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Color grading made easy

With Capture One Pro 8.2 we have released a completely re-designed Color Balance tool. This new tool offers an easy and accessible way to tone your shadows, midtones and highlights, while maintaining the legacy functionality of the old Color Balance tool.

Giving your pictures a subtle color tint in Capture One can be done in many ways. We have the global color adjustment tools in the White Balance and the Color Balance Master. Previously, If you want to target local tones in the shadow, midtones or highlights Curves and Levels can be used. The learning curve when using Levels and Curves in specific color channels can however be quite steep. This approach requires in-depth knowledge of complimentary colors and how input/output values affect the picture.

Simpler. Better. Faster.

With the new Color Balance tool, we wanted to make the color adjustment process simpler, better and faster. The tool has been separated into the 3 basic components of the image. Each of these tools has 3 user inputs: Hue, Saturation and Lightness, allowing for more intuitive and precise control of the final outcome.

The new tool has a completely new algorithm, which allows for more precise adjustment while maintaining separate control for the luminance and saturation. Compared to Levels or Curves, this retains much deeper shadows, and brighter highlights, so you can actually achieve the toning you want, without getting that tell-tale “milky/soft” look.

However, if you still want to create the low-contrast look you get by adjusting the Shadow output Level, this can be obtained even more locally using the Color Balance Lightness slider. Using these sliders in their respective components provides a brand new method of adjusting lightness that only affects the selected tonality.

Adjusting Levels will affect the entire images, because of the linear nature of the tool. Curves with enough carefully placed point can provide the same local effect, however, Curves also affect the saturation to a much larger extent.

You can of course still combine all of Capture One Pro 8’s tools with the new 3-way tool, and I highly encourage anyone to do so. This will open brand new possibilities for color grading and adjusting your pictures to achieve the exact look you want.

The tool is highly customizable, and like other tools can be viewed as a floating tool. You can also decide if you want to use the 3 way, or the separate shadow/midtones/highlight tools for easier reference.

Convenient shortcuts

We have also introduced into this tool a convinient set of mouse- and keyboard shortcuts for the tool to offer quick control of each setting. Some basic default shortcuts are:

While hovering over the Saturation, Hue and Lightness slider, the mouse scroll wheel controls the amount.
If the ring inside the Hue circle is selected, the scroll wheel controls the saturation. If the Shift-key is pressed, the scroll wheel now controls the Hue instead.
Hue and Saturation can also be controlled with the arrow keys, if the ring is selected.

In the upcoming Part 2, I will cover workflow, good practices using the tool, along with examples on how and why to mix the 3-way color balance with other tools in Capture One Pro.

Best regards,

Christian Grüner

Overlay Tool: How to solve complex composition challenges

Ancient Hawaii is a new series of art images we have been working on over the last year. It’s been a pretty tough road with a lot of technical challenges along the way and today l would like to talk about how we used Capture One Pro 8 and the overlay mode to handle one particular challenge in two different images.

Anderson Andia – The Demi-God of Maui

With the image of the Demi-God Maui, one of these challenges was compositing the fishing line into the shot. Obviously having the model actually throw the fishing line would have taken hundreds, if not thousand, of attempts to get the perfect position of body and line. So the way we tackled this was to shoot the elements separately and then combined them all together to get the perfect combination. To start we shot the model where all we had to do was concentrate on a strong body position.

Secondly l composited the background together using numerous water, cloud and other elements to create the final master plate. The last element to be added was the fishing line and this is where the overlay mode in Capture One Pro 8 was so useful.

We got in the studio and used a flat rope that we stitched around a thin piece of wooden dowel giving us the rigidity to help us form a fluid tight line as if it was in mid-flight.

The line was then clamped to two stands in which we could then maneuver it in place fairly easily.

Launching Capture One Pro 8 and in tethered mode we then imported our master image via the “Drop Image here” mode by dragging it from the desktop.

Once the master image was in place we lined up the clamped rope with the model’s hands by dropping the Opacity level down to where both the rope and master image could be seen. Using the Move Overlay Hand Tool made it easy to position the rope to match the model’s hands and get the alignment and arc of the rope perfectly positioned. Shooting tethered gave us instant feedback on how these two elements matched up so when l processed the image out of Capture One Pro 8 and into Photoshop minimal work was needed with repositioning.

Anderson Andia – Papakahanmoku and Wakea

Due to scheduling on everyone’s part, we rarely had the opportunity to shoot the models together (seen image above). Again this is where the overlay mode helped us out greatly especially in the Papakahanmoku and Wakea image seen above. Shooting the female model first was relatively straightforward, but when shooting the male model his positioning was more critical as his eye line would have to match up with her. To do this I processed the female image out and doing a quick selection in Photoshop l imported the PSD layer into Capture One Pro 8.

Using the overlay mode and again shooting tethered we had an instant and accurate guide for him to be able to match up perspective and body positioning to perfectly match her’s. What would have been a difficult shot to complete was both easy and accurate to accomplish thanks to Capture One Pro 8 and its overlay mode, which took the guesswork out of the process and saved a lot of time.

To view the whole ancient Hawaii series go to www.hawaiiancient.com

Behind the scenes for a Handball World Cup shoot

We made this little insight during our trip to Doha back in June. It was shot alongside a TV commercial for the event. As the world cup recently finished all the assets have been released for me to use on my blog etc.

I was commissioned via my agent ShootGroup by Filmworks in Dubai, to work alongside the creative team at Leo Burnett in Doha to produce a set of background images for a composite, a set of athlete shots produced in a makeshift studio in the handball stadium and a set of location images to show some of the great travel locations around Doha.

Location Doha

We were in Doha for a week and everyday started well before sunrise, which was 4.15am so we could use the best light. It’s worth pointing out that during the day the temperatures reached 50+ degrees, which was hot to say the least.

My choice for this commission was to shoot it high-res on the Phase One 645DF+ with a IQ260 back. Steve at Teamwork in London once again supplied the camera system. I was always confident of what we could do with the athletes as by lighting them in our studio setup where I had complete control, but knowing the power of processing the IQ260 files in Capture One Pro 8 gives me so much control out in the field where I had everything, from cityscape at night, sand dunes at dawn, boats on water and a desert fort, as well as lots of white buildings in bright sunlight. I know that I can control the file perfectly with Capture One Pro 8. In the studio we would shoot directly into Capture One Pro 8 tethered, out in the 50 degrees heat we would shoot to card and download. It was an unbelievable heat, you would drink 300ml bottles of water constantly and it just came straight back out your pores, and worryingly the camera seemed to be constantly too hot to handle. My producer even went off to buy the only umbrella in Doha to keep the sun off the camera at all times. Even though the camera felt like it was so hot it must explode it kept working just fine, and produced the amazing images that we required.

Processing

The files we shot were needed by the retouchers pretty much as we shot them, so as soon as we had shot the images the Process Recipe for low-res JPEG’s was run to output the shot images for selection and then normally by the time we got back to the hotel the selects were in and we would deliver a high-res version ready for the retouchers to start mocking up for approval. The workflow in Capture One Pro 8 and the quality of the processed file meant we had no worries at all and as you can see they were able to produce a great set of composite images.

Lighting, Elinchrom ELC Pro HD1000

The lighting gear was a bit of a mixture of lighting modifiers we could get in Doha and a set of Elinchrom ELC Pro HD1000 from the Flash Centre in London, which maxed us out on gear we were allowed to take in to Doha.

1/2000 sec flash duration

We used these lights to obtain the short flash duration to free the subject. You can see the flash duration on the led screen as you change the power settings. This is very handy to control this aspect of the lighting.

Regards

Pete

Natural beauty shines in Capture One Pro 8

My name is Tobias Björkgren,I’m a commercial and fashion photographer based in Stockholm. I took the plunge into a Phase One system three years ago with the lease of a Phase One IQ140 digital back and 645DF camera. I have been loving it ever since.

The reason I love using the camera is because of the wonderful sharpness and falloff that looks really beautiful compared to 35mm. The system doesn’t forgive if you make a mistake, everything is seen and there is no hiding your shortcomings – that said, when it shines, it truly shines!

Natural brass beauty

This shoot I did with the makeup artist Johanna Larsson and model Tone R. from MIKAs model agency. We had an idea to interpret the interior design trends of gold/brass details and the use of Carrara marble. So we used marble as a backdrop and sheets of gold leaf, gold/brass makeup around Tone’s eyes as our shoot evolved. To capture the details I used my IQ140 digital back and rented a 120mm manual focus Macro lens from Phase One.

One thing that surprised me with this lens was how easy it was to use the manual focus, even up close! I was shooting at f/16 but at this distance, with a macro lens, you can see that the depth of field is quite shallow.

We wanted to keep it fresh and natural which suited an inclusive Capture One workflow. It’s so uplifting to edit completely within raw processing software because you know that you have complete control and access to the full camera color space of the Phase One system.

It’s really easy to get nice skin tones when you have the ability to use the selective color editing as a Local Adjustment. I used the masking tool to mask the area on which I want to apply the skin color adjustment. This is a good way to take control of your adjustments if you have other color tones in the image, close to the skin tones, and you don’t want them to be affected. Such as the gold/brass makeup in this shot.

As you can see with the before and after images we did not do much with the editing process. I had to do some filling with the gold around the eyes and remove some gold glitter in the eyebrows in some of the images. To do this I used the Repair feature of the Local Adjustment tool, the other adjustments I did were mostly contrast and color correction, applied globally.

One new thing that I tried on this shoot was to utilise the Clarity tool and apply a negative clarity value. I then counted any softness with an increase to the Structure slider. This was done to soften the skin a little without making it ”mushy”. Using the tool in this way, the contrast within the skins texture is softened without losing details of the texture, if that makes much sense.

I really hope you like my work and to view more visit my gallery on PhaseOne, my portfolio or my Facebook page.

I am also doing a 5 days take-over of Phase One’s Instagram account starting today. Don’t miss out on, follow Phase One www.instagram.com/phaseonephoto.

Best regards,

Tobias