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Create your Atmosphere with Curves

You can have a great scene, the right expression or the ultimate moment in your shot. However, it is the mood or atmosphere in an image that makes all the difference between success and failure.

Telling your story and transferring emotions is a secret of finding the right tonal scale. Just like the French say: “C’est le ton qui fait la musique” (It is the tone that makes the music). The tool you need for this is the Curve Tool.

Why use the Curve Tool?

The Curve Tool differentiates itself from the Levels Tool in that it allows you to control how tonal values of the original image are translated in the end result. With the Curve Tool you have control over shadows, mid tones, and highlights (darker or lighter) separately and independently.

Where the Levels Tool mainly controls the endpoints of your tonal scale, the Curve Tool gives you control over the tonal distribution of the entire tonal scale between these endpoint. Only the mid tone marker of the Levels Tool gives you ‘Curve-like’ control, but the Curve Tool gives much greater flexibility in control and much better contrast control.

Before using the Curve Tool

As with the Levels Tool I suggest you first make adjustments with the Exposure and High Dynamic Range Tools if necessary. Do not use the Brightness slider in the Exposure Tool.

With this image, I didn’t change the exposure or the High Dynamic Range, but I began by first cropping and rotating the image to get the composition I wanted. I then set the black and white points using the Levels Tool, but didn’t touch the mid tones. I also prefer to adjust the clarity and add a vignette at this stage in my workflow. This is my image before I start using the curves.

You are now ready to start with the Curve Tool because all mentioned adjustments affect the histogram you set the curve on (that is the histogram in the Curve Tool).

Preset for speed

A reason why users often skip the Curve Tool is because it seems time consuming or looks too complex. Speed improves with experience (as always) but the predefined presets in Capture One Pro 7 give you a quick start. Note that you can easily apply a preset on a selection of images. You can also copy/apply a curve on similar images. After applying the built-in preset “Mid tones – darker”, I get the following result.

How does it work?

The Curve Tool is an “input-output” kind of game. Take a look at the example below.

I added some green text and arrows for explanation.

The horizontal axis represents 256 levels on the input side of the image. Input means what the Curve Tool receives. Without a curve (straight line) these input levels are translated unchanged to output levels with the same value (0 to 0, 128 to 128 and 255 to 255). Output levels are represented on the vertical axis.

In this example the input level of 53 (see orange vertical line) is lowered to an output of 33. Level 53 is a shadow or dark tone. Because the curve now translates it to 33 it will become darker. You can move any point on the curve line up or down, and left or right. Whatever you do, you constantly create a new input-output translation for that point and (to a lesser extended) adjacent levels.

Manual approach

Lesson one in using the Curve Tool manually is dragging the diagonal line up (to lighten) or down (to darken the image). Next, step two, you can give the quarter and three quarter tones an extra push in the same or reverse direction if needed.

If you like to affect a particular brightness level in the image, use the Pick Curve Point Cursor Tool.

Select the Picker Tool, select a brightness point in your image and that point will be selected in the tool. You can drag the curve point with the mouse or select it and use the cursor keys on your keyboard (the latter is Mac only).

After moving the shadow curve point downwards, I get a darker background which increases the dramatic impact of this low contrast image.

Results

In term of results nothing beats the art of a good curve. Curves give you much more control about how an image looks in terms of brightness and contrast. You can open up shadows and darken highlights. You can make a more natural look or let your creativity go all the way. After the last adjustment mentioned, I got this result.

More Help

Exclusively available for our dear blog readers, I provide you an entire set of Curve Presets. The set contains 23 presets for adjusting Contrast, Highlights, Mid tones, and Shadows.

Place the presets in the curve preset folder and start Capture One. Locations are:
<user name>/Library/Application Support/Capture One/Presets60/Curve (for Mac)
C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\CaptureOne\Presets60\Curve (for Windows)

Tip

When you start working with curves, clone variants are a great help to compare different adjustments.

Summary

With a proper curve you can create the exact atmosphere in your image. First, make your adjustments with Exposure, HDR, and Levels. Just start with Curve, then start with a preset. Adjust the curve if necessary or try another preset.

Best regards,

Paul

New Forensic+ Enhancements in Capture One Pro 7

You may be aware that Phase One manufactures hardware for the industrial segment, specifically for Aerial photography and the Cultural Heritage segments.

Our software department has been inspired by this and developed new tools in Capture One Pro 7 to specifically deal with forensic applications, in cooperation with the top scientists within Forensic Science.

We have used our expertise in RAW conversion to go one stage further in pulling out detail from images, even those that aren’t visible to the naked eye, or on the image itself.

Therefore we are proud to present Forensic+!

What is Forensic+?

Forensic+ is new technology developed by the Image Quality and Algorithms team at Phase One.

We have had many requests from certain intelligence agencies and criminal investigation agencies around the world who have seen examples on popular crime television series, to bring such features to ‘real life’. Forensic+ will help you to discover unseen detail in images with the eventual goal of solving that all-important case!

“We really wanted to turn our expertise to aid those at the forefront of forensic technology. I am pleased to say we have achieved this with Forensic+. The results are truly unbelievable!” – Olaf Pilor, head of Image Quality and Algorithms team at Phase One.

The new tools in Forensic+ are:

Pixel Amplify, Reflection Enhance and Uncrop Image. Pixel Amplify and Reflection Enhance are found in the new Forensic+ tool tab.

Uncrop image is a an additional feature to the cursor tool.

Using a combination of these tools will liberate extra information from any scene, thus expediting the crime investigation process.

Example:

Below is a scene with a number of unseen details that will be aided by the use of Forensic+.

First we can use Uncrop Image to liberate additional areas of the image. The advanced algorithms in Forensic+ are a business secret, but Olaf reveals that uncropping an image is possible due to the fact that most cameras can actually capture more pixels than advertised, normally displaying a cropped image. This is standard practice by manufacturers to cut costs by only ever producing one sensor and simply limiting the properties by changing the firmware on camera models.

Olaf and his team have managed to extract the additional captured information and reveal extra data present in image captures.

For example, if we use Uncrop Image in this case, we can see a huge area of previously hidden image data.

By revealing this, we can then go onto exercise the remaining tools of Forensic+. In this particular scene the white car to the upper right of the picture was suspected to be stolen and involved in a more serious crime. The details of the crime are held hidden for the benefit of the affected families.

Using Pixel Amplify we can easily enhance the pixel structure to make sense of the licence plate.

Use the Amount slider to control the strength of the amplification. Carefully adjust the Radius, depending on how much detail there is in the image. Low-resolution images will need a greater radius to sample a wider range of pixels.

With careful use of Pixel Amplify we can liberate the following detail. (Please note the result has been partially blurred to protect the involved parties).

The jewel in the crown

Reflection Enhance is really the jewel in the crown of the new Forensic+ features. Quite often crucial forensic detail can be hidden in many reflections present in an image.

“With our expertise in lens design and knowledge of optical behaviour and refraction we can build these seemingly completely useless elements of the image into useable forensic material.” Olaf Pilor says.

Again, in the same image, it was believed a possible perpetrator in the related case was also photographed but the person’s face wasn’t visible.

Reflection Enhance here can easily rebuild the various light paths to reconstruct the face of the criminal. Start by using the simple select pointer to pick both elements in the image. i.e. the actual body and then the reflection.

*Not admissible in court

In the Reflection Enhance Tool, our Angle would be set to ‘0’ as the reflection and actual object is at the same vertical level. Moving the Aspect slider allows us to virtually rotate around the reconstructed object. We can also use the ‘Flip’ Tool‘ to flip the image in the horizontal or vertical perspective.

In this case, careful use of the tool creates a variant containing the reconstructed object.
You can see we have a quite clear image of the perpetrator now.

With these new features in Capture One Pro 7 we hope that we can contribute to making the world a better place, not just in imaging, but in peace as well!

Best regards,

David

How to fix permanent hot pixels

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

All image sensors used in digital cameras, regardless of make, model, manufacture or intended application, will have a number of defective pixels. This is not a problem, however, as these errors are mapped and accounted for when the camera is manufactured.

Special algorithms then take care of replacing the invalid content of the defective pixels so the image appears as though the sensor is perfect.

When do hot pixels occur then?
When exposing an image at longer exposure times, from around a second and longer, a varying number of pixels may act differently from those around it and display much larger values than the average pixels. These pixels are called “hot pixels”.

Why do hot pixels occur?
The number of hot pixels is close related to the length of the exposure and the temperature of the sensor. In Capture One Pro 7 these hot pixels will typically be removed automatically.

It happens that a sensor, after a period of time, may start showing some more stubborn or seemingly permanent hot pixels, even in images shot at short exposure times.

This happened for one of my cameras after it had captured around 15000 images. With another camera however, it happened after just a few hundred images. This change can be caused by cosmic background radiation (EMR) hitting a pixel on the sensor and, unfortunately, it is simply not something you can avoid.

If you mainly shoot in bright daylight you may never notice these defective pixels. However, if you have a really dark area in your image, it suddenly becomes quite easy to spot such pixels. But not to worry, with Capture One Pro 7 it is very easy to remove such hot pixels.

How to fix these single pixels behaving strangely
In the details Tool tab in Capture One Pro 7 you’ll find the Noise Reduction Tool. The third slider in the Noise Reduction Tool is named ‘Single Pixel’. This is a tool specially designed to deal with single pixels behaving strangely, which typically happens with higher ISO settings and at longer exposure times.

Capture One Pro 7 will automatically apply a certain amount of Single Pixel noise reduction depending on the exposure time and ISO. Normally when using a camera at low ISO in daylight it will be set to a value of ‘0’.

The Noise Reduction Tool in Capture One Pro 7 with the
default settingsfor a low ISO image exposed in daylight.

When zooming into the above image, I noticed a permanent hot pixel. This was very easy to remove though, by using the Single Pixel slider in the Noise Reduction Tool. On the image to the left the Single Pixel noise slider is set to ‘0’. In the image to the right I moved the slider until the hot pixel disappeared, which in this case happened at a value of ‘15’.

The algorithm behind the tool is designed so it can distinguish between defective pixels, like hot pixels, and real image information such as tiny light spots and reflections. If we zoom into the water surface we see some real image information in the form of small reflections. As you can see, using the single pixel noise slider doesn’t remove the true optical reflections, regardless of their size.

Single pixel = ‘0’ Single Pixel = ‘80’

Real image information is maintained even with the Single Pixel noise slider set to ‘80’.

The tool works like this: For values between ‘1’ and around ‘50’, it removes primarily single pixel defects but does it with more and more strength. Between ‘30’ and ‘80’ the tool will also look for single pixels that are adjacent to each other. Above ‘80’ the tool looks for even larger clusters of defective pixels. Using the tool with values up to ‘80’ will hardly ever remove real information from the image so it’s safe to copy even such a high value to another image.

All the best,

Niels

Bright and Brilliant images with Levels

In this first post regarding the Levels and Curve Tools I’d like to emphasize the versatility of these tools. The use of these tools in a raw processing workflow cannot be overstated. In this post I will focus on the basic Levels functions.

Let’s look at this medium contrast image.

The weather was cloudy when I saw this rose on the beach. Low contrast light conditions are fine for close-ups. The water is reflecting the sky and there is some backlight, but that does not make it shine as I intended.

Before using Levels

In my trainings I refer to the Levels Tool as a histogram tool. It takes a histogram as input. Because of this I first apply necessary adjustments that will affect the Levels histogram. For example, I first crop the image; adjust the Exposure, High Dynamic Range (HDR), and Clarity Tool. In the screenshot below, I show you the tools Base Characteristics with film curve, Clarity and Vignetting and their settings.

Black and White Point

Medium and low contrast images do not use all the brightness values, or the full dynamic range of the camera. As a result they look a bit dull because the tonal scale is reduced. There is no real dark or bright area.

The histogram before adjustments with the Levels Tool

The histogram after adjustments with the Levels Tool.

The histogram for the image fits easily within the 0-255 range of the Levels Tool. Too easily, actually, and it reflects the lack of both real highlights and deep shadows.

Auto Adjust or manual?

The Levels Tool Auto Adjust is a great start for adjusting the Black and White Levels but you can also set it manually by dragging the markers or use the eye-dropper. The black level sets which level in the raw file will be the new darkest area and the white level for the brightest area on output.

Input vs. Output Levels

To be more precise on what the Levels Tools actually achieves here, let’s clarify the distinction between input levels and output levels. Input levels are found on the bottom of the Levels Tool and represent the values in the raw file. You can see that I did use the range of 11-243 in this image.

Input levels are converted to output levels, which can be found at the top of the Levels Tools.

The input level of 11 is converted to 0 (zero) in the output and input level 243 to 255. Output levels of 0 and 255 represent the maximum black and white respectively. Optionally, you can adjust the output levels as well if it serves your needs, like with printing, to 5 and 250 for example.

The image now has a better tonal scale and therefore more punch.

Darken or Brighten

Setting the black and white levels will change the overall image brightness. This can be corrected with the mid tone marker in the Levels Tool. Modest use has little effect on the endpoints of the histogram. In other words: little risk for clipping or losing data. Positive values open up shadows and reduce the impression of contrast.

A ‘full’ histogram from end to end

Technically the biggest advantage of setting the black and white point plus the mid gray with the Levels Tool in Capture One Pro 7 is that it creates a ‘full’ histogram from end to end on output. This will smoothen gradations without banding (in contrast to setting levels in a processed image).

Also, using Levels precedes the use of the Curve Tool, which I will discuss in my second blog.

High contrast images and Levels

In general, you do not need to set black and white points on high contrast images, which tend to clip at one or either side of the histogram. However, you can still benefit from the Levels mid tone adjustment to make modest brightness adjustments without the risk of clipping. I prefer this to the use of the Brightness slider in the Exposure Tool. Or, as we will discuss in another post, you can also use the Curve Tool for that purpose.

Watch in-depth tutorial on how to use the Levels Tool.

Best regards,

Paul