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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

The secret to beautiful colors

One thing that I keep getting asked is, “Why would I switch over to Capture One Pro 8 from what I’m currently using? What does it do better than what I already use?” It seems as though a lot of people do not know that different programs process raw files differently. If this was news to you, then this article is for you!

I was missing out

It’s only in the last few years that I’ve been using Capture One. Before that time, I was oblivious to the benefits. As I started working in the commercial world, photographers seemed to use Capture One, for tethering and processing. I started using Capture One and was surprised at how colors rendered. I couldn’t believe what I was missing out on all of those years before. I initially thought that it would be an undertaking to learn a new program and that the benefits couldn’t be worth it. Still in denial, I thought whatever the difference might be, I could surely make up for it within Photoshop.

Worth the effort

I was completely wrong. Not only could I not make up for it, I couldn’t get anywhere near what Capture One was getting me in regards to how it processed colors. The reality is that it processes them so much more realistically than the current (and most popular) choice for processing RAW files. In fact, going back to the raw converter I was using before makes me realize just how much of an uphill battle it was trying to achieve beautiful color tones in my images. I was doing myself a complete disservice.

Let me show you first hand. Photographer and friend, Michael Woloszynowicz, has kindly allowed us to use his images to showcase the difference.

The two images seen here are imported as is without any settings. As you can see, the image on the left was processed in my previous raw converter of choice and it comes up muted and falls short while the Capture One processing algorithms show us how vibrant and pleasing the tones of the image are. This is before any sort of customization whatsoever. Depending on the image, the discrepancy varies much more…..sometimes, shockingly so. For instance, here is another example shown below.

When I get asked how I got my colors a certain way, the answer is unmistakably that I just started with a base from Capture One. Then when I apply further color grading, it becomes apparent why a good base is imperative. When I show them the difference, they tend to have the same reaction I did when I found out.

The other difference is how it handles sharpness and clarity through the image. You can clearly see how much sharper the base file is with Capture One within the image. You can even see a difference with the contrast. The brilliant clarity resolves much more detail than what I would get before.

The game-changing tool

The game-changing tool in Capture One Pro 8 is the color editor. The color editor allows you to correct offending skin tones that need to be corrected. The eyedropper tool on the bottom right of the wheel allows you to select a very specific skin tone and tweak exactly how it will be modified.

For instance, you can pick a green tint and move it to a red tint, which would blend in closer to the skin range of the image. The smoothness slider allows you to pick whether or not you want just the color you picked, or any neighboring colors to be modified at a lower capacity. The hue rotation slider gives you the ability to move the offending tone closer to its neighboring colors. In this example, a green tone is moved to reflect a beige tone. The saturation and lightness tab adjusts exactly what they say.

The uniformity slider is my favorite

This slider brings all the tones in the selected range closer to one similar tone. So if you have an issue where an image is rendering 5 varying tints of the same color, you can bring them all together without affecting texture, luminosity, or vibrancy. It really saves time in your retouching workflow once you begin working on it. Before, I would spend a much longer time color correcting skin tones in Photoshop. This delicate attention before-hand saves me time and gets me a far more accurate result.

Again, for example, with the settings shown in the image above, here is a before and after of what the edit accomplished.

Before:

After:

Ultimately, the way Capture One Pro 8 handles the fidelity of colors is far better than anything I have seen thus far. It is further complimented by the ability to specifically control each color in the image with purpose built tools. The sharpness and clarity that pair with the color control is a perfect match. This total control is really something that should excite anyone that cares about their images.

Best regards,

Pratik Naik
Solstice Retouch

Want to learn more about Pratik’s work? Sign up for the upcoming webinar, where Pratik will take us through his Capture One to Photoshop workflow.

New powerful workflow enhancers

Capture One Pro 8.1 was released recently with a focus on improving your workflow. Not too long ago I covered the new round-trip feature to Photoshop. In this post I will concentrate on the other powerful workflow enhancers in version 8.1.

Quick Cursor Tools

Many of the cursor tools in Capture One have additional functions if you click and hold on them. For example, with the crop tool, it brings up additional options for adjusting the aspect ratio.

Now in 8.1, this contextual menu can be accessed at any time in the Capture One viewer, simply by Control or right-clicking.

The additional benefit is that we can actually access all the features in the Crop tool, not just what is available from the cursor menu.

You will find a similar result if you experiment with the other cursor tools. Any of the picker tools can be very useful in this respect.

For example, if we choose the Pick Curve Point, we can right-click to get access to the Curve tool itself.

Try a few of the others and see what you find. It can really limit the amount of travelling your cursor has to do, when you can have the tools quick at hand where you need them.

Find and Replace Naming and more Tokens!

The ability to name and rename is also enhanced in 8.1. More naming tokens have been added and split up into different ’Groups’ to make them simpler to navigate.

Additionally, there is also a ‘Find and Replace’ function when batch-renaming. The Batch Renaming tool can be accessed by selecting a number of images to rename, then right-click on one and choose ‘Batch Rename”.

In the Batch Renaming tool, the ‘Method’ can be changed from the traditional token-based way, or changed to the new ‘Find and Replace’ method.

This is a great way for quickly and easily editing the file name or parts of the file name.

For example…

Multiple Guides

For those of you working in the studio or on location that require critical alignment of the subject, the addition of multiple guides is a nice added benefit. In the past, one horizontal and vertical guide were available by clicking on the show guides button on the tool bar.

Now additional guides can be added from the ‘View Menu’.

Note, that in the same menu you can also Lock, Clear and hide the guides. You might like to set up your own shortcuts for these.

Once shown, guides can be repositioned simply by hovering the cursor over them. Additionally, guides can be removed by dragging them to the edge. The current location of the guide is also shown at the edge of it. This can be very useful if aligning the subject for layout.

Other new features in Capture One Pro 8.1

Additionally in version 8.1 (as well as the usual additions of camera and lens support), the following other features have been added.

Improved Auto Adjustments
Up to 16 layers in Local Adjustments
Additional TIFF processing options

This is all part of our accelerated development to deliver more new features on a regular basis in Capture One. Watch this space for more!

All the best,

David

Video: Learn retouching from the best

In yesterday’s webinar Michael shared his unique technique of portrait retouching using the Local Adjustment possibilities and the powerful tools in Capture One Pro 8.

As we ran out of time yesterday, Michael promised to elaborate more on how he does color grading and Color Correction in Capture One Pro 8 in today’s blog post.

Sit back, click play and learn how to do professional retouching directly on the RAW file without the need for Photoshop!

Check out Michael’s website, some of his other tutorials and the webinar from last night.