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Further Adjustments With Capture One

Now, look at this one here. I like the composition. I took a lot of time to get that right. Again-- A little bit dark at the moment. It is, so let's just-- What happens if we hit Auto Exposure? Well, that's pretty good. Auto Gain. Secret recipe. Don't tell anybody about that Auto button. That's pretty good. Maybe I'd still like just a little bit more contrast in this. I'm just going to push that a little bit and pull that exposure back a fraction. It gives it a little bit more of a grungy feeling. It was the floor of a jungle, So where do you want my eye to go to? I want you to look at those leaves. I'm glad you asked that, Pete. So what I might do is jump in again to my color editor. But before I do that, I look at this picture and I think, "You know, what colors are really there?" There's a bit of browns in those leaves, but essentially there's yellow and red. That's it. So I could just do that, and I'm probably gonna take you where you need to go, anyway, but I notic...

e along here there are magenta-ey colors that are starting to come through, so what I prefer to do is be a little bit more selective because you know I'm very, very fussy. So I'm going to drop that in there, grab the yellow, push that up a little bit, grab the red, so what I'm doing is grabbing a couple of color selective layers, if you like. Again, I've selected that, push that up a little bit more, maybe that's a bit too hard, oh, I like the yellow, I think I want you to go back to the yellow. We've done that already, we don't have to go back to the first layer, and away we go. We could use lightness to brighten it up a little bit more. It's looking good, it's looking good. And that was three or four steps in Capture One. And if I went any further, the only things, again, being the sort of person that likes that have a bit of a feel to it, I could add a little bit of that if we go in here. You can see that, when it comes up, boom, it's got a little bit of grit to it. So that was a quick work. Have we got time for one more, do you think? I think we've got time for one more, yes. Let's take this one. Okay. So there's a-- That's a challenging shot. So I can see there's a lot of texture and detail in that rock. Is that the gorge up Cananary? Cananary, yeah. No, it's-- Mental fart. Hamersley Gorge. Hamersley Gorge. Yes, it's Hamersley Gorge. So, one of the things that struck me when I was taking this picture, it's almost comes from the prehistoric age. You almost have this feeling of dinosaurs. It's incredible detail. This section of rock was jumping forward, but in this image it just seems to get lost in the background. So how can I pull that image forward? Can you large that up for me? I'm lost on these Macs. So this structure here was about 10, 15 meters from the background, right? So, I wanna take that out, but, at the same time, I'm looking at this direction. So let's take a different approach. Let's do what you suggested last time. When you work at home and you want to work quickly, so if you do travel, you're on your road trips and you're doing your landscapes and collecting a body of work for fine art, it's really important, whether you're using Lightroom or Capture One or Photoshop, that you set your system up for you, so that you're not worried about where tools are. And you'll notice in here you got a quick tab. We can actually put the tools in that we like. So people talk about workflow. Everybody goes looking for workflow. Well, to me, what comes before workflow, Peter, is thought flow. How do you think? And everybody thinks differently. Get the tools to work for you. So we learn a lot about the way that different instructors will teach Photoshop, Capture One, Lightroom, et cetera, and they'll follow a process. The manufacturers give us guides. It's a great place to start. But sooner or later you'll find out what is your star? Some people use curves a lot and rarely levels, others use levels, rarely curves. Some people like clarity, some people don't, et cetera. Find the tools that you're going to use the most, set them up in a way that the software and the interface with the image is an extension of you in the same way that the camera, when you get it, you set up all the tools within the camera to be a complete extension so it's all about the thinking and you're not doing the mechanics. I'll look at this. Let's just quickly look at that. How would we fix that? Well, this is all about grittiness, drama, it's kind of got this masculinity about it, so all of those sort of things translate, thank you, translate, to me, to contrast, for instance. And let's get the Exposure One, so let's say, okay, it brightened it up. Again, some of you might been noticing I'm following a very similar pattern. I've looked at the exposure, I've said, "Where does the computer tell me it should be?" I'm now going to add some contrast and now I'm gonna bring my exposure back just a little, and I've ended up, maybe a quarter of a stop over. Peter? You had a question. No, I'm just looking. I'm just interested in how you're going to separate that rock in the foreground from the background. I know that you can separate something and contrast brings things forward, and creates contrast, or structure, mid-tone contrast, I also know that saturation will bring it forward. The red's a little bit stronger than the green, but I can see the green, so what I might do is I might go into my color editor, and I know that the green is predominately in this front area, it's a greeney yellow, so let's just sort of expand that out away from the reds. I don't wanna affect these reds. But I don't mind these foreground greens coming up, because I would like that area in front to come forward. In fact, I've got an idea. This is the way my brain works. I'm gonna add a layer in, and with that layer, I'm going to grab a gradient mask, I'm gonna bring it from here and follow the perspective of that line. In fact, that wasn't enough. Let's go a little bit form here. Bring it forward like about there. Now, what I'd like to do, is just punch up the contrast in the foreground because it will bring it forward, right? So suddenly it feels like it's underneath my feet. Yeah, it does. Okay? Now I'm gonna get back to my background, go back to this color editor, I have that selected, and what happens if I push the saturation on that greens? Is it gotta be the yellow in there. Let's pull that out and now it's just the greens, but now I've got this over here. Beautiful thing about that is, I go back into my adjustments, I grab a raise mask, and maybe, No, you're on the background layer, so. So we would take that out. But suddenly we're bringing forward that area here. You could have done that adjustment on the tone layer, and that would allow you to control the green there. The thing about working with images, whether you're try to do them quickly or go back into more refined slowed down process, say, in Photoshop where you're just doing small bits of the image, is you need to have a feeling for what it is you're trying to achieve. For me, this feels like Jaws. That's what it feels like. I'm looking at it, and I'm thinking, it's like, I want that to really jump over the top of you, like it's coming at you like a scary monster. So I've got another layer here, and I've just gotta get a curve, and I'm just going to pull that up, oh, we gotta paint that in first, Pete, you didn't tell me that. So let's grab this and we paint, let's get the bigger brush, feather it, make it a bit bigger, and just in here I just would like that to come forward. So I'm doing a fairly quick brush right here. Again, purpose of this is, I'm on the road, I'm traveling, I want quick edits to see how often when you look at our posts on social media, I think I call yours Preliminary Edit, you do that before you go to bed at night. You sit down, you get through quicker than me, I don't know how you do it, but I'll sit there and I'll download my files, I'll back them up, and I just want to push a few out. I just want to have a look at them. And then when I've seen I think, "Eh, let's put them out there, get some feedback." So I've created a brush on there. Come into here, if I grab that curve, bring it up I'm now lightening it, Okay, a little bit of contrast-curve to it. Now it's separating from the background, okay? Let's add a little bit of saturation to that. That's pulling it forward. And because I've increased the saturation on that section, if I now go back to my background,, I could almost reduce the saturation. I was gonna suggest that. Isn't that strange that we're thinking the same way. That's weird. Worries me. That is really weird. It really worries me. The fact that I'm agreeing with Tony, aw gee. So I suppose what we're saying is, you don't need a lot of steps to make changes. And all I've really worked with is exposure, contrast, brightness, saturation. We've done it with layers, we've done it globally, et cetera. If you understand the effect that contrast has on the viewer's eye, increase the contrast, it comes forward. Decrease the contrast, it disappears to the back. If you understand the effect of saturation, pull the saturation up, it jumps at the person. Reduce the saturation, it goes off into the background. Sharpness comes forward. Reduce sharpness, it often goes back. So you have the tools to tell the viewer where you'd like them to see. And we've really scratched the surface, if that. I mean, we came along with about 30 photos prepared each, just in case we run out of time to show you. What I think we've succeeded in this section is showing you how the thought process interacts with the mechanical process of editing g photograph using Lightroom and or Capture One. Any questions, Kenna? Yeah. I was wondering whether you know, you decide up front, whether need to go to Photoshop to make the changes you want, or whether it's something where you see how far you can get, and then when you run out of headroom, then you go? You switch over? Yeah, I suppose, from where I've come from, I always, I think both of us, always expect to be working in Photoshop at the end. And what we've discovered, I suppose, is that, when talking to a lot of people who are interested in photography, a lot of people don't necessarily have the skillsets to go into Photoshop and don't really want to learn Photoshop. What we've also seen is both Lightroom and Capture One have really upped the number of features that they've got in role processing. So when I was teaching, say, 10 years ago, there was a workflow where you do as little as possible in the role process, so just get a flat file out and take it into Photoshop. Now that's not the case. Now I will do an awful lot in Capture One before I take it into Photoshop. And also, because Photoshop and Capture One deal with color and contrast differently, I'll often round-trip back into Capture One just to make some color adjustments, and then take it back into Photoshop. For people who know that they're gonna go into Photoshop and do most of it, then I'm processing in Lightroom or Capture One, a reasonably flat file. You can always add contrast and add saturation et cetera within Photoshop, but it's sometimes harder to take it away. And one of the questions we had earlier concerning noise, I can think of that, too, is that I'll probably try and get rid of as much noise as I could in the role process and before I go into Photoshop, as well. Noise is not something that I deal with very much, because the files that I have I've made myself blind to the noise I don't know. So I guess the takeaway from this segment for me, I hope that you're gonna take away, is that you can do everything, and at the end of the day, the recent workshop that we've just come back on, my plan now is to do everything on 50 images all within Capture One so I can output them for a book, which we're gonna talk about doing books and portfolios later on so I don't have to go into Photoshop. 'Cause Photoshop takes me more time. So I have to be happy with a 90% result in Capture One or Lightroom, and if I'm happy with, 'cause that extra 10% takes me an extra 50 days, because you're fine-tuning it. You could spend hours and hours, and, again, in the last segment that we do we'll talk about portfolios, and I'll show you how we make prints and think about and work with them. Does that answer it for you? Just working on a picture while we're talking about it. So those at home are listening to you talk about one thing, and I've just picked that up and just popped it up. The last thing I'd probably do with that is, having stood there, having seen this, I know that this red rock here is absolutely, in this light that we're looking at here, is absolutely vibrant. It just glows red. So I would probably come in and just do this to finish it off. Because I know that if somebody's been there, they're gonna say, "That rock is not red enough." I could have done it by just selecting that color very carefully. Do that. I can also, like in, just take out that there, and like that, and then grab the color editor, You like that color editor. I do because I know that the color I'm working with is just that color. And then I can pop that up a little bit, maybe change the hue like a little bit more orange, and voila. You know how I said I do a lot of one minute and two minute exposures? And then you have to wait for another one or two minutes while the dark noise, you know, it reads? When that happened, I was halfway through a one minute exposure and Tony's there going "click-click" and I go, "I gotta turn the camera around!" So I'm afraid, Tony, you beat me on that one. Really annoying. But, but, but, you know, I love that shot. One of the things, just to add a little footnote to that, there are photographers that I travel with that use stitching and focus stacking and you know, all these other techniques all the time, I don't focus stack very much. I do a little bit more now than I used to, because obviously with medium format you've got a lot of shallow depth of field. I don't stitch very much. I still prefer to have it in the one shot. I don't like that interim step of having to get it, but I've started doing a little bit more with my aerials. And I've realized that, as we're flying along, if I just hold the camera reasonably steady, click, click, click, I've decided I can get bigger, but you know, 100 megapixels plus five frames? I mean really, how big do you wanna go? I think it's about getting comfortable with your own style. So whether you're a Lightroom practitioner or a Capture One practitioner, whether you don't use Photoshop, simple steps with a clear idea of where you'd like to go, or, 'cause it's not always the case, simple steps with a clear idea of how you felt when you were there and what it was you're trying to share, I think it can just come out pretty good pretty quick.