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Quick round-trip to Photoshop

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

Capture One Pro 8.1 was released recently with a host of new features. One of these features, which I will concentrate on today, was requested by many of you, so thanks to your feedback it is now part of Capture One!

While we try to encourage you to do as much as possible in Capture One Pro 8, to get the most benefit from the RAW file, there are some tasks that can only realistically be done in Photoshop, for example, retouching.

Simplifies and speeds up your workflow

The benefit of version 8.1 is that instead of having to manually open an exported file into Photoshop and then reimport that file back into the Catalog or Session, is that this process is now automated.

It makes for a much faster and simpler workflow.

The ‘round-trip’ is available whether you are using a Catalog or Session, so the workflow below will make sense for either.

Begin the ’round-trip’

To begin the ’round-trip’ process, you have to use the ‘Edit with…’ command. This differs from the ‘Open with…’ command where the selected image will simply be opened in an application you choose. So make sure to use the right command in this instance.

I am working on the following image in Capture One Pro 8.1

I have made a Black and White conversion, added some Film Grain and a few other minor adjustments. However, there are quite a few ‘dirty’ spots on the face, so I will do a quick removal of those in Photoshop.

‘Edit with…’ is accessed by right-clicking on a thumbnail, or selecting a thumbnail and choosing, ‘File>Edit With…’

This will open a new dialog box where you can specify the output parameters and what application to open the image in.

The dialog box is pretty self-explanatory. In the ‘Adjustments’ tab in the dialog box (not shown) you can also choose to disable any sharpening and cropping.

Once you have decided on the parameters, click ‘Edit Variant”. Capture One Pro 8 will export the Variant and open it automatically in Photoshop. The exported file will also be added automatically alongside the original RAW in the Catalog or Session.

In Photoshop, I can do my quick retouch.

When I close my TIFF file, Capture One Pro 8 will automatically update the thumbnail. It is of course important that I save the changes.

Back in Capture One Pro 8, the thumbnail is automatically updated to reflect any changes that were made in Photoshop.

You can see the TIFF file on the left and the original RAW on the right-hand side…

From now on we can use the ‘Open With…’ command on the TIFF file to make further changes to the image if we wish. Again, this will cause the thumbnail in Capture One Pro 8 to be updated.

An additional benefit is that any Process Recipe you have set up in Capture One Pro 8 could also be used to repurpose the TIFF file, for example, creating a JPEG or TIFF’s at different export sizes.

Best regards,

David

5 easy steps to make your beauty shots pop

I use Capture One Pro 8 whenever I am shooting in studio. The ease of tethering combined with the ability to review images on set are essential to beauty photography, where everything has to be just right.

An iPad with the Capture Pilot app is great for clients as well as hair and makeup artists. A MUA that can review images as they are shot, can see if any makeup touch-ups are needed, thus saving time later on in post production.

In this post I will walk you through the edits I did to make this beauty shot pop.

1) My first step is to always use the lens profile for whichever lens I am using at the time. In this case it’s a 120mm f4 macro. I also chose the extra shadows film curve as a base point.

2) The second step is to Under the adjustments tab I will usually add some contrast, brightness, and then desaturate the image. This gives the image a look that I personally find pleasing. I play around with these as needed, usually not doing more than +/- 15 on any of them. I will only use the high dynamic range tool minimally to adjust the shadows and highlights as needed.

3) The Levels tool is another tool that I use often. The top values of 3 and 250 are so that the lowest RGB value is 3 and the highest being 250. This is useful if you intend to print.

4) I will adjust the contrast and gamma of the image accordingly. I then go into the color channels to tweak the color additionally. For this image I only used the red and blue channels.

5) After these Adjustments, I will export the image as a PSD and bring it into Photo
shop for skin cleanup and dodging and burning, giving the final image:

Best regards,

Rick Rose

www.Rick rphoto.com

Few layers short of perfection?

In Capture One Pro it’s possible to fine-tune your images by using Local Adjustments layers.

With 10 layers at your disposal you can do quite a few of changes to an image, but you often find that you need just a few more layers.

In Capture One Pro 8.1, which is now available for download, the maximum number of Local Adjustments layers has been increased from 10 to 16.

The image to the left is straight out of the camera. The image to the right has been adjusted in Capture One Pro 8.1 using more than 10 Local Adjustments layers.

By using multiple Local Adjustments layers I have been able to control the color and brightness of different areas in the image in order to bring focus on the story of the cozy shopping street in the old center of Copenhagen on a late cold December afternoon.

Below is a step-by-step walkthrough of how I optimized this image in Capture One Pro 8.1

1) First level of tone adjustments:

As I had to lean out of a tower to capture this image, I used ISO 6400, which is about the upper limit for the camera in order to produce a fine result. The image has been exposed with a bit of clipping in the brightest areas of the street lamps in order to minimize noise in the rest of the image.

My first adjustments will be a first level of tone adjustments just to bring the image a little closer to where I want it. As I already know that I will be doing many other corrections to the image, this first level of adjustments doesn’t need to be that precise.

With the High Dynamic Range tool I open up the shadows and bring back some of the details in the highlights. On top of this I add a Curve to brighten the image in general.

2) Setting the overall color tone of the image by adjusting the White Balance in different areas of the image:

I would like to get a general more bluish tone to the image in order to focus more on the theme of a cold winter and cozy shopping. I will now divide the image into three major zones: the sky, the snow-covered rooftops and the lit shopping street.

In the Local Adjustments tool I create two new Adjustments layers one for the street lights and one for the rooftops. The sky will be controlled by the background layer. When drawing the masks I use a brush with hardness “0” to ensure that the different areas blend smoothly into each other.

Background The street lights The Rooftops

For drawing the masks for the rooftops I start drawing the edge of the mask and then use the “Fill Mask” option.

When using the “Fill Mask” option I only need to draw the edges of the mask.

Now it is time to set the overall color tone in the image by setting an individual White Balance for the three areas. I use the Kelvin and Tint sliders. I start with the Kelvin slider and fine-tune with the Tint slider.

The image with individual White Balance adjusted for the shopping street, the sky and snow-covered rooftops.

3) Adjusting individual buildings in the image

There are a number of buildings I would like to work on now. First of all the church at the end of the shopping street needs to be brightened up a bit in order for the viewer of the image to be attracted to this part of the image but a few other buildings need a little work too. I create Local Adjustments layers for each of them.

The five different buildings that need to be adjusted

With the five buildings adjusted

4) Getting rid of distracting elements

Now looking at the image above I find a number of distracting elements. First of all the three windows in the lower left corner are way to bright and draw unnecessary attention to them and therefore need to be fixed.

Close to the tower with lights in the background there is a very bright lamp that needs to be removed and finally I would like to draw more attention to the shopping street and the church tower by adding a mask that darkens everything but this path of the image. Right now the brightest part of the image is close to the light-covered tower.

For the three windows I make an adjustment mask and use a combination of the highlight slider in the High Dynamic Range tool and the Exposure tool.

The bright lamp in the background I remove by using a Clone layer and clone in a building close by.

The mask for drawing attention I create by using a very wide brush with hardness “0” painting over the area I want most attention to. I then invert the mask to darken the surroundings.

The attention mask before I invert it

Before After

Before and after fixing the distracting elements in the image.

5) Fixing the red hearts in the street decoration

The last thing that needs to be fixed is the color of the red hearts hanging over the shopping street. If you look at the reflection on the street is obvious that the hearts were red, but because of the over-exposure of the highlights, the red hearts have turned yellow. To bring back the color of the hearts I create a mask for the hearts and use the Color Editor and the Highlight slider in the High Dynamic Range tool.

Before and after fixing the color of the red hearts in the street decoration.

The example above could only have been made with the same degree of optimizations by utilizing the extra number of Adjustments Layers now available in Capture One Pro 8.1

Download Capture One Pro 8.1 here

All the best,

Niels

Automate Dropbox and speed up your workflow

Recently I was lucky enough to be present on this shoot with Sarah Silver. I learnt many things that day but also a new idea of how to use Capture One Pro 8 with Dropbox, or any other similar cloud sharing service.

At the start of the shoot everyone present on set (who needs access) is added to the days’ shared Dropbox folder, then any selects from the shoot are placed in there, so everyone can see the final images. This is a very simple way of collaborative sharing in a studio if you don’t need the advanced features of Capture Pilot.

In this case, a specific Process Recipe is created in Capture One Pro 8 that outputs directly to the shared Dropbox folder. So at any point, this can be selected and certain images processed directly there.

Therefore I wondered if there was any way to automate Dropbox to do other tasks? For example posting to Social Media. A quick web search supplied me with what I was looking for: Wappwolf.

Wappwolf can apply certain rules to a Dropbox folder. There are many options but the ones I was more interested in were automated uploads to services such as Facebook, Flickr and Google +.

Wappwolf is also compatible with other cloud services like Box and Google Drive, so it is not restricted to Dropbox alone.

Here are the actions that can be added to a Dropbox folder:

Click on images to enlarge

As you can see there are quite a few options, but I’ll create a simple one that could upload an image immediately to Facebook or Flickr.

First of all, let’s handle Capture One Pro 8 and build a Process Recipe to upload an image directly to a Folder on Dropbox and at a suitable size for Facebook. Facebook recommends images to be either 720, 960 or 2048 pixels across, so it makes sense to pick one of these resolutions to avoid Facebook resampling the image.

To create a new Process Recipe, click on the + button in the Process Recipe tool and choose a suitable name.

Now in the Process Recipe tool, decide on the parameters for the output. Again Facebook recommends a JPEG file with the sRGB profile.

Facebook will compress JPEG files, so if you want to ensure maximum quality you could consider using PNG files instead. Capture One Pro 8 can process to both.

So let’s build that in with the correct dimensions. Notice the Scale has been set to Width with a length of 2048 pixels. This means Capture One Pro 8 will automatically resize the width of the image to 2048 pixels.

The File tab has a crucial option that will make this process much easier. In the Root Folder drop-down menu, I have set the folder on my Dropbox that I want to automate. So, to clarify, I first made a folder on the Dropbox called Facebook Upload, and then chose that in the Root Folder drop-down menu.

This simply means, that when selecting this Process Recipe, images will always be saved directly into this folder.

You could explore further options in the other tabs if you wish, like adding a watermark to your image, like your copyright information or company logo.

Test the recipe by selecting an image and choosing File>Process, and make sure the image goes to the Dropbox folder.

Next we need to automate the process. Browse to wappwolf.com and Login/Sign up.

You will be taken through the process to connect Wappwolf to your Dropbox.

Once Wappwolf and Dropbox are connected, you simply go through a process of choosing a folder on your Dropbox and what you want to happen when a file arrives there. You can see below the folder Facebook upload.

After selecting that folder, you can then decide on the automated process. You will need to connect to other services (i.e Flickr, Facebook, Google + etc) to be able to continue.

For my automated process, I can also make a new Album and apply some rules to a comment if necessary.

Once the automation has been set, you will see a summary of it and any other automations you have created.

Now to upload an image to Facebook, all I have to do is select one or more of them in Capture One Pro 8, choose the Facebook Auto Upload Process Recipe and process out! Don’t forget CMD-D or CTRL-D is a handy shortcut for that.

Here is an example:

It could be very useful to have automated features like this in the cloud. If you know of any more, please comment! It would be extremely easy to setup different Process Recipes for other automated actions.

Best regards,

David