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10 simple steps to dramatic seascapes

This year, I decided to travel more, which seems kind of crazy given how much I travel for clients. I have always been drawn to the edges of the world. Much of my aerial and location work is concentrated on the interaction of humankind, and its interaction with shorelines. But I’d never experienced deep blue water and what it was like to be surrounded by the ocean.

Last fall, I started researching cargo ship voyages. I wanted to experience what life was like on a two week crossing of the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to the Caribbean. Most of my days onboard were spent photographing the ever changing weather…..basically seascapes with waves and some incredible clouds. Everyday the weather changed as we transited the Atlantic. The sea state ran from glass calm near France to 4 meter waves (13.12 feet) as we sailed west of the Azores.

The image below was shot from the tail of the 174 Meter (571 feet) cargo ship that I booked passage on in June of this year.

The first image is the RAW file.

Below are the 10 easy steps I followed to create this into a dramatic Black And White seascape:

1) The first thing I did was a slight gradation and my first layer. I pulled the exposure down 3/4 of a stop.

2) Secondly I added 55 percent Clarity in my second layer. I wanted the clouds to “pop” a bit.

3) I then drew a mask on the wake and added 33 percent clarity to bring out the contrast and add a sense of depth (no pun intended).

4) I was bothered by how dark this section of water was appearing. I added a small mask to a layer and brought the exposure up by a half stop. I never draw masks at 100 percent. I tend to use the brush at its softest setting and the opacity around forty percent.

My goal with all the masks, gradations and layers is to try to have the file as close to perfect before I open it up in Affinity or Photoshop.

5) Now comes the fun part: conversion to black and white plus messing about with the Color Editor. The B&W conversion settings were plus 33 red, Cyan at minus 20 and Blue at minus 11. Still not there, but I am starting to see where I want the image to go.

6) The water was appearing a bit cloudy for my taste and overall the image felt a bit flat. I added a slight S-curve to the image.

7) The clouds on the left side of the frame needed to be a bit brighter. I drew a mask, again at a low opacity and increased the exposure by almost a stop and added 19 percent contrast.

8) The blue sky was feeling flat, lacking contrast and depth. I played around with several approaches, including darkening the sky sampling a section and using the color editor to darken the area. I ended up dropping the exposure just a tad and increasing the clarity to 92. (which is a big jump!)

9) The image was feeling too even in tone to me and I added a gradation to the lower half of the frame and increased the clarity up to 31 and the sharpness to 69.

10) Still wrestling with the upper left hand corner of the sky. Tried the vignette tool and that did not feel right. Again, I dropped the exposure just a bit and added clarity to the section. The upper level cirrus clouds looked a bit muddy to me and I wanted to bring them out just a bit.

My goal was to create a black and white conversion that hopefully, conveyed more drama than the color version and to show you the possibilities of image processing using layers, opacity changes, clarity and black and white conversion.

For me, the benefit of using Capture One is I can use the program and its ability to modify an image across multiple layers, in RAW. I can play with variation, shifting tones and exposures in layers and create Variants of those images – all before committing to processing the image and carrying it into Photoshop. Much of what I used to do in Photoshop, I know do on the RAW file in Capture One.

I also think, it is important to step out of your normal zone of shooting and try something different, it may not be life-changing and it may not impact your vision, but the experience of crossing the ocean on a working ship was a delightful experience for me.

All the best,

Cameron Davidson

Video: High-end retoucher tips for color work

In my last blog post “The secret to beautiful colors” I did a comparison of Capture One and my previous Raw converter of choice. I admitted how I never looked back after trying out Capture One for the first time simply because I wasn’t able to get the same realistic color rendition anywhere else.

Now it’s time to give you a real world example to back up my words. In this video I will show you the capabilities of adjusting your colors on raw files, and how I am able to stay in Capture One to do all my color work.

Download free trial and try it Capture One Pro 8 for yourself

Credits:

Photographer: Joe Prileszky

Model: Sophia Deen

Make-up artist: Phoebe Taylor

All the best,

Pratik Naik
Solstice Retouch

Secrets for adding multiple Styles and Presets to one image

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

In Capture One you have the option of combining several Styles and Presets in one image. We call it stacking them.

Why stack your Styles and Presets?

Without the stacking option you would only be able to apply one Style or Preset to each image and trying to apply a second one would remove the previous.

But with stacking enabled, you can mix and match several of these pre-configured adjustments. But what happens in case of two or more conflicting adjustments? Which will be saved and which will be overridden?

For each tool, you decide whether you will allow stacking of Presets, and as long as two Presets do not conflict with each other, it makes sense to stack them within a single tool.

For Styles, you also have the option of stacking. When working with Styles, it makes a lot of sense to be able to stack Styles or Presets as they may come from different tools dealing with separate issues.

For instance, you can make a Preset that adds some basic metadata to your images like ‘creator’ and ‘copyright’. You can stack this Preset with a Preset that turns your image into a square crop format and with a Preset that adds some general color corrections.

How to stack Presets

To show how you can stack Presets within a single tool, I will create two different adjustment Presets which I will combine by allowing Capture One to stack Presets.

First, I will create an Exposure adjustment Preset pushing the exposure by 1/3 f-stop. I set the exposure compensation to 0.33 and press “Save User Preset” in the Manage and Apply drop-down menu. As the exposure is the only change, it is the only item that has been checked in the save dialog. This is important, as I will later combine this Preset with Presets using contrast and exposure. I name this Preset “Exposure +1/3”.

Next, I will generate a Preset giving the look and feel of old color films. I set the contrast to +18 and the saturation to -56. I save this Preset and make sure that only contrast and saturation are selected in the save dialog. I name this Preset “Old Colors”.

By default, the “Stack Presets” is turned off. Start by selecting the “Stack Presets” menu. Now a check mark indicates that stacking is turned on. Now you can select the Preset “Exposure +1/3” as well as the Preset “Old Colors”. By stacking these Presets, we combine them within a single tool giving you a nice color look, reminiscent of the early days of color films.

If you stack Presets where the individual parameters are not independent, the last Preset you add will be the one that takes effect.

To remove a stacked Preset, you can either click on the Preset again or use the remove option found when pressing the triangle in the “Applied … Presets” list.

If you want to apply the corrections to other images, you can just copy the settings to the Clipping board and apply them to the selected images. This operation will ensure the right settings are applied. If you also want to see these adjustments coming from a certain Preset, you should check the “include style layers” checkbox on the top of the Clipping board.

See how to create your own Styles and Presets

Try out Capture One for free

All the best,

Niels

Color Balance reload – still more to give?

It’s been a while since we released the 3-way Color Balance tool in Capture One 8.2, and to be honest, I am wondering how I ever coped without it! It finds its way quite often into daily adjustment of images, even if it is a small tweak here and there.

For some reason, which I have no explanation for, I am currently going through a phase of preferring more less contrast and less saturated images than I have before. No doubt I will revert to the opposite at some point, but for now I prefer subtlety to punch-in-the-face colors!

So, can the 3-way Color Balance tool still be used effectively in this situation? Of course, and I have discovered a couple of methods that work nicely.

Here is a picture of my son I shot a while ago. This is straight out of the camera, except for the square crop.

Pretty good on the-out-of-camera adjustments, in my opinion, but I always experiment with a couple of different adjustments to see if a different direction helps. I am not much of a Preset fan as quite often one Preset doesn’t lend itself well to a different image, and I can work pretty fast with the tools on hand.

Looking at the histogram, exposure seems about perfec,t so right now I am not going to mess with much in the Exposure tool, except to drop the saturation down quite a way to -30 points. I have found this is a good start point before going on to the Color Balance tool in many situations. It gives a subtle but still visible effect, which I really enjoy.

You could argue there is a little bit of clipping in the shadows, but as this is in the very deepest areas (just below the ear for example), it won’t achieve much to improve the end result by adjusting the Shadow slider in the HDR tool.

Now, the only thing this has achieved so far is to make everything look a bit dull (see below).

Next step is to then to move to the 3-way Color Balance tool and see what we can do here. I haven’t done much but it is enough to cool the shadows (which I like) and add a bit of warmth back into the midtones so the skin tone is improved. Remember, the further you move the selection towards the edge of the circle, the greater the saturation. I have also played around with the lightness of each of the tones by pulling the right-hand slider up a little in each case.

If you want more fine control in the 3-way Color Balance tool, don’t forget you can drag it out of the tool tab and enlarge it, like I have done above. Can we do anything else? Sometimes I go back to the Levels tool and play around with the midtone slider to see if I prefer a lower contrast effect (which I did in this case) and nine times out of ten apply some kind of positive or negative vignette.

Let’s put the adjusted image up, alongside the original.

The last thing to do is some minor spotting work. I really must remember to clean his face before taking a picture.

Don’t forget that even in a Black and White image the Color Balance tool is useful. The Lightness sliders will still come into play and even changing the saturation of a given color selection has an effect.

Here are just four examples from one image:

There is no harm in trial and experimentation! After all, the end result is the key.

Finally, here is another example. I have put the tools used on the left-hand side so you can see the process. The Local Adjustments are simply selective areas to lighten and darken the image where I see fit.

If you want more in-depth instruction on the 3-way Color Balance tool, don’t forget to visit the earlier blog posts on that subject:

Color grading made easy

Color control like never before

Best regards,

David