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Color control like never before

In the previous tip about color grading and the new 3-way Color Balance tool, Color grading made easy, I covered the basic functionality of the new Color Balance tool along with a quick look “under the hood” of the new tool.

In this post I’ll go much deeper, exploring the far corners of the tool, it’s more advanced application, and the design choices made to provide the users with a quick yet precise way of “grading” his or her images.

Algorithm design

Let’s start by investigating how this tool is different from the traditional Levels and Curves Tools.

First, as I mentioned in Color grading made easy, no knowledge of complimentary color interactions is needed to use the new Color Balance tool. You simply select the specific color you desire and increase the saturation and/or luminance until you have achieved the precise tone you want.

For toning, Levels have usually been the preferred way to achieve the desired look. Let’s take a look into how the Color Balance tool is different:

Levels (and Curves): When adjusting the Blue channel, for example, and adding more blue to the shadows, one would increase the Shadow Output Level. Of course, this results in more blue, but it has the distinct side effect of lifting the overall luminance value of the shadows. Another side effect you’ll find is the Shadow output Level affecting more and more into the midtone values and eventually even the highlights. Avoiding this effect requires tedious curve point anchoring and adjustment.
Color Balance tool: The new Color Balance tool works all together differently. If the Shadow wheel is adjusted, the adjustment will never affect the highlight, and will only affect the lowest midtones values to create a pleasing roll-off. However, the real game-changer is the preservation of the deep shadows. This retains a much higher detail level in the shadows, as the luminance is not changed in the deep shadows.
The same principle applies, to some extent, to the Highlights. Here the tool retains the extreme highlight areas when using small corrections.
The Lightness sliders provide a quick way of adjusting the luminosity of the selected value. This adjustment is applied with a limited impact on saturation, which is a different approach from both the Levels and Curves tool. These sliders can act as both classic input and output adjustments, depending on which way they are adjusted. The Midtone Lightness slider is particular interesting as it provides an impressive, and otherwise non-existent, Midtone Output slider.

Illustration 1: This illustration on a black and white gradient shows the deeper shadows being preserved.

Integration with other tools and workflow

Retaining the deep shadows can of course be problematic if the “milky” look from the high Output levels is desired. In this case, after obtaining the desired color toning, increase the RGB Output Level and you have the same effect. However you will achieve much more individual control.

In general, the Color Balance tool is all about color and intensity, whereas Levels and Curves will also change contrast and luminance. Because of that difference, when using Levels or Cuves, a given image will need more adjustments than usual to obtain the same end-result and will likely be much harder to achieve.

Illustration 2 and 3: This shows the same image, with the same look. Left is done with Levels, Right is done with the Color Balance tool. Notice the Saturation and RGB levels.

With non-destructive editing in Capture One, there is no “right way” of adjusting a given image. However, there are workflows and tools that can greatly minimize the time required to achieve the desired result and toning of an image. As an example, here is how I usually achieve my “look” and tone for a given portrait:

Change the Base Characteristics: I start by changing the Film Curve to my liking. I usually prefer the “Extra Shadow” curve for most images.
Increase and adjust global contrast and exposure using the Exposure tool, High Dynamic Range, Clarity and Levels.
Use the Skintone Tool and Uniformity slider to dial in my desired Skintone
At this point I am ready to use the Color Balance tool. I like to use tones that are already present in the picture as inspiration for the toning. That could be clothing, eye-color, background, props etc.
When I am happy with the colors, I usually make a brief detour back to the exposure adjustments to fine-tune the image.

Improved editing speed using keyboard shortcuts

Since we’re talking about the time it takes to adjust an image, it’s worth noting that all the sliders on the Color Balance tool can be assigned to Modifier Keys.

With the right hardware, such as a Wacom tablet, or video grading wheels and trackballs, you can achieve the colors you want much faster.

I mentioned a few Modifier Keys in Color grading made easy. There is one more worth mentioning (Windows only), and that is the Alt-key coupled with mouse movement. Using this Key will dampen the mouse movement at ratio of approximately 3:1. This makes adjustments in the 3-way tool much more accurate, especially if you’re using a Wacom pen. Use the Wacom utility to assign and configure as you see fit.

With and Without the Color Balance tool

So what do images look like with and without the Color Balance adjustments? Let’s take a look at a few examples. Below each image set is paired with a black and white gradient showing the same toning applied. I’ve also included one gradient without any color adjustment for reference.

Illustration 4: With-Left. Without-Right: A red Shadow and a slightly green Midtone. Notice how the green Midtone also helps to correct for the red skin tone.

Illustration 5: With-Left. Without-Right: Blue Shadows, yellow Midtones and slight red Highlights. Notice that while the grading seems slight, it’s impact on depth and skintone is significant.

Illustration 6: With-Left. Without-Right A very subtle edit, blue Shadows and yellow Highlights. Again, though subtle, the little added warmth to JUST the highlights significantly improves the quality of the image.

With all these new possibilities, I’m happy to introduce you to my new favorite tool! The Color Balance tool makes toning easy and fast. Not only that, it also gives me more control over the final image for picture perfect results.

I hope you will enjoy the new Color Balance tool as much as I do.

Best wishes,

Christian Grüner

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