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Why shoot RAW?

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

RAW image files are sometimes referred to as ‘digital negatives’ because they save the data obtained from the camera sensor as information that can be converted into an image. The data is unprocessed and requires a RAW converter to transform it into an image.
What you have with a RAW capture is an incredible amount of data with a much wider dynamic range and color tonality from which to construct an image with more freedom. An in-camera JPG file is that same image data compressed with a predefined contrast curve and color management applied by the camera manufacturer as a fit-all solution to how images should look.

If you imagine a RAW file as a huge range of ingredients in a kitchen, then you’ll understand that the bigger the selection of materials, the more possibilities are available for creating something delicious. To continue the analogy, if a large counter packed with every imaginable ingredient is RAW, then a JPG would be the baked cake

All cameras capture in RAW, but when you decide to shoot JPG, most cameras will convert your RAW file to a JPG for you, only keeping the JPG.

We want to share why we think shooting in RAW is the way to go for more control, flexibility, and quality.

How far can camera control take you?

“Just get it right in camera” is probably a statement you’ve heard, or maybe even said, at some point in your life as a photographer. While there is some truth to the statement, there’s a limit to what you can actually ‘get right’ in camera. White balance, depth of field, focus, exposure – you have control of these. But when it comes to contrast, color grading, highlight and shadow recovery, and much more, it’s almost impossible in most cases to have any impact on this before pressing the shutter.

Getting everything as close as possible to what you want in-camera is by far the best starting point. But some things simply have to be done in post-production and editing a RAW file has much more to offer than editing a JPG file. Below is a quick run-through of some of the benefits of RAW.

Easy-to-correct white balance

While it’s easy for studio and landscape photographers to set the white balance correct, it’s not always possible for other genres of photography. Take event photography, for example. You move around, in and out of buildings, sun, shade, everything is changing, and you just have to follow the subjects. The ability to easily correct white balance in post-production is a key benefit of shooting RAW.

Original file was too blue due to the time of day and incorrect white balance. Since some areas of the original JPG file had a blown out blue channel (255), it was impossible to bring back details of that channel. The RAW file provided correct colors with a single click with the White Balance Picker.

Diving into bit-depth

It sounds technical, but bit-depth can be seen as the number of shades between the darkest value of a pixel and the brightest value. When you capture an image in JPG, the depth is 8-bit. This provides 256 shades per channel per pixel. A 12-bit RAW file captures 4.096 shades per channel, while a 16-bit RAW file captures a whopping 65.536 shades.

Long story short, you have so much more information to play around with in a RAW file, making your images super flexible with smooth tonal transitions when you edit them.

Get more dynamic range

I like to describe dynamic range as the elasticity of an image. There are more details in the shadows and highlights than meet the eye if you capture your images in RAW. Capture One is renowned for its highlight and shadow recovery capabilities, providing a solid foundation for bringing back details in areas of your image that would have been lost if shooting in JPG.

The original image was overexposed with blown out highlights. Reaching 255 in multiple channels, it was impossible to recover any data in those areas from the JPG file. The dynamic range of the RAW file allowed a clean recovery using Capture One.

Better Image quality

With more control comes better image quality. The ability to fine-tune sharpening and noise reduction before converting your RAW file puts you in the front seat of the process, providing optimal image quality.

You can go back in time

Image editing software is constantly evolving, and as new tools and features emerge, it’s allowing more sophisticated processes for your photography. I have talked to photographers loading ten-year-old RAW files into Capture One 11 to discover that they can get much more out of their files than they could ten years ago. It brought new life to their old images.

RAW processing algorithms are becoming more and more advanced, and you really don’t have the same possibilities with old JPG files. So, keep those RAWs!

What’s the catch?

RAW files take up more space, filling your memory cards and hard disks up faster. This isn’t as big a problem today as it was ten years ago, as storage prices are very low. Also, most cameras shoot slightly slower in burst mode when shooting RAW files.

Another catch is speed. All images shot in RAW have to be processed with a RAW converter. This, mixed with the slower burst speed, makes it less preferable for sports photographers covering major sports events. The images have to go to press as fast as possible, making it difficult to run every image through a RAW converter.

Fujifilm advantages!

When you are shooting Fujifilm you already know how great their film simulations are. With them you can easily color grade your pictures when pressing the shutter button, these simulations can make your images get a cinematic or analogue feel to them. These film simulations are saved when you shoot jpeg. But when shooting RAW they are still embedded in the file in Capture One – but you can change it after importing, that is not possible when shooting jpeg.

Along with the film simulation Capture One also embed lens corrections and camera profiles.

So, what should I shoot?

Unless you need to deliver images very fast (say for newspaper photography), or if the colors and contrast aren’t the priority in the specific images, you should absolutely shoot in RAW.

Today’s memory cards bring a lot of storage for a reasonable price, so if your camera supports shooting RAW + JPG, that is an option that brings you the best of both worlds. You have a JPG file instantly available next to the corresponding RAW file, offering you all the options described above. The only downside to this is a more demanding file management.

Just like working with a full set of ingredients at hand, shooting your images in RAW will provide the full set of options for editing your images exactly as you want them to look.

What’s your main argument for shooting RAW?

If you don’t already own Capture One, download a 30-day trial and try editing RAW files today.

See it from my perspective; Creative cityscapes editing

Working with natural light is often challenging as you have less control over the outcome, especially if you want to get that shot there and then. Thankfully, with Capture One’s suite of tools and in particular targeting those adjustments in Layers, the potential for achieving your vision is greater than you think!

Join award-winning fine art photographer and filmmaker Baber Afzal as he demonstrates the process in this step-by-step guide. Remember that you can download a free Capture One trial here.

The following image was shot towards the end of December of last year, 2017. We had the most amazing conditions come to life when fog started rolling in during the afternoon in Dubai which is really rare. This shot was taken while we were crossing downtown and I noticed this unreal reflection on Burj Khalifa that we just couldn’t miss as the low flying fog was making its way through.

Now let’s talk about the process of how I edited this image in Capture One. Below is a step by step breakdown with screenshots of the tools I used.

Global Adjustments

I’m going to use both layers and global adjustments for this image. Global adjustments form the base layer by affecting the entire image. In the Layers Tool, this is the Background layer.

Exposure

Looking at the histogram, it’s clear that the image is underexposed. To compensate for this, I added some slight exposure and brightness. Mixing the two gives better control of the overall lightness of the image, as brightness will preserve the highlights better.

Checking for chromatic aberrations and purple fringing

Next up is checking for chromatic aberrations and purple fringing. This is a pretty common phenomenon when shooting architecture and landscape. Chromatic Aberration is ticked as default within Lens Correction, and luckily this image didn’t suffer from purple fringing. No further actions required.

Straightening vertical lines

Shooting buildings upwards like this image will always produce tilted vertical lines unless you use a technical camera. This is fixable using Keystone Vertical in Capture One.

I simply dragged the round handles on the two lines to make them align with vertical lines in the image, like so:

After clicking Apply in the middle, the image looked like so:

The keystone correction was now applied, and I simply needed to switch to another cursor tool, for example, V (Select), to see the actual image.

Making local adjustments to the foreground buildings

The first step towards muting these buildings is by masking them out first.

The best way for us to create our mask is by using the Advanced tab in the Color Editor Tool.

The Color Picker, highlighted in Orange, is used to pick the brown color of the building, shown below.

The resulting color wheel will look like this.

Now we need to stretch out the radius so that we can affect the full spectrum of that color. Also increase the Smoothness value too. The resulting wheel will look as below.

Next, click on View selected color range to see which areas of the image are selected. Any color not part of the selection will show as monochrome in the image. Gradually keep widening the handles in the color wheel to make sure we cover all the colors available in the building except for aqua and blue since we don’t wish to select the sky.

The resulting wheel will look like the one above and the resulting image will look as follows with View selected color range checked.

We can be confident enough that we have managed to cover most of the colors available in the foreground building. The windows won’t be selected since they match the color of the sky or almost share similar color space.

The next step is to convert this color range selection into a layer mask. As shown below, simply click on the three dotted lines on the extreme right side of Color Editor and click on Create Masked Layer from Selection.

This will create a new Layer.

The Masked Layer is shown in red on the image. Toggle M to turn the mask on and off.

Capture One has done a pretty incredible job with the selection, but now it’s time to fine-tune the mask by using the brush cursor tool. Click B to select the brush and right-click to set the brush size to 140 and keep the Auto Mask feature ON, so that when we brush along the side of the building, it doesn’t bleed into the sky.

The leftmost building and the second building from the left need help in fine-tuning.

Below is the final mask we managed to make in 5 minutes with the brush tool. Now we have successfully made a mask for the foreground buildings as we discussed.

Next, I will make the necessary adjustments to this layer in order to give a mute feeling to those buildings. I have used the below panels and adjustments.

I increased the Contrast slider in the Exposure panel to give a bit of pop to the top parts of the two middle buildings. This slider is smart in the sense that already saturated colors receive less of an increase than those colors that are not. Also, highlights are protected to a certain extent.

Now the image looks like this:

We managed to get a pretty decent muted feel of the buildings in the front. The reason for us to give this muted feeling is so that we can bring focus to the building in the back, the Burj Khalifa.

Now let’s create a new empty layer and rename it to ‘Burj Khalifa.’ Click on the three dots in the top right corner of the Layer panel and click on Copy Mask From – Foreground Buildings.

This will copy the mask that exists on the Foreground Buildings layer we made onto the new Burj Khalifa layer.

After doing this, enter the same menu and click on INVERT Mask.

Now you have successfully created a background layer simply by inverting the layer as shown below.

Making Adjustments to the Burj Khalifa Layer

It’s time to divert the viewer’s attention to the main subject – the Burj Khalifa.

The best way for this image is to use the Clarity tool. The beauty of the Clarity tool is its ability to adjust the mid-tone contrast without potentially losing highlight or shadow detail.

As you can see below, I adjusted Clarity to the maximum value and set the structure to 20 to bring out the edges of Burj Khalifa a little.

I made some additional changes to this Layer too. To give the layer a bit more punch, I used the Advanced tab of the Color Editor again and this time selected the blues (referring to the sky in this case).

I reduced the lightness by around -15 so that the sky can become a bit darker and at the same time not affecting the luminosity values of the fog where the reflection is happening, giving it a nice pop.

Below is the image so far.

I still believe we have a bit more room to add extra Clarity to the Burj Khalifa, so let’s create a new layer again and name it ‘Burj Khalifa 2’.

As we did earlier, simply copy the same mask again of the Burj Khalifa. Now we can use this layer to add a bit more Clarity to it, so it makes the reflection look more refined.

This time I used Punch for the Clarity mode so that it adds a bit of vibrancy and contrast to the mid-tones.

Again – the image so far.

Adding the finishing touches

After reviewing the image, I just need to add a few finishing touches to the “Background.” This will affect the whole image.

I decided to bring up the brightness a bit since the image became a bit too dark due to the changes we made.

I’ve also added a little Vignetting.

And finally, a Curve adjustment by bringing up the blacks by 5 points and lowered the midtones while I left the highlights the way they are.

Below is the final image we have managed to achieve.

I hope you all enjoyed this blog post. Feel free to now apply these techniques to your images, and experiment!

I would love to see the images you create with what I have taught here. Good luck!

Achieving Perfect Skin Tones Using Capture One

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

One of the more difficult aspects of photographing people is getting the skin tone right in order to get that beautiful, natural look. Capture One has some great tools that will help you to achieve perfect skin tones.

Join beauty and portrait photographer Jonas Nordqvist as he demonstrates the process in this step-by-step guide. Remember that you can download a free Capture One trial here.

In this blog post, I will break down my workflow for you, so you get a better understanding how my process works and get a feel for how powerful Capture One Pro 11 really is.
With that said, every photo is different, and I adapt my work process depending on the image. But, every photo starts in Capture One, either shooting tethered or importing from a memory card into a unique session folder for that specific shoot.

Capture One > Photoshop > Capture One > Exported product

Import and working in sessions

I always shoot my work tethered when its physically possible and the cable doesn’t hold me down. Capture One has a great engine for tethered capture, and it comes with a lot of perks like showing the rest of the team what you create without having anyone hanging on your shoulder. Another thing that I usually do is some minor adjustments as well as setting the white balance which will be passed on to every image captured. In the shot below I felt that the backdrop was too saturated, so I toned it down to get rid of distractions.

All my files go directly into a Session folder which I love working with. Every Session contains all the files from that shoot; RAW-files with settings, retouched PSD-files, exported jpg and so on, making it easy and handy to work with. I can simply move the whole folder to another hard drive when I want. More simple than working with big catalogues.

The RAW process

Basically, the RAW process for me is to correct tonal flaws and imperfections that the image has, both in color and luminosity. Usually, I don’t do any big changes or the final color grading here. Instead, that’s the final step after I am done with all my retouch processes.

Analyzing the image

Let’s talk about this image. This was a beauty test shoot with Edda, a model from Nordic Model Agency in my home city. The shot was taken in studio with a beauty dish slightly above the model. I also used a soft box under the model to bring some shadows back.

Before I start editing, it’s good to come up with a game plan for how the end result should look. This is totally up to your creativity and there is no right or wrong.

I see three things I like to correct. First is the exposure that I feel is on the brighter side of the spectrum. Next is the skin tone. If you look carefully, you see a shifting tone of saturation and hue on the neck and camera left forehead. The last thing that strikes me is the background, which is too saturated and a bit dark for the look I was going for.

White balance

The first step of the RAW process is normally adjusting the white balance of the shot, even if I feel that it’s spot on, I go ahead and experiment until it feels right. The correct way is to use a gray card to meter the right value. But this can also make a warm summer evening look like mid overcast day, which you generally don’t want. For this image, I just made it a little warmer which I usually tend to do.

Exposure

Exposure is normally set right where I want it, but I tend to make some minor adjustments if needed. A good tip is to go with the mood you want, not the “correct” way.

If you watched a movie, it would look weird if every scene had the same exposure day and night, right?

For this beauty shot, I feel like it’s a bit too overexposed so I´ll dial down the exposure.

I still feel that it’s too bright in some areas so I’ll use the High Dynamic Range and bring back some details in the highlights. This tool is amazing still making it look natural. If you want to use these settings more selectively, you can use a layer to brush the settings to where you need it.

Clarity

Do we really need clarity on a head shot? Too much can make your photo look cheap, but if you use it carefully, you don’t need to worry about it. The Capture One team has done a great job separating Clarity and Structure to make the changes you need. For this image, I bumped up the value slightly on both, making the image look sharper.

Lens corrections

Capture One has great built-in profiles to correct flaws from your lens. Let’s say you shoot wide open (low aperture value), or with a wide-angle lens, this can be very useful.

This shot was taken at f/10 on a 100mm macro lens, so no corrections need to be done.

Changing the background color using layers and Color Editor

Like I mentioned before, I’m not pleased with the backdrop color, so my goal is to reduce the saturation and maybe make it a little bit brighter.

I went ahead and created a new filled layer called “pink backdrop,” and under the advanced tab in the Color Editor, I selected the color picker to select the background color. To easier see what color is in your selection go and check the box “view selected color range.” By doing this, some parts of the image will be shown in color and some parts in black and white. The colors that are visible in the picture are within your selected color range, and the unselected colors turn black and white. Here, I will fine tune the selection to have only the pink background selected. For a more precise selection, move the Color Editor window out from the rest of the tools and then expand it.

I still had some pink colors on the color range, so I used the “Erase mask” tool to mask it away. Now I adjusted the saturation and lightness to the look I want.

Skin tone

If we look at the skin, as I mentioned before, we can see some areas shifting in tones as well as saturation. The most outstanding shifts in this area are on the neck and camera left forehead which shifts to a more saturated orange tone. This is normal, and with a trained eye, it’s easy to spot on a lot of images. A great way to fix this is by using the Uniformity tools in the Color Editor tab. This process will save me tons of work in Photoshop.

I created a new local adjustment layer called “Skin tone” and drew a mask around the subject’s skin. There are different ways of doing a mask, but I’m most familiar with the shift-technique. While holding down shift, I click and draw the mask around the edges of the model and when I am all the way around, I use “Fill mask.” Here I also mask out the lips and other makeup areas that I don’t want to change.

The Skin tone tab has two groups of sliders; Amount and Uniformity. In the amount group, you selectively change the skin tones to a preferred look with hue, saturation, and lightness. The Uniformity tools are used to even out different variables which is very powerful.

Again, we use the color picker and try to select a natural tone somewhere on the skin. Then I drag the Hue slider under Uniformity up to 100 to easier see which tone I selected. If it’s too green, or too red, I’ll select a new spot or adjust the selection on the color wheel.

Resetting the Hue slider again, then I carefully try to find a value on Hue and Saturation that will correct the tone shifting but still looks natural and does a fairly subdued change.

Exporting the image to a PSD

When I feel that I am done with the RAW process, it’s time to export the image to Photoshop for further retouching. When right-clicking the image, you have the option to ‘Edit With,’ which will place the image next to the RAW file in Capture One. Here I use PSD format, 16 bit and Adobe RGB profile.

Make sure to select ‘Crop as Path (PSD),’ as you will have the full image available if needed. Any crop you might have made in Capture One will be included as a path for instant cropping in Photoshop.

Round-trip with PSD file

When all the retouch is done, I can go back to Capture One and there I’ll find my file in the output folder. The great thing about this is that I have access to all of Capture One tools and can apply them to any PSD file as I like. This fits perfectly with my workflow and makes it all very easy to do the final edits on multiple images for a story. This also allows you to make more room for drastic edits, high contrast and mixing with different colors as you like. Or you can try any of the Capture One styles. As in the RAW-process, I try to keep it natural and subdued.

In my process, this is usually where I do my final color grading, make a black and white copy and without having to retouch all over again. A great tip is to make different variants of the image, so you can compare what crop you like the best, or maybe if the image looks better in black and white.

The first step on this image will be to add a slightly darker/tanned look to the skin. There are multiple ways of doing this, but I will be doing it in the advanced color editor by selecting reds and yellows and then slightly bring down the lightness and saturation.

Another favorite tool that I tend to use often is the Color Balance. Making the shadows “cold” and the highlights “warm” will add a nice depth to the image, but don’t push it too much!

Contrast is key, and you might have noticed that I haven’t added any yet. But when I do, which I always do, I do it with curves and very often the luminosity curve. For this image, I will do a small s-curve with luminosity, and then I darkened the image slightly with the RGB-curve.

Almost done

Everyone is familiar with the dilemma of cropping an image, and I am no exception. With Capture One you can save different aspect ratios depending on what you are exporting the image for. Magazines can be 8,5×11 and then there is Instagram that uses 4×5 as the longest vertical.

Before the image is exported, I will add some grain to it. The grain will make the image look more analog, realistic and can cover up too much retouch. Make sure to select an export recipe and turn on the proofing, the symbol that looks like a pair of glasses. With this, you will see how the image will look in the resolution you export in. I made different recipes for a variety of purposes like Instagram, my website, client proofs and so on.

Before/after

How to create stunning black and white images

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

While there’s minimal work involved in turning a color image into black and white, there’s a few more steps to creating stunning black and white photography. Brand Ambassador Martin Bailey shares his workflow on one of his images, showing his process to emphasize the level of control you have in Capture One. Watch the step-by-step video tutorial that accompanies this blog post to see Martin’s edits in action.

If you don’t already have Capture One – make sure to download a 30-day free trial here.

Each year, I travel to Hokkaido, the northern-most island of Japan, to lead my minimalist winter landscape photography tour. Much of the work I make from the locations we visit is converted to black and white, and Capture One enables me to create beautifully toned black and white images without the need for third party plugins. Being able to work directly on my raw files affords me a number of important benefits. I can save on disk space, because I don’t have to save large PSD or TIFF files. I can also revisit and tweak my processing without having to completely reprocess it in a third-party application. And I get to reap the benefits of the ever-improving processing engine as Capture One is upgraded over the years.

Today we’re going to take this image, straight out of the camera:

And convert it to this black and white image:

Here are the steps that I follow to create my high contrast black and white image of what I call “The Boat Graveyard” in Hokkaido, Japan. Some of the shortcuts I use are custom shortcuts, that may be different to yours, but this is another one of the many things that I love about Capture One. We can customize it to suit and speed up our workflow, enabling us to quickly work through our images.

First, let’s enable Black and White and reduce the Blue channel to -20, to darken the blue in the sky a little.

Then, on the Background layer (as opposed to creating a layer) let’s adjust the Levels to brighten the whites by moving the white point to -226, to open up the whites in the image, and move the midpoint to -0.18 to increase the contrast a little.

Let’s also add 40 Clarity in Punch mode and 12 Structure.

And we can increase the contrast more by applying a somewhat aggressive Luma Curve to darken the shadows and mid-tones, and lighten the highlights slightly. It’s a good idea to also turn on Exposure Warnings, so that you can see if you start to push it too far. We don’t want the whites to get too bright, or the shadows to get too deep.

I also increase the High Dynamic Range Highlight slider to 38 to reduce the highlights and increase contrast further.

We can use the Gradient tool with the SHIFT key to draw a mask over the horizon line and apply another pretty aggressive Luma Curve to the sky, with a strong S curve. The Luma curve works mainly on the luminosity or brightness of the image. We can also add a very subtle S curve to the RGB curve, to slightly darken the blue in the sky at the same time as adding more contrast.

As we bring out contrast in the sky, the dust spots from the sensor start to become prominent, so we can use the dust removal tool to remove them. And finally, for this layer, let’s increase the Clarity a little further, to around 15.

To bring down the bright patch in the bottom left of the sky, let’s add another Adjustment layer and paint in a feathered mask to darken down the shadows a little with a Luma Curve.

Now we’ll create a new Adjustments layer, and paint in a new mask over the foreground, and use the new Refine Mask feature to fine tune this along the ridge of the snow, then delete what’s left over the sea with the Erase brush. Once we have all of the foreground snow and boats selected with our mask, let’s add a Luma curve and a bit of an RGB curve, as well as a slight increase in the High Dynamic Range Shadows slider, all to brighten the mid-tones and highlights in the snow.

Finally, we use a number of Heal layers to clone out the bits of grass in the foreground to add the finishing touches.

Another thing that really helps me to speed up my workflow, is that once I’ve made my changes to an image like this, I often copy my adjustments to the clipboard, and apply them to other images with just a few keystrokes. Of course, if I’ve been using masks, I have to adjust them to match the content of the new image, but it’s still a lot faster than doing everything from scratch on each image.

I used to spend a lot of time after returning from my tours just to get through my initial edits so that I can start to blog about my adventures and use the images to market future tours. Now that I’m using Capture One, my workflow is so streamlined that I am able to keep up with my processing each evening, and come home with most if not all of my work processed. This is a huge time saver and reduces the stress as I try to catch up with business after my tours.