How do you prepare for photo shoots in freezing climates?
Our upcoming livestream will help you prepare for your next cold adventure – maybe a ski trip, arctic exploration, or any chilling future endeavor.
Join David Grover and Sony Alpha Ambassador Rachel Jones Ross for an informative talk on gearing up for icy climates.
As a Canadian local and explorer, Rachel has had her fair share of dealing with plunging temperatures, snow, and ice. In this gear-focused livestream, we will discuss how you can protect yourself and your valuable equipment while ensuring that you set yourself up for success.
Prepare for working in arctic temperatures.
Take care of your camera, lenses, and batteries.
Feel safe and knowledgeable when venturing into extreme temperatures.
Protect yourself with the proper clothing – without being hindered by it!
Beauty and still-life photographer Zoë Noble has been using Capture One for years. Working with big brands like L’Oréal Paris, Ogilvy, and No7 and personal projects like We are Childfree, which tells the stories of women who choose to not have children, Zoë works meticulously to make her images look as good as they can.
In this guest blog, Zoë shares her five favorite features in Capture One Pro and how she uses them to get more control over her images, save time on her editing and make her images stand out.
1. Style it out with Layers
It’s important to be able to control as much of the editing process as possible so I can bring my own personal vision to life. I love that I can now use Layers with my Styles with the new Capture One Pro 23 because they allow me to play with the opacity of the layers and tweak the edit to my taste.
The editing process is so much simpler now that I can have different elements of the workflow on different Layers – one Layer will have all the color adjustments, and another all my contrast adjustments, meaning I can hone and perfect each component individually.
One way I keep my editing workflow efficient is by using luminosity masks to create selections and target different areas of an image super quickly. I’ll often create a luminosity mask of just the midtones and then pull down the RGB curve to bring out even more detail.
As well as using masks for contrast and luminosity changes, I will also use them for color, creating a luminosity mask of the shadows or highlights and then adding color with the Curves tool and playing with the opacity to my taste.
3. Creativity and the Color Editor
One of the most important parts of editing my images is correcting color issues and ensuring that the color is harmonious and balanced. For me, color correction is even more important than color grading, which often adds a more stylised “look” to the image.
The Color Editor is an incredibly powerful tool for manipulating and targeting colors, making it really easy to correct issues. I especially love the Skin Tone tool which makes unifying skin tones super simple and can even be used to correct other issues like smoothing out the tones in background paper or clothing.
4. Getting granular with Film Grain
I love the look of film, so when I shoot digital, I often try to give my photos that analog feeling. Adding grain using the Film Grain tool is the last part of my editing process, which ensures that my images don’t feel too sharp and synthetic.
To make sure I get the right level of grain I’ll turn on Proofing, choose the intended output size and view at 100% zoom so I can accurately view how the grain will affect my image.
5. Embrace the Curves
While Curves can be the most daunting tool to learn, it’s definitely the one I value the most. Being able to control the luminosity, color, and contrast of the shadows, midtones, and highlights from one tool is incredibly powerful.
To keep things simple, add a layer for each type of adjustment you want to make. Add one called “Color” where you only work in the red, green, and blue channels. Then add another called “Luminosity” where you can work in the Luma Curve to adjust the brightness. Finally, add a layer called “Contrast” where you can add an “S” shaped curve just to the RGB curve. Once you separate things out you can clearly focus on just one thing, which makes life easier.
In this guest blog, wedding photographer and Capture One Ambassador Eric Ronald shares his thoughts on the new features in Capture One Pro 23, letting AI take on the more tedious tasks, and what this latest version ultimately means for getting your time back.
With every iteration of Capture One Pro, we are gifted with exciting new features. While they are generally going to benefit all of us, sometimes new features are particularly helpful for certain photographers. For example, Capture One Pro 22 saw the exciting rollout of “merge and stitch”, much to the delight of our landscape photographer friends. For this most recent installment, Capture One Pro 23, however, I am especially excited as some of the new features are going to really help those who need to cull and edit a high quantity of images. As a wedding photographer, I most definitely fit that category.
These new features are a significant and symbolic step in the evolution of Capture One as we move more and more into harnessing the power of machine-based learning aka AI (Artificial Intelligence). While we’re not at the stage of kindly asking HAL-9000 to take care of our entire editing needs just yet, there are a few exciting new AI-based features that are going to make many of our lives a lot easier and claw back much-needed time.
Let’s get into some features that I’m particularly excited about.
Smart Adjustments
This is a game-changer. Simply set your exposure and white balance how you like it in one image. Set that as the reference image, then apply those Smart Adjustments to selected images. This isn’t about copying and pasting numeric values. No sir. We’re talking about Capture One identifying the subject/s in the frame, analyzing the skin tone, and automatically adjusting exposure and white balance to visually match the reference image. Pretty cool.
What I can say from my testing is that this feature is very much usable and ready to deploy in your workflow straight off the bat. Think of it like setting a skin tone exposure and white balance reference for Capture One to match to. If you do that, be prepared to be blown away by this extremely helpful new tool!
We all know how much time can be spent in the dreaded cull. For me, on a wedding day, I tend to take about 6,000 – 8,000 images and whittle that down to 500 – 700 to deliver to the couple. The images are mostly variations of the same frame, all with slightly different moments, expressions, poses etc. What that means for me in the cull is that it’s all about selecting the best one or two shots in each sequence.
That’s where the new faster culling feature comes to save the day. What it’s able to do for us is simply group similar-looking shots together.
Rather than Capture One deciding for us, they give us the power to adjust the sensitivity or threshold of how it will group shots together. Have it set low and it will group shots that are vaguely similar, say, taken in the same environment. Dial it up and it will be looking to group shots that are more of an exact match with your subject, lens, composition etc. Simply play with the slider to see the results change instantly right in front of you to find your sweet spot.
Once you have done that, you can sink your teeth into the cull with intuitive navigation where you’ll feel right at home straight away. On your keyboard, hit up/down to cycle between each shot, make your selections by applying a chosen color or star rating, then hit left/right to cycle through each group or sequence – easy!
These two features are all about saving us time. So, whether that buys you more time polishing and refining your images in more detail, or simply taking the dog for a walk is entirely up to you.
In Capture One Pro 23, I’m also happy to now have the ability to change capture time for those times when the clocks on my two bodies weren’t lined up correctly (oops!) and apply Layers in Styles in this exciting installment.
However! Is this growing dependency on AI a slippery slope that will eventually lead to computers evolving beyond our human control and seeking world domination? We’ll see. For now, though, thank goodness it’ll save us some time in the edit suite!!
Join our Ambassador Quentin Décaillet on November 15 for an interactive product shoot with Capture One Live.
Go behind the scenes, learn about Quentin’s workflow, and interact directly with him in this live session.
Capture One Live provides the foundation for a smarter, faster, and better collaborative workflow. You can share your photoshoot with clients and teams worldwide and it allows them to easily view, comment, rate, and color tag photos, collecting your feedback all in one place without the need for file storage or emailing images back and forth.
Once you have done that, you can sink your teeth into the cull with intuitive navigation where you’ll feel right at home straight away. On your keyboard, hit up/down to cycle between each shot, make your selections by applying a chosen color or star rating, then hit left/right to cycle through each group or sequence – easy!