we're gonna back off a lot of these adjustments you're going to realize that subtlety is the key so I have made this feel a lot cooler and so I'm going to bring that back now the opposite if I want to add yellow into my highlights or warm them up what I'm going to do is I'm going to adjust the output level on the highlights and this is going to be at the top and so what I'm going to do is just my output level I'm going to bring that down and you can see that what I'm doing is I'm adding yellow so that makes them warmer now one thing I will say about warming up an image or cooling down probably saying Ted you can do this in the white balance and you're right you can but what we're doing is we're actually applying this on a color level which allows us to have a little more finite control over it and I think just using one channel to do anything is going to give you kind of a one-dimensional result I kind of prefer to use two if I can so what I want to do is if I want to make this image cooler I'm gonna add some Blues to the highlights a little bit but I also want to add some Saiyans in there as well because that's actually more what the color of the sky is going to be and you can see that that has an effect so what we're gonna do is that a little bit of blue and remember cyan is the opposite of what it would be red so we're gonna go into the red Channel and I'm going to adjust the output level this time because I don't want to add red I want to add cyan so we're gonna bring that in just a little bit you can see that that cooled up the image quite a bit it's a lot cooler now so if I do it quick before after I'm gonna alt click on the reset button and there's before here's after before after you can see it cooled it down quite a bit let's reset that and let's warm it up this time so remember I don't want to add just one channel so what we're gonna do is we're gonna add some yellows from the blue channel and I'm also going to add some Reds in because red and yellow will kind of equate to orange and that's kind of what I'm going for here so what we'll do is we'll go to the blue channel we want to not add blue we want to add the opposite yellow so I'm gonna adjust the output level at the top and we're going to bring in so make those a little more yellow and then I'll go over to the red channel and then what we want to do is add Reds so I'm not gonna just the output this is the red Channel so we'll just the the highlights here and there we are warming it up so that's a lot warmer so if I do a quick before and after I'll click before after before after I am able to control the warmth of the image now I'm just affecting highlights perhaps you want to work on the shadows you need to warm up your shadows or your mid-tones you have all of those options here in the levels tool steak this is step further one of the things that is important to me in terms of how I interpret color in the images that I make is that I come from the film era and film had a huge impact on the way that I want colors to look in the end and it's interesting because I think we're at a point right now where there's a lot of photographers who fall into the same category so emulating what we see in film is actually something that is difficult to do in the digital world because technically we have more dynamic range out of cameras than we used to we have more color options and it's constantly improving as time moves forward and so what we're having to do is kind of go backwards a little bit cuz you have to remember that film was a physical motion with a chemical process that was added to it and it was never perfect as much as like I think engineers in those days we're always trying to create more quote/unquote accurate colors the reality is is that film was always an interpretation of what we would see in the real world and that's not a bad thing at all I think that's a really important thing and I think in terms of the way I edit images I always want color to be there for a reason I don't want it just to be a flat color image I want the colors to do something and so a lot of times there is kind of a film look that I want to have that's in place and back in its heyday there were literally hundreds of film types that you had at your disposal that you could purchase and now it's a lot less but you still have options but knowing what you're going for in terms of different looks can be important I'm gonna switch over to another image because we had a lot of shadows here and for instance there are Kodak emulsions that give kind of what people consider to be a Kodak look and there's actually a couple different ones but if you take something like portrait or even like a cinema film like vision 3 and they have a little bit of a magenta cast in the shadows at times and then also they're kind of also known for their kind of creamy rich highlights so you have some little bit of yellow highlights and you have some magenta shadows so if I take an image and I want to interpret it and give it a little bit of that Kodak look that's one of the things that I can do so what I'm gonna do is go to my green channel and I'm going to grab the output or sorry I'm gonna grab the the shadows level here because this will give us magenta inner shadows now if I crank these up they just black go purple and that's not what we want we just want a slight magenta cast so I'm going to bring it just a little bit and then the other thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to give it the creamy highlights by going to the blue just in the output because I want yellow not blue so we're gonna bring that out just a little bit and I might go to my red channel and bring in just a little bit of reds at the top to just to balance that out that's gonna go a little bit orange but you know it'll warm it up okay so more or less this is the look we're going for so if I do it quick before and after here's before and here's after yeah I've kind of Kodak aside this image is that a word Kodak oaf I'd anyway I've given it something that's a little more of a Kodak look now I can tell you right now just looking at this it's probably a little too intense and I'm telling you guys a little bit goes a long way so if you're gonna add them a little bit of magenta cast to your shadows just add a little it's it gets intense really quickly the other thing that you might notice on here too is this is an image that was taken on one of my Fuji cameras excellent cameras but the dynamic range and the contrast is nothing like what film looked like so what I might want to go back and do is go out to my RGB channel so all of them together and what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to raise the output a little bit on the shadows probably to around seven or eight just give it a lift there I might add just a little bit of contrast in here so what I'm doing is I'm essentially decreasing the dynamic range and it might bring my highlights down just a hair and this is a really quick way to emulate more of a film look just using the levels and I might go in and add some grain to this if I really want it to look like film but I typically don't do that in digital but anyway if I do a quick before and after let's see let's all click on the reset here there's before there's after so now I'm starting to get more of a film look I might even want to lift those even more and it's a little too high and this is kind of a kind of a shadow heavy image anyway but anyway I'm starting to get that look and that's kind of one of the codec looks you know there's there's other looks too like for instance akhtar kind of has a little bit more green tint to the shadows than you know which would be opposite magenta so if I go back into my green channel let's take out the magenta and let's add a little bit of green in there just a little bit now I start to get more of a necktie looking I'm probably going to let's take the yellows out of the highlights and add some Reds in there too and so now we have kind of a green look to this and if I do it quick before and after you're gonna see that we've kind of actor fied xr5 I'm making up words right and left but anyway I made this look a little more like kodak actor now XR doesn't have that light of contrast to it so I mean remember I'm not emulating a specific film stock I'm just giving it a direction in that look and just kind of this global sense so I'm just kind of pushing in that direction you can go emulate film stocks but what I'm trying to show you guys how to do in here is to use a really simple tool like a levels adjustment to go in and start tailoring the image and balancing it out to what your subjective idea of what that image is going to be or as I've said over and over in the past couple videos what is your intention as a photographer it's a really important thing you remember because the more experience you have with this there's going to be an intent to what you're doing in the way you want it to in the end another interesting look you could go for is something like Fuji Velvia which had a slight blue cast in the highlights and a lot of saturation was a very saturated film stock so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add some Blues to my highlights and a little goes a long way there we go and then what I'm gonna do is bump my saturation up and now we're starting to get into Velvia territory it would give you really rich blue skies it's really interesting a lot of the Fujifilm stocks and how they were developed my friend David Brooke over the small side used to work as a consultant for Fuji back when they were developing a lot of these and a lot of them were developed to look good under certain weather conditions in Tokyo because it was overcast a lot and it would come up with a film that would kind of intensify certain things and of course then it takes taken out of context obviously when it hits the global level and it's really interesting to see a lot of the different Fuji looks but that's certainly one you could do another one that's kind of interesting is if we look at something like Fuji 160c which actually had blue highlights and yellow shadow details so if we go into the blue Channel what I'm going to do is I'm going to add yellows to the shadows just by bringing this over so we're gonna warm up our shadows and then we want to add a little bit blue to the highlights so what I'm going to do is bring this one over like so and I might even go for a little cyan in there just to balance that out and there we go now we start to get like this 160c look to it and so if I do a quick before and after here's before here's after so the main thing that I hope that you take away from this video is we're using one tool to perform a variety of edits and I'm showing you different possibilities of what you can do and we're not using presets to do this we're understanding how to use the levels tool to do it ultimately any image editing software it provides a lot of different ways to do the same thing in fact you can go in and you can just use the contrast slider you can use the exposure slider we're using the levels tool because it's one tool that provides a lot of options with it not only in terms of the balance in your image in terms of contrast shadows and highlights but also in color detail as well and we're actually putting some color casts in to make these emulates sort of some classic film looks and it's a really interesting exercise to do and if you get into this habit and try it with some of your own images and try to emulate some of the stuff that you look up to you're eventually going to start understanding how you can realize your intentions as a photographer and that is really important how you come up with a creative vision and how you see that through from start to finish and that's ultimately the goal with all this stuff now I know I've been working in capture one and there is no levels tool if you're a Lightroom user they don't have a levels tool they have a curves adjustment tool which we will talk about in a separate video and Australia to do some of these same things but essentially we've been working with the levels adjustment tool if you're an Adobe user they do have one in Photoshop the only difference is the way they handle the outputs it's broken down onto a separate graph and so you do your output controls from there but it's other than that it's the same tool that you see in capture one so anyway give this a shot leave me a comment let me know your thoughts what you would like to see in future videos I want to get into a lot of color adjustment and a lot of editing stuff that's really practical it's not just presets and how do you do gimmicky things it's what I'm interested in is how do you really develop a statement as a photographer in a certain look that you want to go for and something I'm pretty passionate about so anyway until the next video I will see you guys then later [Music]

Channel: The Art of Photography

Views: 88,035

Keywords: cinematic look, film look tutorial, depth of field, how to, color grading, film look, Kokak, fujifilm, how to get the film look, how to get the film look with a dslr, how to get the film look in lightroom, Capture One, photo editing tutorial photoshop cc, photo editing tutorial lightroom, capture one pro 11, capture one pro, capture one tutorial, Capture one film look, film look in capture one, photography, The Art of Photography, Ted Forbes

Id: NQiqOinqHV4

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 25 2018