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The creative power of the White Balance Tool

In order to get very precise color reproduction it is of course important to use a grey card. Most cameras give a pretty good Auto White Balance though, which can be very useful in a lot of circumstances where precise colors are not that important – e.g. in landscape photography where it is often more about expressing a mood.

Another benefit of shooting RAW

Among the many great benefits of shooting RAW files, the ability to change the White Balance in an image after it has been shot, is probably one of the most important features. It’s only possible to change the White Balance the right way when you are working on a RAW file.

The White Balance Tool and the Color Balance Tool in Capture One Pro 7 give you two tools for working with the White Balance in an image and the ability to recreate the original color balance of the screen or just create a whole new color balance.

Four different versions of the same image. The only difference is the White Balance. It is easy to see what a big difference, it makes to the overall expression of the image.

Two tools for tweaking the White Balance in an image

On the Color Tool Tab in Capture One Pro 7 you find the White Balance Tool and the Color Balance Tool. Both tools only change the White Balance of the image, which simply is a matter of changing the overall ratio between the red, green and blue component of the image.

You can basically do the same thing with the White Balance Tool and the Color Balance Tool, but they have a very different user interface approach. They each have their own strengths.

White Balance Tool:

Let’s start with the White Balance Tool. For landscape images I typically use the Camera Auto White Balance or a custom daylight balance in my camera. So I won’t need to use the White Balance color picker and a grey card shot to establish a good starting point for the White Balance.

The White Balance Tool will show the method used for White Balancing the image and it will also show an approximated Kelvin and Tint value matching the selected mode.

Typically an Auto White Balance will not give you the same as if you are making a click balance on a grey card. If you for instance are shooting in the warm yellow sunlight around sunset, a click balance on a grey card will fully remove the warm tone in the image. An Auto White Balance on the other hand will balance the light, but it will keep some of the warm look.

So if you compared the Kelvin and Tint values in two images where one was made with a click White Balance on a grey card and the other by using Auto White Balance you will get different results. Only the click balance will give you approximately the right kelvin temperature of the light.

If you want to change the White Balance you can just drag the Kelvin and Tint slider. If you by accident have set your camera to a totally wrong White Balance settings for instance like “fluorescent” for a landscape image, you can use the Kelvin and Tint values to guide you to a setting, which would be a good starting point for optimizing the White Balance. So if you have been shooting in daylight, then set the Kelvin between 5000 – 6000K and the Tint near 0. Remember the Kelvin read-out is a guide and not an exact Kelvin measuring device.

The left image shows how the image would look if the camera White Balance accidently has been set to” Fluorescent”. In the image to the right the Kelvin slider has been dragged to 5450K and the Tint slider to 0. This is a much better starting point for a neutral White Balance for the image. The slightly greenish cast can be removed by fine-tuning the Tint slider.

Using the Kelvin and Tint slider

Quite small changes in Kelvin temperature lead to a quite different color appearance. Typically when dragging the Kelvin slider to achieve a certain look, you will also need to fine-tune the Tint slider. Working with the Kelvin slider you basically change the image between a blueish look and a yellowish look, which will give the images a colder look or a warmer look , which is something that can add value to an image.

The Tint Slider adjusts between a greenish look and a magenta look. Often you use the Tint slider to minimize unwanted color tints in your image.

4000K 4400K 5200K 7000K

Above is the same image, but with four different Kelvin temperature settings in the White Balance Tool. They are very different but still very nice and still realistic versions of the image. The image itself hardly contains colors so it gives you quite a large range of possibilities for crating your own look.

The Color Balance Tool

With this tool you can achieve a specific look in one simple operation by simply dragging the White Point (center circle) to a specific color toning. Once you have your desired toning, you can use the two sliders to fine-tune the look.

The Saturation slider increases or decreases the effect of the toning. With the Hue slider you can fine-tune the color toning.

With the Color Balance Tool I have dragged the center white point to a more reddish tone.

Every time you make a click White Balance, the tool will reset and set the white point in the neutral center of the hue circle. Moving the white point in the hue circle will now tone the white point to the specific color in the hue circle.

The tool has some very useful presets to create a warmer or a colder look. I will strongly recommend you to try out these presets. It is an easy way to get to a good starting point for a specific look, but you can also create your own preset.

The preset Warm Look +3 has been selected. The difference between the +1, +2 and +3 is only the saturation of the new white point in the image.

A great benefit of using the Color Balance Tool is that you can easily achieve the same look independently of the real color temperature of the scene or independently of what camera you are using as the Color Balance Tool is an adjustment to the already established White Balance.

All the best,

Niels

To mask or not to mask?

Masking is a term that you may not think applies to Capture One Pro 7, but as you have seen in my previous blog posts it is certainly possible to selectively edit areas with Local Adjustments.

So indeed this is a kind of masking, but are there other ways we can selectively adjust images? Take a look at the image above. It has quite a prominent blue sky, but it didn’t look as rich as this in the unedited photo.

All it took was a simple Color Editor adjustment and a change in the ‘Lightness’ slider to simply bring the tone down to something more pleasing. No need for any kind of Local Adjustment.

Often the Color Editor gets overlooked as a way to change the appearance of a color and not just the hue. Also in the above image the red flag was picked as well, to richen the red a little. Again, no need for any local adjustment. So think about if an area of your image needs adjusting, or if it can be dealt with using one or a few color edits as opposed to needing to draw a mask.

When to use Auto Masking?

During workshops and seminars I often see people instantly going to the Auto Mask feature and then spend more time than necessary trying to mask around complex objects, when all it could take is either a simple edit like above or a quick combination of a Local Adjustment Mask and a color edit. Normally for the last option the mask need only be ‘rough’ one, so it is extremely fast to do! We will look at that technique at the end.

However, the Auto Mask can certainly be a really useful feature and I do use it on occasion when the above-mentioned techniques don’t work.

How the Auto Mask works

The image below may well benefit from an Auto Mask, if I want to separate the background from the flower a little. Auto Mask works by detecting differences in color and contrast in an image file to find the edge of a subject, and this is a good example.

Here is the image with some basic corrections but I wouldn’t mind darkening the background a little. As the background is made of multiple tones it doesn’t work so well to use the Color Editor as in the above example.

So instead I will use the Auto Mask function of the local adjustments brush. Normally, Local Adjustment masks are simply brushed on with varying size and opacity. If you want to know more about using Local adjustments then there are plenty on the blog you can read up on. To check them out, try searching for ‘Local Adjustments’ in the upper right corner on the blog.

To activate the Auto Mask, right-click on the image with the Brush selected and check the Auto Mask box.

The Brush icon now has three concentric circles with a smaller one in the centre. This centre circle is now the sample area. So during brushing the mask will stop, or find the edge, when the content inside the sample zone differs compared to the outermost circle.

Now all I need to do is draw along the edge of the petal, keeping the sample zone on the petal itself and the outer circle on the background. If you have opted to see the mask as you draw, it will look like the edge has not been detected, but the calculation is actually made when you release the mouse or pen.

During masking:

After releasing the mouse or pen:

I continue around the edge until the mask looks like this:

To fill in the mask, I can use the Fill Mask command in the Local Adjustment Tool:

Now the mask looks like this:

There is a small error in the upper right-hand corner and in the bottom right, but it’s easy to clean that up with the erase brush.

Finally, I can invert the mask and darken the background to my liking!

Finally, a really useful technique is to use a Local Adjustment in combination with a color edit. I use this image below a lot, captured by my friend Malcom Bryan in Beijing, as it illustrates this point perfectly.

Here it is with some basic adjustments:

What I want to do is edit the color of the red ballon a little in the background, but there is a problem! If I select it in the Color Editor and make an adjustment, it also effects the balloon seller’s skin tone. We can see this by turning on the View selected color range option in the Color Editor. This turns any part of the image, that will not be affected by the edit, to monochrome. I have adjusted the range and smoothness carefully to just include the balloon, but it still effects the skin tone as well!

So by using a really rough Local Adjustment mask, I can select just the area in the top left-hand corner, select the red tone only and then the skin tone will be left unaffected.

So, that’s three different ways you can select areas for localized adjustments. All with different uses but all equally useful!

Best regards,

David

The trick that changed my approach to color correction

In this second blog post I will show you an easy and somewhat unusual trick that was taught to me by Steve Hendrix of Capture Integration in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

A way to push a mood or grade an image

I was looking for a way to take a large section of brown grass in a housing development and shift it towards green. Steve suggested that I use the Skin Tone Editor in the Color Editor in Capture One Pro 7. Using this tool has changed how I approach color correction and how I shift colors to push a mood or grade an image.

In the fall of 2012 I shot aerials of Chicago, Illinois for a book project and my stock library. A few minutes before sunrise, we flew a Schweitzer 300 helicopter out over Lake Michigan and along the Chicago shoreline. I wanted to see if I could make a stronger photograph of the Chicago Harbor Light than the one I shot in 2003 for the Chicago book project mentioned above.

The water appeared greener than I remembered

We were flying in a “severe clear” high-pressure system. The light was clean, crisp and perfect for low-level aerial photography.

When I imported the images in the Capture One session for this shoot, I noticed the water appeared greener than I remembered. I shot this image with a Nikon D4, 35mm F/1.4 Nikkor G lens and a B+W Polarizer. The sky was close to where I wanted it but the water was a bit lacking.

First off was an adjustment the overall exposure. I brought it down about half a stop to dampen the highlights on the sunward facing side of the ligthhouse. I used the highlight recovery tool to bring down the clipped highlights and also brought the output level down to 250.

Why I used the Skin Tone Editor

I thought about Steve Hendrix’s Skin Tone editor suggestion and used the editor to shift the water color toward blue.

For those wondering why I use the Skin Tone Editor to shift color instead of the Advanced Color editor – it is just another arrow in the quiver. You can shift the color a fair amount and the uniformity slider allows you to spread or restrict the color. I find it useful for coloring grass or shifting the color tone in water.”

After taking a sample of the green water, I shifted the color quite a bit plus increased the smoothness and uniformity. The water was a bit dark to my taste and I increased the lightness to 2.2. This is a great trick for decreasing or increasing brightness in an area. I often use it to bring down skies and to increase the color.

Next up was the sky. It seems as if it is almost a must-do wtih aerials that if you expose for the surface than your sky tends toward overexposure. I prefer to not use gradient filters while shooting aerials. They can be one more item that can drop out of the helicopter and my philosphy is, safety first. I take a minimalist approach while in the helicopter becuase more weight equals less power and the less equipment in the rear cabin the less chance something can go missing.

The sky correction was made on a second level and was close to 3/4’s of a stop.

Since this image was intended for stock, I wanted the colors to pop a bit when seen as a thumbnail on the agency website. I find for many of my aerial and landscape images that I can process the image out to a final delivery file without going into secondary image editing programs to correct or enhance.

Best regards,

Cameron Davidson

email: cameron@camerondavidson.com
web: http://www.camerondavidson.com

Focus Tool for tethered work

Capture One Pro 7 has a Focus Tool, which allows you to inspect your image at a zoom range of 25 – 400%.

Useful for tethered shooting

The Focus Tool is especially useful when creating still-life images or product shots in a tethered setup shooting directly into the Capture Folder in Capture One Pro 7.

By using the Focus Tool you can at the same time have an overview of the whole image while being able to inspect a critical area at 100%.

In Capture One Pro 7 on a Mac it is even possible to have multiple Focus Tools open at the same time for instance to be able to control the total depth of field in a scene.

The Focus Tool in its default place in the Details Tool Tab

The Focus Tool is by default placed in the Details Tool tab but as with most tools in Capture One Pro 7 you can make it floating.

At the bottom of the tool you can select the “pick focus point” cursor and click in the viewer to inspect the preview image at 100%. At the bottom of the tool you can also change the Focus Tool zoom rate.

If you select the Pan Cursor Tool (hand) you can pan inside the Focus Tool. Double-click in the Focus Tool to change zoom resolution between 25% and 100%. With a scroll wheel mouse you can simple scroll to zoom in or out.

A third method to navigate the Focus Tool is by using the overview feature. On a PC you simply press the spacebar while the Pan Cursor is inside the tool. On a Mac you need to right-click with the Pan Cursor Tool inside the Focus Tool and click into the overview window.

The overview window inside the Focus Tool

The white frame indicates the area, which is displayed in Focus Tool. With the mouse you can now simply move the white frame.

Multiple Focus Windows

When using Capture One Pro 7 on a Mac Computer you have the option to use multiple Focus windows simultaneously. This is a very useful option when creating an image where you need to control your depth of field very precisely.

To add another Focus Tool simply select “Create Floating Tool” / “Focus” in the Windows menu. Once you have a new Focus Tool you can dock it below the first one in the Details Tool tab.

I have now docked my extra Focus Tool right under the first Focus Tool in the Details Tool Tab.

When working with two or more Focus Tools, only use the Pan Tool inside the Focus Tool to navigate to where you want to inspect the image. This way the two Focus Tools can inspect different areas of the image simultaneously.

When you browse between different images or when you capture a new image tethered the two different zoom positions will be maintained.

In the example below I was using the Schneider Kreuznach 120mm MF TS f/5.6 tilt and shift lens. I wanted to place the focus on all the bottle labels even though the bottles were placed at a 30-degree angle.

On the viewfinder it is hard to see, if I am perfectly focused so I need to check the focus in Capture One Pro 7. I used two Focus Tools to inspect each end of the row of bottles. This way it was much faster to achieve the right setup of the Tilt and Shift lens. So even though I need to iterate a few times to get it perfect it was achieved very quickly.

All the best,

Niels