Capture One

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Realistic HDR with Capture One Pro 8

Capture One has a High Dynamic Range tool designed to optimize images with a large dynamic range normally leading to loss of detail and colors in highlights and shadows.

In Capture One Pro 8 the High Dynamic Range tool has been improved in such a way that it is easier to recover detail in both shadows and highlights in a natural way.

Avoid the “HDR look”

The design goals have been to achieve a more natural and realistic look when doing strong correction. With the new High Dynamic Range tool in version 8 you are now able to do strong corrections without getting the artificial HDR look.

The High Dynamic Range tool is now also available in Local Adjustments Layers. So if you need super strong corrections you can now simply add an extra layer and apply more Shadow or Highlight recovery from the High Dynamic Range tool.

Before After

The image to the left is straight out of the camera. The image has been exposed with just a bit of clipping in the brightest part of the sky.

The image to the right is after it has been optimized in Capture One Pro 8 primarily by using the improved High Dynamic Range tool.

The improvements in Capture One Pro 8

To show how the HDR tool has been improved I will use the image from above.

In order to compare version 7 against version 8 I will start by looking at the image in Capture One Pro 7. By first using version 7 the image will get image settings from this version, which will be maintained when you look at the image in version 8. If you look at the Base Characteristics tool you will see that the processing engine “Capture One 7” is used for the image. If I make a new variant of the image (F2 on Mac/F7 on Windows) the new image will, by default, be using the new engine “Capture One 8”.

Two variants of the same image. The variant to the left is using Capture One 7 engine as it has been opened in Capture One 7. The variant to the right is using the Capture One 8 engine.

If I now apply maximum values for the Highlight and Shadow sliders in the High Dynamic Range tool, which is something that I would hardly ever do, then it becomes much easier to see what I mean by saying that the new version looks more natural and realistic.

Capture One Pro 7 Capture One Pro 8

For both variants maximum values for Highlight and Shadow corrections have been applied in the High Dynamic Range tool. When looking at the version 7 variant it is easy to see that the image has become unrealistic with a grayish low contrast look. The tone transitions in the sky also break up a little bit.

When looking at the Capture One 8 variant the overall appearance is a much more natural and realistic look. The sky is also showing a nice and smooth tone transition from the orange highlights to the darker corners.

Applying High Dynamic Range tool in an Adjustments Layer

When comparing the two versions of the software, it is obvious that version 8 gives a more realistic look. But what if you like the deeper orange sky from the version 7? In Capture One Pro 8 you have the ability to apply the High Dynamic Range tool in a Local Adjustments Layer. So if you need even more highlight recovery you can simply add more in a Local adjustments Layer.

In this case I simply added another Local Adjustments Layer and used the Fill Mask feature to apply the extra Highlight recovery on the whole image.

A deeper orange sky has been achieved by adding more highlight recovery in a Local Adjustments Layer covering the whole image. I have also reduced the Shadow correction to around 55, which I find works better for this image.

To finish up the image I would typically add some Clarity and Structure with the Clarity tool. This brings back more local contrast to the image, which I often find pleasing when very strong corrections have been made in the High Dynamic Range tool.

Final image after applying Shadow and highlight recovery with the High Dynamic Range tool as well as adding some Clarity and Structure in the Clarity tool.

Will settings in Capture One 7 give same results as in Capture One Pro 8?

In the process of enhancing the High Dynamic Range tool we have made some changes around how we split shadows, mid-tones and highlights and how we weigh the different colors in an image. This is all part of why the improved tool works in a more realistic and natural way.

These changes will have an effect and the slider settings for the High Dynamic Range tool made in Capture One 7 will not give the same look as in version 8. Capture One Pro 8 respects all settings made in version 7 and an image adjusted in version 7 will look exactly the same in version 8, as long as you don’t upgrade the engine for the image.

If you want to see how the image will look using the Capture One Pro 8 engine without loosing your version 7 variant, the safest way is to create a new variant, which by default will be using engine “Capture One 8”, and then simply make a Copy and Paste of all settings from the first variant. This way you can compare the engine 7 and 8 and do whatever tweaking you need with the Capture One 8 variant to make it look as good or better than the version 7 variant.

Use the copy and paste icons to move settings from a variant using Capture One Pro 7 engine to a variant using Capture One Pro 8 engine.

All the best,

Niels

Capture One Pro 8 in the mix

We’ve had a really good response so far making it really difficult to choose the first one of your images to adjust! In the end I decided to use an image from David Goldman.

The kid of stilts

David gives us the background story on this image:

“I was in Ethiopia doing a story about The Hamlin Fistula Hospital and the work they do to help women recover from the devastating damage caused by an obstetric fistula: death of the unborn baby and often incontinence. We were traveling down to the Omo valley in Southern Ethiopia when we came upon this kid on the stilts. Basically he is doing a show on the side of the road. The hope is that tourists will stop and give him money in exchange for photos”, says David and continues:

“We took some photos and gave a bit of money. He felt we underpaid him so he was going to throw some pretty big rocks at our truck. We ended up paying a bit more :)”.

Above is the image in Capture One Pro 8, all purely on defaults.

Luckily David has given me a head start with a nicely exposed and composed image. Thank you David!

Before getting into some specific adjustments I will check up on Lens Corrections and make some changes there.The lens has been automatically detected and the distortion corrected to 100%. If I wish, I can also make changes to the Sharpness and Light Fall-off if necessary.

One option I definitely recommend is to “analyze” the Chromatic Aberration of the lens and camera combination. Even though we can remove this based on the lenses we test, it can vary. So this way you get the best correction possible. Fortunately in Capture One Pro 8, you can do this on a batch of images simply by selecting multiple ones first.

I couldn’t really see any noticeable purple fringing in the image so I have left that slider untouched. Compared to version 7, this is now a variable adjustment as opposed to a checkbox. You can even apply it as a local adjustment!

On to the fun stuff!

With those corrections done, we can go onto the fun stuff! White Balance-wise I think it might be a little too warm for my liking (remember I said it’s subjective!) so a simple reduction in the Kelvin value looks good to me.

Looking at the Levels, the only slight change to make is pull the highlight slider in a touch. You can turn on your Exposure warnings, if you like to make sure you don’t clip data. (Cmd-E for Mac or Ctrl-E for PC). I think I might lighten the mid tones a little as well, also in the Levels tools. Now I know the image could be looking a little flat now, but don’t worry we will come onto Contrast and Clarity next.

Capture One Pro 8 saw the addition of the ‘Natural’ clarity mode. This is my favorite choice for Clarity adjustments now, as the effect is nice and subtle without adjusting the Saturation.

A value of 50 is about good here and also a touch of Structure helps to bring out the details in the rocks in the foreground.

I am pretty happy so far, but I think we can make the sky look a bit more interesting and maybe the boy on the stilts could also look better in David’s image.

In the Color Tool Tab, the Advanced tool can be used to select the blue sky only with the picker, and increase the saturation and decrease the lightness. Just to get a bit more richness in it.

Now, I feel the right hand side of the image has a bit of an exposure imbalance, which I am finding distracting, especially as I am ‘reading’ the image from left to right. So, I am going to correct it with a gradient mask on the right-hand side only and lift the exposure a little. This might make the overall image too bright, but then I have the freedom to adjust it as a whole with the exposure on the background layer.

The mask looks like this….

and I think raising the exposure on that layer by 0.71EV works for me…

As I said, maybe the image is too bright now and I think this is when I approach the ‘playing’ stage, which might be hard to document as it involves me going back and forth a little with what I have got so far.

After playing a little I ended up increasing the Clarity more (still on the Natural mode) and adding a slight Vignette.

One last thing to try is see, if I can brighten the boy a little without it looking over-processed or fake. I made a pretty rough Local Adjustment mask around the boy, and then just increased the Shadow slider in the HDR tool a little. As this is only affecting the lower tones, the lack of a precise mask does not matter and only the skin is brightened.

The HDR tool is another adjustment that was added to Local Adjustments in Capture One Pro 8!

I hit another playing phase and actually added another Local Adjustment to lighten the boys face a little as it was just falling into shadow. I also bumped up Saturation overall a tiny bit as felt it was a bit too low in hindsight.

The last thing to do was to get rid off two dust spots in the sky. The Spot tool worked just fine for that.

Below is David’s image with my adjustments on the left and defaults on the right. I hope I did it justice!

Below is the final output.

It also makes for a nice Black and White.

Thanks to David Goldman for sending us this image.

Best regards,

David

Speed improvements in Capture One Pro 8 enabling OpenCL

With the introduction of the latest Mac Pro (2013) it has become common to include more than one GPU card in computers. In previous versions of Capture One, support for OpenCL processing was limited to a single GPU. In Capture One Pro 8, all available GPU’s will be utilized, distributing the workload between them according to individual processing power.

This processing distribution doubles the per pixel processing speed for the Mac Pro (2013 model), improving the end-to-end speed by approximately 50%. In Capture One Pro 8, we have carefully optimized the processing pipeline to become as parallel as possible, resulting in the fastest processing of any Capture One version – and any current current RAW processor.

The speed advantage of using OpenCL is noticeable. When using both of the AMD D700 graphics cards in a Mac Pro (2013) computer, you can process a full 80 megapixel RAW file in less than 1.5 seconds.

In Capture One Pro 8, the default setup is not to use OpenCL for processing due to a possible incompatibility of future OpenCL drivers. To enable OpenCL, you need to switch to Auto in the Hardware Acceleration preferences as shown below.

When Auto is selected, Capture One Pro 8 will test the capability of the graphics card, and if the card proves to be powerful enough, it will be used for processing.

What is OpenCL?

OpenCL is an open standard that defines how to interface and utilize all the processing capabilities within graphics card’s (GPU) and multiprocessor CPU’s. OpenCL is short for Open Computing Language.

OpenCL essentially enables effective utilization of the thousands of compute units within modern graphics cards. For Capture One Pro, only relatively new GPU cards have enough computing power and onboard RAM to be utilized effectively.

The number of processing or compute units is an important proxy for performance. However, driver optimization, specific implementation of the floating point and integer pipeline of the GPU, along with the total amount of on-board memory are important elements as well.

If you have too little on-board memory the full image has to split up in small units creating data transfer overhead that will limit performance.

Performance

Utilizing OpenCL for dual GPUs in Capture One Pro 8 accelerates your processing significantly compared to Capture One Pro 7 – where only one GPU is used.

Performance for Mac Pro (2013), Dual D700 ATI cards, 12 core CPU:

Capture One Pro 7: 28 IQ180 files: 2.23 min – end to end
Capture One Pro 8: 28 IQ180 files: 1.34 min – end to end

Capture One Pro 8 is processing files 52% faster than Capture One Pro 7.

The benchmark numbers depend on your graphics card, number of CPU cores and speed of your SSD disk.

In terms of the interactive speed using one of the recommended graphics cards, it is possible to get real-time feedback (30fps) for almost all slider interaction in Capture One Pro 8, including the HDR tool (which was not using OpenCL in previous versions).

As of September 15, 2014, here are the recommended GPU Cards for “best performance”

Windows:
AMD R9 290X
NVidia GTX 780Ti

Mac:
Dual ATI D700 in Mac Pro (2013)
AMD 7950 in Mac Pro Tower

Drivers

As of September 2014, four major companies have developed desktop drivers for OpenCL: NVidia, AMD, Apple and Intel. OpenCL is also becoming a popular interface for other computer architectures going forward, even embedded systems and SOC (System On a Chip) devices.

For Mac OS X the OpenCL drivers are part of the operating system, where the drivers for Windows based systems are installed as part of the display drivers. For your convenience here are the links to the OpenCL enabled drivers for Windows.

Windows driver requirements:

For AMD/ATI graphics: Catalyst Software suite 13.4 or higher http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Windows+7+-+64
For NVidia graphics: NVidia Display driver version 320.18 or higher http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/78216/en-us
Intel Iris Pro Graphics: Version 15.31.9 or higher https://downloadcenter.intel.com/SearchResult.aspx?lang=eng&FamilyId=39&ProductID=3723&ProdId=3723

Final Words

Unlike Capture One Pro 7, there are no image settings or features in Capture One Pro 8 that will by-pass the use of OpenCL, and use the CPU processing pipeline. Thus, if your graphics card is capable of it, it is preferable to enable OpenCL, as you will see a significant increase in Capture One Pro 8’s speed.

And who doesn’t want faster processing?

Regards,
Lionel

Picture-perfect precision with Capture One Pro 8

Our way to approach industrial environments is at the end pretty simple. In order to create a clean, modern and new approach to such topics we force a crystal clear picture language. Capture One Pro 8 helps us with that even more.

Earlier this year we were hired by Fortune Magazine USA to cover the production and testing facilities of a well known Swiss watch company.

My favorite picture of the day
The example I want to talk about was a little side shot, done in a rush while visiting a few departments of the factory. The geometrical order and the “clarity” of this testing cabinet was catching my attention and it actually turned out to be my favorite picture of the day. Of course there was some work to be done on the raw file, which was shot with our Alpa 12 TC and the Phase One IQ260 digital back.

First stop: LCC process
First of all I had to go through the LCC process in order to get rid of any lens cast, dust, and light falloff. Pretty simple in Capture One Pro 8! Find the corresponding calibration shot, tell Capture One Pro 8 to create an LCC by right-clicking your image. I do normally include the “dust removal” option and after that apply it to the original picture. See screen shot below.

Click on images to enlarge

New Clarity method

Then I do some general adjustments like White Balance, exposure, HDR and some basic color correction. The Curve is used to add a little contrast and I also pushed the blue channel a bit. See screenshots below. I was also using the new Clarity method called Natural. I like it a lot! It is less aggressive than Punch.

I also play a lot with Structure. A great tool especially for pictures in this context, as Structure helps to improve the fine details in an image like this.

In the next tab be sure to check the “dust removal” button in the LCC section! It often goes forgotten and dust removal from LCC’s does a really great job! It’s worth double checking! See screen shot below.

Correcting the geometry
I also used the Keystone tool to correct the geometry of the picture. As I said, it was done in a rush so it needed some fine treatment.

I don’t tend to do fancy things in the sharpening tab. What I usually do with pictures like this is to reduce the radius bellow 1 – normally between 0.7 – 0.9 and limit the amount between 90 – 110. In my experience my Alpa / IQ260 combination rarely needs more sharpening than that.

Fun with the Local Adjustments

But then I went into the Local Adjustments: with the massive increase in performance, they are real fun now to use in Capture One Pro 8! First I corrected some issues with the mixed light situation the picture was taken in. Some daylight, some tungsten light with various colours.

Before the release of Capture One Pro 8, the usual way to correct that would have been to do extensive color correction or create different Variants to combine in Photoshop. Now you can have adjustment layers with different White Balance settings and brush them into your picture. That is an amazing benefit, which I use often! See screen shots below.

Perfection with the Repair Layers

Besides some minor color correction I also used the new Repair Layers to get rid of some dirt and the logo on the button – which I think was distracting the viewer’s attention.

The great thing about doing correction or retouches already in Capture One Pro 8 already at that point, is that if you have to do global changes later in the process, it will not affect your already done retouch! Especially in a process of “finding a look” for your picture – that can be really helpful!

Create a lens flare

I also figured out something cool: You can already use an Adjustment layer to create a lens flare in Capture One Pro 8! Here is how I do that: create an Adjustment layer, invert the mask so that you can actually see what your correction looks like.

Then push the exposure and the brightness to maximum and reduce the contrast to minimum. That’s pretty much what a lens flare in your camera would do. Invert the mask again to hide it – and than take a big soft brush and make one dot to the point where you want to show your flare with a opacity of 15 – 40. Do the same thing again with a smaller brush.

That should be enough. Now you can adjust your flare with the exposure value to taste! Pretty simple effect but it ads some dimension to the picture. You don’t see it in the first place, but you will miss it if you turn it off. Only try to “support” what’s already there, not to create something completely new – ok?

That’s it pretty much it – I hope you have enjoyed that little factory tour and we are looking forward to your thoughts and comments. – If you like to see more of our work please visit our website: www.scanderbegsauer.com

All the best,

Andreana and Alex