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The enhanced B&W tool put to the test

As an assignment we were asked to portrait our friend Michael, one of the owners of Zurich’s L’Ei’Out design agency.

We had the unique opportunity to portrait him in the south of France, Provence Region. We were very lucky to find a cool spot, a unique piece of furniture – and to have a great guy in front of our Phase One camera. The rest was an easy job for Capture One Pro 8.

Tremendously improved conversion

First I started to import the image into a Capture One Pro 8 session and chose the Base Characteristics for our Phase One IQ260 and used a “Film Standard” Curve. See screenshot below.

Then I rotated the picture a bit by using the new “Rotate Freehand” tool: just pick the tool, click somewhere in the picture and rotate as you wish! See below.

The Black and White dialog box in Capture One Pro 8 is still the same as in the previous version – but the result of the conversion is tremendously improved! I turned yellow and green down to get a deeper and more dramatic appearance since I had a lot of foliage in the picture.

In the Exposure tab I opened the shadows a little bit in the HDR tool and applied a slight s-curve to add some more contrast. I have chosen the new Clarity method “Natural” and darkened the corners of the picture with the vignetting tool massively to get the picture more into a classic black and white look.

The new Film Grain tool is great, especially for black and white pictures. For this picture I used the grain type “Silver Rich” and have chosen the granularity to my taste. I also “misused” the Spot Removal tool to do some simple corrections in Michael’s face and also removed a bright and disturbing spot in the background!

Now… the fun part: With the improved Local Adjustment tools in Capture One Pro 8, it’s really easy to do some dodge & burn within Capture One.

I created two correction layers “lighten” & “darken” and drew the masks accordingly. Just use a soft brush with a low opacity! I lighted some minor parts in the face and darkened the background and parts of the jeans. With the massive performance increase in version 8, drawing a mask is really fast and easy now!

So this is the “lighten” part before:

So this is the “lighten” part before: And this is the version with the correction and the mask applied!

The same with the darken layer. Here is the version before:

This is what the mask looks like:

And this is the version with the correction layer applied!

Below is the final image out of Capture One! Please note that the whole process – including the dodge & burn part – took us less than five minutes! I hope you enjoyed that little trip to France!

Best regards,

Andreana and Alex
Scanderbeg Sauer

My favorite feature in Capture One Pro 8

This week you get another chance to go behind the scenes and meet the dedicated and passionate team behind Capture One Pro 8. Check out the video and get unique insights into the making of Capture One Pro 8. Enjoy!

All the best,

Niels

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.