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Get as much image real estate as possible

I thought in this week’s post I would write less about technique and more about improving the environment you are working in!

Now, I can’t do much personally about your office or studio space, but hopefully by now you will have discovered that the Capture One interface is extremely adaptable for the way you or I might like to interact with it best.

If we look at the default workspace with the lead image in place, it looks like this:

Nothing wrong as such, but there are a lot of options that might distract from the image at hand. And secondly, if we are not blessed with the latest massive monitor then we want to get as much image real estate as possible to make it easy on the eye and not waste space with tools and other elements that we don’t need in the adjustment phase.

So here is what I prefer to work with during adjustment:

A little but easier on the eye, no?

Basically it is just some subtle changes, but nice to work with. I have consolidated some tools into certain Tools Tabs to make that area as narrow as possible, removed the browser and also removed the Viewer labels.

Where do I find Viewer Labels?

If you look at the first image, it’s the bar under the image with the basic metadata like shutter speed, ISO etc. I really don’t have a use for that, once the image is being edited.

If I need to bring back the browser, I just press CMD-B (Mac) or Ctrl-B (PC) on the keyboard. Even that is simplified too.

I should add by this point that I have already gone through a process of rating and selecting. I do this with no Viewer at all and just simply the browser with the usual thumbnail information intact.

The final feature that helps me is the Proof Margin toggle button. You’ll find it in the top left hand corner of the viewer and you might not even have noticed it.

What this simply does, is to give you a bit more ‘air’ around the image, so it is not so close to the borders of the viewer. I personally find it much easier to judge composition in this way. You can actually set the size of this margin in the Preferences.

In theory you could just set the standard Margin to something broader, but I do like to be able to have a choice as well.

To have a final look at the image it is a simple case of CMD-T (Mac) or Ctrl-T (PC) to hide the tools giving us almost nothing but the image.

We do have a full screen option, which you might prefer (View > Enter Full Screen), but I find my way faster.

So here is a quick summary on how to adjust those workspace elements:

To add or remove a single tool from a Tool Tab, or even an entire Tool Tab:

Right-click on any of the Tool Tabs and choose from the menu.

To change the order of Tool Tabs:

CMD (Mac) or Ctrl (PC) drag:

To resize the different areas:

Drag the divider lines:

Hide various elements in the Viewer and Browser

There are other options you could explore too, for example Auto Mode for both the Browser and Tool Area. This means that they will hide until you mouse close to either edge. But I prefer to use the shortcut keys to show and hide, but you may be different!

To save your workspaces, do so in the Window menu. You can have as many as you like.

If you want to switch quickly between your different workspaces then right-click on the toolbar, choosing Customize, and add the following icon:

All workspaces are then available from there:

If my choices don’t seem right for you, then that’s OK of course, we all have our preferred way of working.

That’s the beauty of a customizable interface.

Best regards,

David Grover

From messy to magnificent in 8 simple steps

Recently I shot aerials of New York City for a long-term personal project. This is a view that many photographers have shot – the southern tip of Manhattan showing The Battery and the Financial District.

This image was shot on a Hasselblad H1, 35mm lens and my trusty Leaf Credo 60. Supporting the camera and back was my Kenyon gyroscope. I was shooting from a turbine helicopter piloted by a friend who I have worked with for many years.

I will walk you through my process of taking the uncorrected RAW file to a final full-res image.

8 easy steps

First off, let’s look at this ugly mess of a RAW file. The sky is too bright, the color is off and a bit green plus there are dust spots and lens corrections that need to be made.

Step 1: The first part of my process was to get my black point set and to knock down any glaring highlights that may be clipping. I set the black point to 5 and brought the highlight recovery up to 36. This brought the highlights down to 252/251.

Step 2: I then changed my ICC Profile to Leaf ProPhoto RGB and the curve to Credo 60 product. This gives me a bit more contrast and a slight amount of magenta.

Step 3: Next up were lens corrections. Capture One Pro 7 is able to correct the distortion in the Hasselblad 35mm lens easily. I checked all three boxes: Chromatic Aberration, Purple Fringing and Hide Distorted Area (see below).

Click on image to enlarge

Step 4: Then I applied the keystone correction. This is critical with aerials because you are often looking down on buildings, and it tends to push the perspective a bit when you shoot extreme wide-angle lenses. I am not looking for complete correction but more in line with bringing the image closer to how the eye sees and believes.

For this image I chose two buildings close to the center of the frame to use as the keystone reference. If I had chosen buildings toward the edge of the frame, the corrections would tend to be too dramatic for my taste plus it would crop the image more than I want. Occasionally, the correction will shift the horizon to the left or right and a small correction will be needed.

Step 5: I like to spot an image before adding correction layers, major color corrections or gradients. I use the Spot Removal Tool more than the Dust Tool even if it was a dust spot. It just works for me. The radius was a bit larger than the dust spots and yes, I did leave the airliner flying out of Newark Airport in the frame.

Step 6: After I finished spotting the sky, I used one of my favorite tools in Capture One Pro 7: The Color Editor. In the advanced mode, I clicked on the center of the sky. I pushed the smoothness up to 30, left the saturation alone (although I was tempted to push it up a bit) and dropped the lightness to 49.4. Without using the Gradient Tool, I was able to bring the sky color and tone down quite a bit by using this Color Editor.

Step 7: I applied a gradient on the bottom of the frame to bring the exposure down just a bit. I played with it for a while, adding contrast and then backing off to make it a little more subtle.

Step 8: Then it was off to top half of the frame and bringing out the clouds with Clarity. This one is tough – you can easily overdo it easily and make your skies unbelievable. I added just a bit.

That’s it for this one. Clean, simple and easy.

Thank you to David Grover and Gitte Maj Nielsen from Phase One for asking me to participate in the Capture One Blog.

Best regards,

Cameron Davidson | Photographer
email: cameron@camerondavidson.com
web: http://www.camerondavidson.com

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