Make the most of Layers with this in-depth look at Capture One’s layering capabilities – which have grown significantly over the past few years. In this two-part series, we’ll cover everything you need to know about using layers in Capture One, to make your editing more useful and targeted.
In the first part, we’ll walk you through:
Download a 30-day trial of Capture One.
Go even deeper with Layers in the second part of our two-part series on Capture One’s layering capabilities. In this session, we will wrap up what you need to know about using Layers and run through some practical examples of using layering in your editing.
In the second part, we’ll cover:
Download a 30-day trial of Capture One.
2021 was a busy and exciting year for Capture One.
Throughout the year, we released a succession of fantastic updates to Capture One 21 and rounded it off with the launch of Capture One 22 in December. Together, this delivered must use new tools like Style Brushes and the Magic Brush, highly requested features like Panorama Stitching and HDR merge, updates to our core workflows like the redesigned Importer and Exporter, wireless tethering for select Canon cameras, and a long list of newly supported hardware.
We’ve also invested heavily under the hood over the last year. We ported our Mac codebase to run natively on Apple’s M1 silicon, and brought code and speed optimizations to Windows, making Capture One noticeably snappier and more stable on both platforms.
It was also a year of great growth and development for our Community engagement programs. We received plaudits where we deserved them and we stood to listen when we didn’t get things quite right. We welcomed a new and diverse slate of Ambassadors who continue to awe us with their work, their creativity and their innovative approaches to professional photography. We hugely value our Community, so we’ve world tiredlessly to follow up our words with actions, and are committed to continuing to do so.
Inside the house, we’ve also been very busy hiring a new team and building the infrastructure required to run Capture One as an independent company, with about one-third of the Capture One team joining in the last year. We also expanded our footprint in Athens, where we opened an Engineering site in the summer of 2020, and moved into our permanent office there.
We can’t wait to get started with 2022.
To some extent, 2022 started early for Capture One. We gave you a sneak preview of Capture One Live, our first Cloud product, we disclosed our progress on porting Capture One to the iPad and we introduced stable and reliable wireless tethering.
We’re incredibly excited about the future of photography.
We are witnessing the emergence of a multi-device, collaborative photography workflow, including Cloud, Mobile, Social and Collaboration platforms, and we understand
the importance and value of bringing our core strengths in image quality, reliability and efficiency to meet the rapidly evolving requirements of photographers and image creators.
We’re pumped about our plans and we hope that as all the parts start to fall into place, you will be too.
Most importantly though, I would like to heartfully thank our worldwide community of photographers for your engagement and custom. The work you do tirelessly, your diversity, your creativity and your wizard-like skills inspire us to do our best work.
Thank you for your support in 2021, on behalf of the Capture One team around the world, I wish you and your loved ones all the very best in 2022.
Rafael Orta
CEO
Despite the ongoing effort from camera manufacturers to increase the dynamic range of digital camera sensors, capturing the full range of tonal values in a scene remains a critical challenge for most photographers.
But what is dynamic range exactly?
In photography, dynamic range refers to a camera sensor’s ability to record details both in highlight and shadow areas. In other words, dynamic range marks the difference between the darkest and lightest tones in an image. The best sensor on the planet, which is the human eye has an astonishing 21-stop dynamic range while the best cameras available today can only achieve approximately 15 stops.
In order to broaden the range of contrast in a single image while maintaining details in both highlights and shadows, digital photographers, for years, have relied on a post-processing technique called high dynamic range merging, also known as HDR. HDR consists of digitally combining several images taken at different exposure levels by varying the shutter speed.
Unfortunately, over the years HDR photography has become a pejorative term due to the unnatural results we have all witnessed in say, real estate and landscape photography, as photographers relied on presets and automatic image blending to yield affected images.
As an architectural and interior design photographer, I heavily rely on manual HDR post-processing techniques. Since early 2016, Capture One has been my photo editing software of choice due to its unmatched tethering stability and the control offered by its powerful features. So far, my workflow mainly consists of image capture and adjustments in Capture One followed by advanced retouching and image blending in Photoshop using luminosity masking techniques.
For a while, the current high dynamic range tool in Capture One—despite its ability to recover highlight and shadow—lacked the ability to blend several exposures together. Therefore, I was particularly excited about Capture One 22’s new features. I was recently asked to evaluate the new HDR Merge tool and see how it could fit into my architectural image editing workflow. So without further ado, let’s jump into it.
The interior image below was shot during a recent shoot for PCL Construction of a new branch of the Canadian Western Bank in Edmonton. In this case, a bracket of three images with 1.0 EV between each image was shot using a tripod. I made sure that the brightest exposure had details in the shadows and the darkest one showed enough details in the highlights.
At this stage, I would normally make some adjustments to my base exposure in Capture One, then apply the same adjustments to each image in the bracket, and finally stack them as layers in Photoshop. I would then create luminosity masks in order to keep my highlights and shadows under control. Finally, the color of different areas of the image that require corrections would be selectively adjusted. The new HDR Merge tool in Capture One made things significantly easier. For starters, I only had to select the RAW images I wanted to merge without adjustments, right click, and select “Merge to HDR” within Capture One. To the reader: when applying adjustments to the images prior to merging, it’s not required because the algorithm uses the original unadjusted RAW files only.
A dialog box then appeared with two options:
After pressing “Merge” a new window popped up to let me know that the merging process was starting.
The images were shot at full resolution on my Sony A7R IV and it only took 30 seconds to generate the HDR .dng that appeared next to the input images. I then made some adjustments to the new HDR .dng file like I would on any RAW file and compared it to the original image with the same adjustments applied:
As you can tell in the close-up above the difference is significant in the highlights: the windows on the left don’t have blown out areas anymore and the light fixture highlights in the merged image at the bottom look cleaner as well. Most importantly everything was accomplished without leaving Capture One.
The same merging process was repeated with “Auto Adjust” selected
I am generally not a fan of auto adjustments, but the tool did a fantastic job recovering highlight details and creating a well-balanced image. I personally like my images more contrasty and felt the algorithm under-exposed the image a bit to keep the highlights under control. Still, moving a few sliders wouldn’t take much effort to enhance the result. Pretty impressive considering it all occurred in one step!
Advanced color adjustments and a few touch ups were then performed in Photoshop to produce the final image that was delivered to the client.
Overall, I was quite impressed with the increased dynamic range obtained when merging bracketed images directly within Capture One and will definitely add the new HDR Merge tool to my toolbox when editing future images.