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Colorist POV: Color grading in Capture One Pro 9

I had the privilege of being asked by David Grover, Support and Business Development Manager at Phase One, to experiment the new color grading tools inside Capture One 9. I knew the existence of this RAW processing software, but never had the time to explore it until a couple of weeks ago. David wanted to know what an experienced video colorist thought of their new color grading tools, so I dove into Capture One Pro 9 with that in mind.

Coming from Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, it took me a bit of time to understand CO9’s file management and overall way of doing things. The learning curve was a bit longer than I thought, but it was worth it… Once you get the gist of things, the tools are pretty easy to comprehend.

Capture One Pro 9 is a rich and feature heavy retouching software. There are a lot of things I would like to talk about, but instead of doing a very lengthy blog post, I will break it down into different parts. This first part is dedicated to Capture One Pro 9 latest addition, the Color Balance Tool. I’ll start by quickly explaining how the tool works, continue by showing some grading examples and finish off with sepia looks.

Color Balance Tool

The Color Balance Tool introduces into Capture One the concept of color grading all colorist are familiar with; the three way color wheels. As a Lightroom user, I used to combine the temp & tint sliders, the RGB tonal curve and the split toning tool to push the colors in the desired direction. I got used to retouch my pictures that way and although I always ended up satisfied with the result, it felt a bit unnatural compared to how I grade videos.

How it Works

I assume if you are reading this on my blog, you must already be accustomed to how color grading roughly works, but here’s briefly how the Color Balance Tool functions inside Capture One 9.

Let’s start with the Master Wheel:

You’ve guessed it! Drag the point in the middle to change the color of the image. The further you go, the more saturated the image will get. Since we are in the Master Wheel, the changes will be applied to the entire image. I like to think of this wheel like a “color brightness”. The changes you’ll do using this wheel will push the colors around and also affect the overall brightness of your picture. If you want to be more precise, you can use the left slider to adjust only the saturation of your selected color. If you wish to adjust only the hue, simply drag the tiny handle directly on the color wheel (located on the right on the above screenshot, but it will move depending on the color you chose). The right slider is solely for the brightness, but it is greyed out in the Master section. There is of course a Brightness and Exposure slider located in the exposure tab of Capture One 9 if you wish to adjust it.

You might ask yourself why use the Master Wheel when we have the 3-Way at our disposal that offer much more control. Well… I personally always use it before starting any specific color work. This wheel is great to establish your base look. I find it more organic to push the colors in a general direction with the Master Wheel and then mix things up with the 3-Way Wheels. But that’s just me!

Speaking of 3-Ways, here’s out it looks:

The same principles explained above apply here, except that you now have individual controls for the shadows, midtones and highlights. And you are now able to adjust the brightness with each wheels. Whether you are looking for an extreme bold look, or just a subtle color adjustment, this is where the magic happens. Fool around with the controls if you want to experiment weird looks or apply your color theoryknowledge!

Alright, now that we’ve go the basics covered, let’s take a look at some examples of how the Color Balance Tool can have a great impact on your pictures.

Before I start playing around with the Color Balance Tool, I always try to get the best dynamic range possible and also sharpen the picture. This article is focusing the color tools of Capture One 9, but I think it is essential to start grading your pictures with a decent base look. This is process is similar to what I do when I grade videos such as commercials and music videos. You can of course come back later on and tweak the exposure a bit if you wish.

It’s not a dramatic change compared to the original, but as you can see below, I have more details in the highlights and shadows, the image is sharper and a little bit warmer. I’ve included the main parameters (click on the image) I used to create my base look. This will obviously vary depending on your original image and on your taste. Hopefully, it will you a hint as to how I generally start my looks!

Now that we have a decent base look, it’s time to push these wheels around! In the following examples, I will compare the base look (not the original picture) and the graded image. That way, you guys will be able to see what the Color Balance Tool brings to your image more easily. Just drag the slider to compare the two images.

Grade 01: Reddish color cast

Grade 02: Blueish shadows and warm highlights

Grade 03: Old School Cyan

Grade 04: Old School Purple

As you can see, the possibilities are infinite. From a colorist standpoint, these tools are crucial to experiment and push my looks to the next level. I usually don’t go too far and stick to something somewhat realistic like example number 2, but I might consider exploring bolder looks for my next photography projects.

Split Toning

Just like Lightroom, Capture One 9 has a split toning tool to craft nice sepia looks. It works great, but I was curious to use the Color Balance Tool instead. In order to make it work, I completely removed the saturation from the image before pushing the color wheels. If you use the Black & White tool, it won’t work.

I found it much more intuitive and precise to use the Color Balance Tool rather than the regular Split Toning Tool. Here are a few before and after sliders:

I did these last examples rather extreme to demonstrate what you can do with this technique, but you can also it in a more subtle way. Most of the time, I rarely do a pure black and white image. I like to add just a notch of color in the highlights, like the example below. It almost seems like a regular B&W image, but with an extra warm touch. The Color Balance Tool is great at doing that!

Conclusion

The Color Balance Tool is definitely a must when it comes to color grading. Capture One 9’s managed to implement this tool inside a photo software brilliantly… the controls feel organic and I have to say that I really like the “handles” they added to precisely control the hue and saturation. Give it a try!

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for part two featuring another great color grading feature inside Capture One 9, the Color Editor Tool!

Oh.. and to conclude, here are a few other pictures I shot on my 5D and processed in Capture One Pro 9:

Best regards,

Charles-Etienne Pascal

Check out my website: I SEE HUE

To Luma or not to Luma?

In Capture One Pro 9 there is common ground between the improved Contrast slider and the new addition of the Luma Curve mode. So when you should you use the slider?, and what about a Curve? or even when should RGB Curves come into play?

As with many functions in Capture One Pro 9, the choice is yours but ultimately it’s about giving you precision and power and not having software make the decision for you.

Let’s take a look at this following example. It shows quite clearly that using a Luma Curve in this case gives a better end result with more control over the final result.

Straight out of camera, the image looks like this but there is plenty of data in it to extract all the contrast and depth that I want.

If we were to treat this as a color image first of all, one of the first things I would like to do is to boost the contrast in the sky to make the clouds more visible.

I would like to treat the sky as a separate element of the image, as the buildings won’t require the same treatment I feel. Fortunately masking that will be a pinch as I can transform a color selection into a mask, which is new in Capture One Pro 9.

My color selection of the sky I have tried to keep as tight as possible by narrowing my selection down. I will end up with some of the right hand side of the building being selected but I don’t anticipate that will cause me much trouble. It’s a bit flat anyway, so it would benefit from any additional contrast added to the sky.

Immediately, this selection can be transformed into a Local Adjustment mask, with the end goal of being able to edit the sky with the additional benefit of using the contrast slider of a curve.

Now we have ‘Layer 1’ in the Local Adjustments tool, which is a pretty decent mask of the sky, with some of the right hand side of the building.

With the mask activated (and shown in red) you can see the result.

To add some contrast in the sky, we have a choice of

Using the Contrast Slider
Using an RGB Curve
Using a Luma Curve.

They will all give a slightly different result. Here is the Contrast slider, at a value of 30 points.

Here is an S curve applied in RGB.

Here is an S curve applied in Luma

So you can see that there is quite a different result from using the 3 different methods. The strongest shift in hue and saturation is when using an RGB curve (as we would expect) and the least change of hue and saturation is when using a Luma Curve – also what we expect!

The benefit of using the Luma Curve in this instance is that we can apply the contrast we want and individually control our preferred level of Saturation. In this case I might as well add a few points of Saturation to get the level I like.

You will see in each of the examples that the contrast has also increased on the right hand side of the tower, which I said earlier, I probably wouldn’t mind and my suspicions were correct.

To finish off the image in color, I made another local mask on the middle of the tower to darken it off more and add some contrast. I also did some selective dodging and burning.

Finally, for a Black and White version I modified the sliders somewhat in the Black and White tool and added a little grain.

Best regards,

David Grover

5 easy steps to save your low contrast images

Whether it is a grey and rainy day or a day with lots of scattering light that makes an image appear with low contrast, you can easily fix the problem with the histogram and the Levels sliders in the Levels tool.

Pictures with low contrast hardly ever look interesting. Even if an image was shot in very low contrast, you should still try to use a full range of tones in the image.

Image straight out of the camera and the image after being optimized in Capture One Pro 9.

After loading the image in Capture One Pro 9, it is obvious that the image looks very dull lacking both contrast and colors. When I took the image, my brain had compensated for the very low contrast light conditions, so I remembered the scene having more colors and contrast even though the weather was really rough.

The histogram in the Levels tool explains why the image appears so flat. All the values in the image are gathered in the middle of the histogram without any really dark or bright tones.

Step 1: Fine-tune the White Balance

I notice that the red, green and blue histograms aren’t really on top of each other indicating that it is a good idea to adjust the White Balance in the image. I use the white balance picker in the splashing water as this diffuses the light and gives a good general balance for the whole image.

I don’t use the picker on the clouds as this will lead to a wrong White Balance for the image. Distant clouds always get a bluish tone, which I like to preserve in most landscape images.

Step 2: Optimizing the histogram

Now I simply drag the shadow and highlight slider in in the Levels tool so they are placed where the main mass of the histogram starts and ends. You could also use the A button in the tool for Automatic optimization for the histogram.

Optimized histogram in the Levels tool

Now the image looks much better. But I would like to do a few more things to enhance it even more.

Step 3: Adding more details in the splash

To get more detail in the white splashing water I will do a combination of some corrections in the High Dynamic Range tool combined with some Clarity and Saturation adjustments. By first using the highlight slider in the High Dynamic Range tool I bring more details into the splash, which I can amplify by adding some Clarity and Structure in the Clarity tool.

Saturation, Highlight and Shadow compensation in the High Dynamic Range tool and Clarity has been added. Now it is much easier to see the patterns in the white splashing water, which is better separated from the now more bluish sky.

Step 4: Darker skies

Finally, I would like to add more drama to the sky. I will do this very simply by applying some Vignetting to the image. Besides adding drama, it also helps drawing the viewer’s attention towards the breaking wave in the center of the image.

When adding Vignetting I compensate with a little extra brightness and contrast to ensure the same overall brightness of the image.

Final image after being adjusted in Capture One Pro 9

Step 5: Watch the noise in the image

When you stretch the data as much as I have done in this example, it is a good idea to take a look at the file in 100% zoom rate to see if you need to fine-tune the noise settings. On a normally exposed image Capture One Pro 9 will automatically make sure that the noise settings are set correctly but in a case like this you may have to add a little extra Color Noise or Luminance Noise Reduction.

All the best,

Niels

Documenting the daily life within a Haitian hospital

Photographer Jens Honoré recently had the opportunity to visit the Saint Damien Pediatric Hospital in Haiti, invited to photograph the daily life within the hospital.

The Saint Damien Pediatric Hospital is a non-profit hospital, founded in 1989 by NPH (USA) and is supported through public donations of the NPH USA’s St. Damien Pediatric Hospital Fund.

Jens Honoré writes…

When carrying out an assignment like this and photographing the emotional state present within a hospital, it can be quite a delicate challenge especially for someone outside of the community. It requires one to be very discreet, respectful, sensitive to the patient as well as sensitive to the overall tone and atmosphere surrounding that patient.

My approach was quite simple, to keep the images as simple as possible and for my presence to be as informal as possible. No lights or any other tools were used, no assistant or guide, just me, my camera and the subject. I knew that I needed a system that could work under challenging light conditions but I wanted a system that would deliver the absolute highest quality files. Although discretion is high on the priority list for a project like this, and Medium Format is perhaps not known for it’s discrete size, the choice to use Medium Format was made for a number of reasons.

First and foremost in my decision to use medium format was the image quality offered by the XF Camera System. Some of the best optics, high resolution and the shallow depth of field possible in medium format were big on my list to ensure I could deliver an end result I could be proud of. There is also the feel of medium format. The photojournalist reportage style of a project like this is quite common. It’s of course not a bad thing, but it wasn’t what I had envisioned for these images. I wanted something that would set these images apart from the typical delivery and I thought that the different aspects of medium format would work well to achieve that.

XF IQ3 50MP, SK110mm, ISO800

I wanted the resulting images to reflect as much the subject as the atmosphere. Hospitals are not exactly associated with joy and celebration, but neither are they entirely bleak and somber. The atmosphere of the hospital is what the patient makes it and I wanted to capture a depth in the images that hopefully reflected that atmosphere. It’s that depth that I felt required something different from DSLR, something I knew from experience only a medium camera system could deliver. The XF Camera System proved to be the right choice when I weighed all that I wanted to deliver for this project. It had all the features I needed in order to produce the photographs exactly how I envisioned them.

Although the end result may not depict an overtly happy tone, I believe I delivered the images in a manner that reflects the subjects themselves. I’m sure everyone can agree that a sick or suffering child is something no one would ever want to see; yet it’s an unfortunate and unforgiving part of life. There is melancholy to the images that one can’t avoid; this is the unfortunate truth surrounding illness, especially in children. However, due to the generosity and hard work of the people at Saint Damien Pediatric Hospital, and the NPH USA organization, there is hope, there is care and there is love.

I’d like to thank the good people at Saint Damien Pediatric Hospital in Haiti for allowing me to photograph and for all their patience and care towards the children of Haiti in need of their care.

Learn more about St Damien Pediatric Hospital here

XF IQ3 50MP, SK110mm, ISO400