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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

Take full control of the content in your images

A new and powerful feature in Capture One Pro 8 is the Repair Layers.

The Repair Layers are designed to make it easy to remove unwanted objects in an image like for instance power cables or people walking into the frame.

Clone or Heal?

In a Repair Layer you can either Clone data from one part of the image to another part of the image or you can use the more advanced Heal layer to easily blend data from one part of an image into another part of the image.

When I was shooting the image above the light was just perfect and the clouds were nice positioned on both sides of the old lighthouse. The only problem was the many tourists walking in my frame.

Not the perfect shot

Knowing that Capture One Pro 8 has the Repair Layer feature and that it would be a simple task to remove the unwanted people in the frame, I decided to take the picture rather than hoping that the people would go away before the light and the sky had changed.

The image to the left is straight out of the camera. The image to the right is after removing the unwanted people in the scene and adding some basic corrections in the Exposure tool tab.

In the Local Adjustments Tool, which you find in the Local Adjustments tool tab, you now have the option to create two new kind of layers: Clone Layer and Heal Layer.

Create a Repair Layer:

In the Local Adjustments Tool simply press the “+” button to add a new layer. By default it gives you an Adjustments Layer, but by holding down the mouse on the “Adjustment” button in the Layer you will have the option to change the layer into a Clone or a Heal Layer.

You can also directly add a specific kind of Layer by holding down the “+” button in the Local Adjustments Tool. This will give you a drop down to select among the different kind of layers.

Set source and destination for you Repair Layer:

In a Repair Layer you need to select the source point from where to copy pixels and a destination point to where you want to paste the pixels. When this is established, you can brush in the needed area, which need to be fixed. For all the brush strokes you do in a single Repair Layer, it will keep the relative distance between the source and the destination point at all time. The success of a repair is very much depending on how clever you select the source and destination points.

I will start by removing the long shadow in the sand dune, so I add a new Heal Layer. I zoom into the image and adjust my brush size so it is about the size of the thickness of the shadow. For a Heal Layer I normally use a hardness around 50. If I use a Clone Layer, I often uses a hardness between 0 and 40.

The idea is now to set the source and destination points in such a way that as many of the structures in the source point fall naturally into the destination areas. To set the source point hold down the “Alt” key while clicking with the brush. Then click with the brush to set the destination point.

The white circle indicates the source point for the Repair layer and the orange circle shows the destination area.

I can always re-adjust the source and destination points by simply dragging the circles. Now with the source and destination points established, I can simply brush over the shadows in the sand dune. While brushing, the algorithm uses the simpler and faster Clone method, but when you let go of the brush, it optimizes the cloned data to blend it into the color and lightness of the background. After you have brushed your Repair Layer you still have the option to change you layer from a Clone to Heal layer or vise versa. This means that if you are in doubt about which method to use you can just start with one type of Repair Layer and then later change to the other kind of Repair Layer to see if it works better.

With two long brush strokes I remove the shadows in the sand dune. Here I used the option to show the mask strokes. The Heal Layer does a fantastic job in making the repaired area blend smoothly into the background layer so it is almost impossible to see what is the original image and what is repaired.

Now I would like to remove the remaining part of the two people climbing the dune.

In the first image I set the source and destination points. I do it so the source and destination points are parallel to the ridge of the dune. This will ensure that the ridge will be perfectly repaired. In the second image you can see my brush strokes and in the image to the right you can see the final result of moving the two people and their shadows.

Using similar ideas for setting the source and destination points in combination with an appropriate selection of brush size, I could easily remove the unwanted people in the image by applying only four Repair Layers.

I deliberately left one person in the image just add dimensions to the image.

Full freedom for editing an image with Repair layers

The Repair Layers in Capture One Pro 8 work on the raw images. This gives you full freedom to work with the image and to do whatever adjustments you would like to do with the image both before and after you have done a Repair Layer.

All the best,

Niels

Meet the Team Behind Capture One Pro 8

The secret sauce to Capture One Pro 8 is without a doubt a unique team of skilled and passionate people.

In this video and the next you get to meet the brainy PhD’s and passionate photographers all sharing the same love and passion for photography.

Find out who these people are, why they live and breathe for Capture One and why they think version 8 is the only choice for photographers who are serious about their images.

Feel the passion!

All the best,

Niels

Clarity with Punch

The High Dynamic Range Tool in Capture One Pro 7 is a very powerful tool when dealing with the large dynamic range you often find in landscape images.

With this tool you can bring back details in both shadows and highlights. When doing extensive correction in both highlights and shadows it is often a very good idea to use the Clarity Tool to bring back more contrast to the image in order to give it a more natural look.

Before After

The image on the left-hand side is straight out of the camera. The image has been exposed to preserve the highlights with only a bit of clipping, leaving the shadows very dark. The image on the right-hand side is after the High dynamic Range Tool and the Clarity Tool have been applied in Capture One Pro 7.

The Clarity Tool in Capture One Pro 7 has three different methods for applying clarity to an image:

Punch:

The default method that besides applying local contrast also applies a bit of local saturation. This usually works very well on for instance landscape images.

Neutral:

Adds the local contrast the same way as “Punch” but without changing the saturation. When really strong clarity corrections are applied then this method often gives more pleasing results.

Classic:

This method was introduced in Capture One 6. It applies the local contrast without changing the saturation, but it does it in different way than the Punch and Neutral.

The image above where I added quite a bit of Clarity is a very good example to show the benefit of having alternative methods for clarity. In this example with lots of mostly gray clouds it is easy to see how the different method works.

Punch Neutral Classic

When comparing the Punch and Neutral method it is easy to see that the sunstroke as well as the yellowish sky over the horizon picks up more color when using Punch. The sunstrokes appear equally strong.

Comparing the Neutral and Classic method you will notice that Classic preserves the highlights better and it gives you much more details in the forest. On the other hand the sunstroke isn’t as strong as when using Neutral. You will also notice that Classic has a tendency to show a halo over the strong contrast edge of the forest.

So which method to use is very much an individual choice and is also very much dependent on the motive.

If you prefer Punch or Neutral, but are afraid to lose highlights details, I have a few tricks to overcome that:

1) In the Levels Tool bring down the target levels from 255 to for instance 245. This will leave a little headroom for the Clarity Tool.

2) Use a Local Adjustments Layer to add negative clarity over the highlights details with a smooth brush. This will reduce the clipping effect from the Clarity Tool.

Clarity Neutral Clarity Neutral including the little trick

Applying the trick with the Levels Tool and a negative clarity brush over the highlights in an Local Adjustments Layer brings back all the needed highlight details even when such Clarity corrections are applied as in this example.

All the best,

Niels