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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NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One.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

Organize your Catalogs and find your best assets in no time

Basically, a Capture One Pro 7 Catalog can be organized in two ways:

By using a simple folder structure at a system level (i.e. the organizational structure is handled using folders on your Mac or PC with images residing in the folders you’ve made).

By using a virtual organization in the User Collections area of the Capture One Library Tool.

How does virtual organization work?

A Collection is simply a ‘group’ of images gathered in one place for easy reference. I used the term ‘Virtual’, as placing images into a collection does not physically move them on disk. We simply update the Catalog database to reflect where you have organized images and in which collections.

Virtually organizing your images has a number of advantages over the traditional way of placing images in various physical folders on the system:

A single image can belong to several different collections and does not require a physical copy
Smart Albums can be used to automatically sort images with a variety of search terms
Projects (one of the four Capture One Pro 7 organizational items) can be intelligently used to enhance your organization and workflow.

The main benefit, of course, is that you should not be struggling to find your best assets in your Catalog… EVER!

Creating organizational items

All the virtual organizational items can be created in the User Collections area of the Library Tool. So for example, if we wished to create an Album in our Catalog, we would simply click on the Plus icon in the User Collections title bar:

Then you can choose one of the four organizational items, which I’ll go through now:

Albums

Albums are the most basic of organizational items. Simply create it and then drag and drop, whichever image(s) you want to appear in that album. Remember! You are not moving any image files on the disk, therefore an image can belong in several different albums.

Smart Albums

If you have never used a Smart Album before then I would recommend you to explore them. Smart Albums are quite versatile in helping you sort images with a minimum of effort.

A Smart Album populates itself with images based on a user defined search criteria. For example, you could have a Smart Album that:

Only contains images that you have given a specific rating. e.g. Five Stars
Only contains images that contain a certain keyword
Only contains images shot with a particular lens

… and so on!

Of course, all search terms can be combined to create complex queries with results being returned in a matter of milliseconds.

For example, a Smart Album could be set to only contain images shot within a certain time period, that are keyworded with a certain term, are rated five stars and, captured with a particular camera and lens combination. The only limit is your imagination really!

Using Smart Albums with Projects

The power of Smart Albums is best explained in combination with the ‘Project’ organizational item. As busy photographers we can all imagine that we could end up with a great number of Smart Albums and Albums in our Catalogs. This could get very untidy and confusing.

Because of this we can use Projects for some brilliant organizational options.

Basically a Project limits the search scope of a Smart Album, so remember these basic guidelines:

A Smart Album not contained within a Project will search the entire Catalog.
A Smart Album contained within a Project will only search the images within that Project.

Therefore you can use both ‘global’ Smart Albums outside of Projects to monitor your entire Catalog and Smart Albums inside Projects to monitor only images specific to that Project.

Example

In this small Catalog we have 477 images:

You can also see that three Projects already exist in the User Collections area, but let’s make a new Project from scratch to show you the process.

I’ll start by choosing Project from the menu described earlier, and naming it:

This creates a new, and empty, Project in the User Collections area:

As a Project cannot contain images itself, I will right-click on the Project and choose ‘New Inside…’ and create an Album.

If you expand out the Project, the empty Album will be ready to accept images, simply by dragging and dropping as we did before.

Alternatively, if you right-click on the album and choose ‘Set as Selects Collection’ we can use a handy shortcut to quickly move images into that album, if you prefer not to drag and drop.

Simply select any image(s) and hit Cmd (Mac) / Cntrl(PC)-J on the keyboard to populate the Album with the image.

After selecting our files, we have an Album that now contains 13 images. Circled in orange is the icon that designates this as the Selects Collection.

Now the magic starts with Smart Albums!

I’ll right-click on the Project once more, as we did to create the Album in the Project earlier, but this time I’ll choose to create a Smart Album. The following dialog box opens, which is where we set the parameters for the Smart Album’s search scope. I have used a Preset to automatically set the Search Criteria that the rating must equal five stars.

So any image in my Project that agrees with the criteria will be automatically added to the Smart Album. You can see that the Smart Album now only contains six five star rated images from that Project.

Finally, if I were to place a Smart Album outside of any Project in the User Collections area, then this Smart Album would search the entire Catalog. Here we have a returned result of 143 Images.

Using Groups

Our final organizational item is a Group. This is a free form item, which you can use pretty much the same way as a system folder. It places no limits on the scope of Smart Albums like a Project does.

For example, here I have just used a number of Groups to categorize my collections further.

I hope by reading this tip you can see there is a lot of scope for using virtual organization as a way to empower your Catalogs in an intelligent way. By careful addition of Projects, Albums and Smart Albums it will be easier and most importantly faster, to find the assets you need for any given assignment or task.

Best regards,

David

Let your clients approve your images anywhere in the world

Recently I had a very relevant question from a Capture One Pro 7 webinar participant.

The question was:

If you’re using the Capture Pilot web option could the client view the images remotely via the Internet, say if they were in their office on the other side of the world?

Capture Pilot is normally used as a great tool for assisting you in the studio. If you have YET to use it, I would recommend you take a look.

Capture Pilot is an iOS application, or as mentioned above, a simplified tool that can be used on any web-enabled device. The tool allows you to have an additional remote station where the selected contents of Capture One Pro 7 can be viewed, rated and color tagged. Additionally on the iOS application there is full remote control of a supported camera, if attached to Capture One software.

Capture Pilot has many uses for you as a photographer, for your assistants, your clients and even the stylists.

Normally, Capture Pilot is used in the same location as your host computer. For example, you could be shooting tethered in your studio with your DSLR with Capture Pilot running on an iPad, being viewed by your client comfortably sitting on set.

So what if you could also use Capture Pilot as a means to discuss a shoot with a client remotely? Perhaps show them adjustments on the fly and allow them to rate and tag images?
This got our team thinking and we decided to see if we could set this up. Not only to see how it would work but also how difficult it would be. It turns out for our investigation it was very simple!

Setting up

Network routers vary so it is impossible to provide a “one-size-fits-all” instruction. My personal router is an Apple Airport Extreme and configuring it for this task was easy. Remember, Phase One is not an IT support company, and I am merely suggesting one method to do this, and we do not offer official support connecting to Capture Pilot over the internet.

First, you need to know your IP address. This is easily found by typing ‘what’s my IP’ into Google. Your IP will simply be returned at the top of the search results. Or you can simply click here

You will see an IP number returned that looks something like this:

62.251.74.177

Make a note of this as you will need to give this to whomever wishes to access your Capture One session remotely via Capture Pilot.

In Capture One Pro 7, start the Capture Pilot image server by clicking here:

Click on the Mobile Tab and Web Tab, making a note of the Local IP and Port Numbers. Like so:

So we have 10.0.1.7:56004 for Capture Pilot on an iOS device and 10.0.1.7:80 for Capture Pilot on any web-enabled device.

The Local IP is the IP address of the computer running Capture One Pro 7. The port numbers describe how an external connection could access Capture One Pro 7.

Now you will need to access the administration portal of your network router. As I mentioned earlier, the terminology and interface will vary depending on manufacture but I hope this will be enough so you can explore further.

As mentioned my router at home is an Airport Extreme. It can be accessed by the Airport Utility application. Port Settings or Port Forwarding, as it might be described, are accessed in the Network tab.

In order to create a new Port setting, first click on the ‘+’ icon at the bottom of the “Port Settings” option.

In this case I will need to make two entries. One for Web and one for iOS as they use different ports.

First, I’ll create the entry for Capture Pilot Web.

Basically, make sure the information shown in Capture One Pro 7, is entered the same here – i.e. the Port number should be 80 and the Private IP address should be 10.0.1.7. Just as we found in the Capture Pilot Tool.

Now enter the same for Capture Pilot Mobile on iOS:

Once the router has been updated I am ready to give out my IP address.

For any web-enabled device it is very simple. The address your client should type in their web browser would be your IP address that you discovered from Google along with the port number from Capture Pilot. The address should be written in this syntax:

62.251.74.177:80

They will see a “webpage” similar to the one below and based on what you have allowed Capture Pilot to share. (This can be selected in the ‘Folder’ pull down menu in the Capture Pilot Tool in Capture One Pro 7)

Opening an image in this web mode will allow them to rate and color tag an image.

The great news is this will then be synchronized with Capture One Pro 7 on your machine. So you can now see exactly how your client has rated your images.

For Capture Pilot on iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPad Touch), they will need to setup a custom server.

Click on the plus icon in the home screen of Capture Pilot, as launched from the iOS device.

Then enter the details shown in the Capture Pilot Tool from Capture One Pro 7.

The server will connect and you will be able to browse and rate images.

ow that the iOS device is set, if you had a camera connected to the host computer, you could also remotely trigger it. Please let me know if you have an idea for using that! 😉

DHCP Reservations

Most network routers do not automatically reserve a unique IP address for your computer. In the above example, the local IP for my computer was 10.0.1.7. However, at the time of writing this, it is 10.0.1.18.

Therefore, to save having to reconfigure the Port Forwarding each time you want to allow remote access for Capture Pilot, it’s a good idea to reserve a static IP address for your computer. In the Airport Extreme setup it is here:

Your computer is identified by a MAC address. It is unique to the Wi-Fi card or Ethernet port in your computer. Therefore, you can permanently link an IP address to a MAC address, and not have to reconfigure the ports, if your IP address is not automatically ‘static’.

Further Help

It is important to state that Phase One is not an IT support company and this is just one example of how to set up Capture Pilot in this way with Apple network equipment. The language and terminology used will vary from router to router, so if you need assistance with setting up Port Mapping / Forwarding on your particular device, then please contact the specific manufacturer.

Phase One support cannot assist with network setup regarding Capture Pilot over the internet.

Best regards,

David