Capture One

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How to fine-tune your Black & White images

The first blog post I did was about converting a fairly simple image (processing wise) into a nice Black & White image.

This second post is based on a more complex image requiring more input and manipulation at the processing stage to achieve a beautiful result.

“If you don’t like the weather, wait 20 minutes”

I am known as a landscape photographer but a lot of the time I’m really a skyscape photographer. Frequently I look for dramatic skies and then find a suitable landscape to go underneath it. Perhaps it’s because I’m based in the UK and although we curse the changeable weather we experience, it does bring with it some wonderfully dramatic cloud formations. And nowhere is this more true than in Scotland (where the common saying is ‘if you don’t like the weather, then wait 20 minutes because it’ll change”!).

A passion for the Scottish Highlands

I love photographing in the Scottish Highlands. It’s a rugged landscape characterised by craggy mountains, open moorland and picturesque lochs. And one of my favourite locations is the Glencoe area. I try to visit two or three times a year, preferring the unpredictable weather and the sometimes theatrical light that occurs in the spring, autumn and winter months.

Great conditions

This photograph was taken in March at the side of Loch Leven facing towards the magnificently named ‘Pap of Glencoe’ (not that it can be seen in this image as it was shrouded in low hanging clouds). It was dusk, the light was fading fast and a strong, cold wind made the clouds sweep across the sky: Just the sort of conditions that I love to work in.

Looking for movement and dynamism

I decided to make the most of the scudding clouds so I fitted a 10 stop ND filter to my lens and selected an aperture of f16. This combination resulted in an exposure of just over 2 minutes – I knew from experience that this would add to the drama in the sky. I use long exposures a lot in my landscape work – I like the sense of movement and dynamism it can add to an image like this.

When I’m intending to convert to Black & White I like to start with a relatively flat original and add the drama at the processing and printing stage.

My aim is to ensure that I record the whole range of tones in the final file so the histogram is a much-used feature on my camera.

In the fading light I didn’t get time for more than 3 exposures but chose this one to work on because the swirl in the water added some interest and echoed the movement in the sky.

Getting the best starting point

Before converting the image to Black & White I always prefer to make basic adjustments to get the best colour image I can as starting point. In this case that involved:

cropping (I removed the foreground shoreline to emphasise the swirling water)
adjusting exposure to lighten the image by adjusting the levels and using the HDR Tool to protect highlights and shadow detail
increasing contrast using the Exposure Tool.

For this image I used one of the presets available as a download for Capture One Pro 7 from Capture One Complete (see http://www.captureonecomplete.com/uk/ ). I often use the available Styles and Presets as a starting point and then I fine-tune the result to suit my style and each individual image (I’m not a fan of taking the same approach to the processing of every image).

I used ‘B&W Style 7’ as my first step.

I then added Local Adjustments. I really like that feature and the ability to make selections in Capture One Pro 7:

I created a graduated Local Adjustment Layer over the water area at the bottom of the photo and increased the exposure to +0.93 to lighten this area.

Finally I spent some time carefully selecting the water with the Brush Tool before lightening it and increasing the contrast.

For the final stages I added a slight exposure vignette to darken the corners, cloned out any dust marks and sharpened prior to printing.

All the best,

Steve

Shortcuts to a faster workflow with your Wacom tablet

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

I personally began using a Wacom tablet to work with Photoshop some time ago. It was more out of necessity as I found it simply too uncomfortable to use a mouse for long periods of time while retouching images.

Never looked back

It took me a couple of days to get used to it, but since then I have never looked back.

More recently I have begun to explore the Wacom preferences and added in some customization of the pen and the tablet, adding additional shortcuts I can use in Capture One Pro 7.

Customize more and work faster

Capture One Pro 7 already supports pressure sensitivity linked to the size of the Local Adjustment brush, but there is so much more you can do to leverage the various options in the Wacom preferences to use other features in the software.

I have found this is an additional way to work faster, as well as using keyboard shortcuts.

The following blog post was written based on using a Wacom Intuos 5 touch, which is similar to the more recent Intuos ‘Pro’ series.

Why use a Wacom Tablet?

I mentioned in the introduction that I moved from using a mouse for comfort reasons. In fact, even for non-imaging applications I still stick with the pen and tablet. I find it faster and easier to use.

If you haven’t tried out a graphics tablet before, then in my opinion it is certainly worth a trial. They consist of a touch and pressure sensitive tablet and a pen. The tablets are available in a variety of sizes with varying functionality, for example how many levels of sensitivity they may offer. You can read more about the Intuos here

Customizing

All functionality of the pen and tablet is changed in system preferences (In this case on the Mac). Here, for example, we are looking at the various options available for the pen:

What I like about the customization options is that they can be application specific.

Note, in the ‘Application’ heading I have added Capture One Pro 7 as an application and all changes to the pen and tablet options will only be made for Capture One. I could continue to add other applications here. Applications that are not shown will use the options in the ‘All Other’ tab.

The tablet has a number of programmable shortcut keys, known as Express keys, while the pen has a two way rocker switch and also an ‘eraser’ on the end – more on that later!

The Pen

I only make a couple of changes to the Pen, namely on the rocker switch. I have this set to enter the ‘Radial Menu’ (more on that later) and to be able to Pan and Scroll.

Pan/Scroll means that when I hold the button down, and subsequently drag with the pen, I can scroll through the thumbnails, for example, and any other scroll action, like moving up and down a web page.

If this does not fit with your personal preference then you can see from the screen grab below, that there are a multitude of options available!

That’s indeed one of the strengths of the Wacom system. Pretty much any input option on the pen or tablet can be set to do a huge variety of actions.

The Tablet

The mind also boggles here with the number of customizable options you can make, but I limit myself to a few changes.

The tablet has a number of Express keys on the side of the tablet. These again can be set to do various different options and keystrokes. I don’t make extensive use of these as I always have my wireless keyboard close by. I do however use the Touch Ring and Radial Menu.

The Touch Ring

The Touch Ring is a touch sensitive scroll wheel that I mostly use for changing the size of the Local Adjustment brush. There is a keyboard shortcut in Capture One Pro 7, that also changes the size of the brush. This is [ and ] – The square brackets.

Therefore it is an easy task in the Touch Ring menu to add this keystroke to one of the Touch Ring options. You can have four different actions of the touch ring, by pressing the centre button to move between each one. Here is the setup page for adding the square bracket keystroke.

Now it is easy when I am working with Local Adjustments to keep one hand on the pen and my other hand on the Touch Ring to quickly alter brush size as I work around an image. The good news is that brush hardness can also be controlled by the shortcut Shift-] so to avoid having to enter the Local Adjustment brush dialog box, I can also use the Touch Ring to change hardness, by setting the Keystroke in a similar way.

See how fast it is to move round an image in this short video clip below. What I wanted to do for the title image was to lighten the background compared to the sculpture. I figured the easiest way to do this would be to mask the sculpture itself and then invert the mask.

Also in this clip, I choose to ‘clean’ up the mask using the erase brush. You can actually flip the Wacom pen upside down to automatically choose the eraser, but I actually find it faster to simply hit ‘e’ on the keyboard to select that option and then ‘b’ to return to brush.

http://youtu.be/EFk3mSR4kj8

If you would prefer to link brush size to pressure, then turn on the option in the Brush Settings dialog box. Access it by right-clicking while the brush tool is selected.

The Radial Menu

The Radial Menu brings up a floating circle of customizable options when you hit either one of the Express keys, or in my personal case, the top part of the rocker switch on the pen. It looks like this.

I have customized each segment with a useful command in Capture One Pro 7. For example creating variants, as you can see in the top and adjacent segment.

So to create a new variant, I click the rocker pen switch once, and then click on the segment itself. Each segment can be changed here.

I haven’t fully decided if this is faster than keyboard shortcuts or menu selections (one thing I find with a pen and tablet is that I can move much faster around my monitor area compared to a mouse), but it does give me another option.

One final mode that I have discovered recently is Precision Mode. If I want to draw more complex masks, it can often be a help.

I have set one of the Express Keys on the side of the tablet to activate this mode.

Initiating Precision Mode concentrates the area of the tablet into one section of the screen.

Therefore you can be extremely precise for mask drawing. You can adjust the size of the precision area too.

I hope you have found the above suggestions useful. I am sure there is more I could do to leverage the tablet even more, so I would be interested to hear if any of you have come up with some interesting ways to work with tablets and Capture One Pro 7.

Best regards,

David

Steve Gosling’s tricks to create stunning B&W images

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

I love making landscape images. But I’m not interested in producing record photographs – pictorially accurate representations of the scene before me. I’m far more interested in producing personal interpretations of my chosen subjects.

I like to leave room for the viewers of my photographs to make up their own story around the image, to bring a bit of themselves into their interaction with my photographs. I believe that images that perfectly describe a subject leave little or no room for that interaction to take place.

Deliberately generic – placeless and timeless.

This image is typical of my style – I hope that it is evocative, moody, atmospheric but I acknowledge that it says very little about the location. For the record it was taken at a small town, Whitby, situated on the North East coast of England – does that information contribute much to the viewers reaction to the image? I don’t think so. It’s deliberately generic – placeless and timeless.

It’s also typical of my compositional style – graphic & minimalist. I take a reductionist approach to composition – removing anything from within the frame that doesn’t contribute to the final image. I look to take things out of my frame rather than add more in.

On a cold winter’s day

This was taken at the end of a cold winter’s day as the light was beginning to fade. I saw the potential for this composition, set the camera up and took a few photographs but they lacked the atmosphere I was looking for.

And then as dusk drew in, the light came on and I had the photograph I had envisaged.

I was concerned about the contrast range in the scene and fitted an ND graduated filter over the sky area. This helped to keep detail in both the lamp and some texture in the sea behind it. The ability of the Phase One back to record a wide exposure range also help me retain detail in the lamp itself – even recording the shape of the bulb.

Post production

Once I put the image into Capture One Pro 7, the processing stage was for once straightforward (sometimes I spend hours tinkering with an image before I’m happy with it). In a way this reflected the simplicity of the image itself.

I always like to get a reasonable colour image as my starting point prior to conversion to Black & White so I made a basic adjustment to the exposure via the Levels Tool to lighten the highlights.

I also increased both clarity and structure via the Clarity Tool to increase contrast and improve the definition around the lamp.

The resulting colour image looked like this:

I then converted the image to B&W using the Styles built into Capture One Pro 7 (in this case ‘B&W High Contrast’)

I chose this particular setting as it did a good job of bringing out the textures & details in the sky. I often take the presets as a starting point and then adjust them to fine-tune the result to my personal taste.

With this image I only had to increase the contrast a little (via the Curves Tool) to give the image more ‘punch’, clone out the dust spots (I’m ashamed to say that my sensor was particularly dirty on this day) and sharpen prior to exporting.

Final image

All the best,

Steve

Location: Whitby, North Yorkshire, England

Equipment: Alpa TC Camera, Schneider 36mm lens, Phase One P20+ digital back, Manfrotto tripod with Manfrotto 410 geared head, Lee 0.6 stop ND graduated and 0.9 ND filters

Exposure details: f16, 4mins 28secs, ISO 50

HAPPY NEW YEAR Y’ALL

I hope that you had a fantastic New Year’s Eve. I know, I sure did………..ehmm!

Time has come to move forward and look at 2014.

This special “day-after-professor-tip” will help you remove the red eyes from yesterday’s images. However, what you did last night Capture One Pro 7 cannot change!

Removing the lipstick mark

To do this I will make a Local Adjustments layer and use the Color Editor in
Capture One Pro 7.

I use a rather small brush with hardness set to 0 to ensure a smooth blend into the background layer.

With the Color Picker in the Advanced Color Editor Tool I pick the red color of the lipstick. As the shirt is almost white I can then just reduce the saturation of the picked color. This leaves the lipstick mark as a dark mark.

By adjusting the lightness slider I am able to find a level where the previously dark lipstick mark now gets the same lightness as the shirt and the lipstick marks are perfectly removed.

Fixing the red eyes

Here I will also use a Local Adjustments layer. But this time I need to make a more precise mask of the white part of the eyes. I use a small brush with the hardness set to 95 and I carefully draw a mask for the white part.

When drawing the mask I do not pay attention to the colored part of the eye, as I use the Eraser Mask Cursor Tool to clear that part afterwards.

By reducing the saturation in the Exposure Tool for the selected Eye mask, I can now minimize the effect of the reddish-looking eyes.

Fixing the skin tones

I will also try to fix the dark shadows under the eyes. To do this I create another Local Adjustments mask with hardness set to 0 and as big a brush as possible while still being able to select the dark shadows under the eyes.

I use a simple Exposure to brighten up the shadows under the eyes. I combine this with a bit of negative Clarity. The negative Clarity removes the darkness from the shadows of the wrinkles.

Finally I make a rough mask for the cheeks and add some negative Clarity. By doing this the two latest masks blend more natural together and leave the skin looking a bit cleaner and softer.

Well it made a big change. Maybe a good shower is in order now.

All the best,
Niels