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How to make your food shots stand out

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One.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

Here is the finished shot of an Indian salad that I shot with my friend and exceptionally talented food stylist, Katie Giovanni.

In this instance I was shooting with Capture One Pro 8 with the IQ 160 back on a Phase One camera. The lighting is daylight with lots of black flags blocking the light out to create more contrast.

The journey from the initial to the final shot

As much as I try to minimize post work and processing, some shots just demand a little more tweaking and that’s when Capture One Pro 8 comes into it’s own. Here I will outline the journey from the very initial shot from the camera to the final shot you see here.

Stage 1: the first shot

This shot above is the first image before I work on the White Balance, exposure control and other processing options. It is a RAW image. Apart from choosing an ISO and exposure values this initial shot is a little bit like dipping the proverbial toe in the water to see what the potential is.

Stage 2: White Balance

I will always adjust the White Balance before the shot is completed so that you get an accurate idea of the composition as it develops. Often I’ll warm or cool the shot down just a little using the White Balance tool.

Working on the composition

Stage 3: Composition

The shot above is now pretty much complete within the camera but needs a certain amount of work on the raw file. Apart from White Balance the shot has been un-touched in Capture One Pro 8.

Stage 4: Exposure and Contrast

Changing the exposure and contrast at this stage is for me about trying to determine the mood and feel of the shot. Personally I prefer using this method rather than Levels as for me the exposure directly relates to minor exposure changes as if they were in camera. Obviously a calibrated screen is essential. See screenshots above.

Stage 5: Localized exposure change

One of the most useful features of Capture One Pro 8 is the layer options where you alter localized areas of the image. The red onion was just slightly burning out the highlights. If we tried to darken this using files that weren’t Raw, it would be almost impossible to retrieve this information. Using the raw information it is relatively easy.

Using the Draw Mask tool, you click on the plus sign to create a new layer. You can rename this layer if using multiple layers. Then using the Draw Mask tool you choose the size of the brush and then paint within the area you require to alter. The area will go red. Then using the sliders you can alter the exposure, contrast, color of this selected area (see screenshot above).

I also used this tool with another layer to make the small metal dish filled with mustard seeds go a little lighter.

Stage 6: Changing the background color

While using this tool I selected the background layer to make the whole shot a little bluer/turquoise. I did this by selecting the background color using the color picker tool, and then slightly changed the hue and saturation. See screenshot above.

Stage 7: Adding a vignette

Under the exposure slider tab is the Vignette tool. This shot I felt would benefit from your eye really closing in on the main dish so I added a vignette. Vignette’s can add to an image but I personally prefer it to look natural and not overly obvious. Capture One Pro 8 has a range of options to let you select the shape and amount.

Stage 8: Finished shot

So here’s the finished shot, which has been enhanced by Capture One Pro 8’s many features. The whole process took me just a few minutes.

As a food photographer for such a long time it’s quite incredible how the genre has moved on into the public’s imagination with a lot of people wanting to create their own blog, or wanting to self-publish their Mum’s recipe book. Food is a serious business and whether you are shooting angry soufflés for books or belligerent burgers for fast food chains, it’s always good to know that the digital age is complementing and helping progress rather than compromising quality for convenience.

More on Howard Shooter:

I started 20 years ago assisting a food photographer who photographed across multi disciplines, i.e. editorial, publishing, packaging and design, and I was blessed with his old school attitude to teaching about the craft, using 10×8 sheet film and old Strobe lights. The photographer and I are still great friends today and my approach to digital photography has been shaped by these skill sets that I developed as a young and enthusiastic apprentice.

Being quietly geeky and gadget mad

As an early adopter of digital being quietly geeky and gadget mad, I can’t help always feeling that what Phase One got right was that they allow the photographer to shoot without the digital bit either taking over or getting in the way. If you want it, it’s there but you don’t need a degree in quantum physics to get started shooting in a way that is as easy as pressing the camera shutter.

I shoot tethered which is a posh term for the digital back being physically attached to the computer with either a firewire or a usb cable. Capture One Pro 8 happily receives the raw data from the camera and there is the enormous file in beautiful color in front of your eyes for everyone to see instantly.

Why I use Capture One Pro 8

It is the immediacy of the action and the reliability of the new software, which constantly impresses me. The most crucial part of this process though and what sets Capture One apart from the competition is three fold; firstly the color is so accurate, it always has been the market leader in this area as far as I’m concerned and it just gets better.

Secondly the filmic quality of the files makes shooting seem like a throw back from when we would huddle over enormous light boxes judging the bracketing of sheet film transparency. Finally Capture One Pro 8 let’s you make very exacting changes to raw data, accurately, quickly and naturally.

Hope you enjoyed the blog post.

Best regards,

Howard Shooter

7-1-15

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