Dodging and Burning in Capture One
Lesson 41 from: Get The Most Out of Your Photos with Capture One Pro 10David Grover
Dodging and Burning in Capture One
Lesson 41 from: Get The Most Out of Your Photos with Capture One Pro 10David Grover
Lesson Info
41. Dodging and Burning in Capture One
Lessons
Introduction
08:11 2What's Possible with Capture One: Quick Edit
06:50 3Capture One Versions: Installation Basics
02:19 4Interface Introduction and Customization
27:16 5The Power of Keyboard Shortcuts
09:27 6Image Management Basics
10:38 7Organization Best Practices
09:53 8Building your First Catalog
19:47Image File Management Automation
06:42 10Advanced Catalog Organization
17:41 11How to Add Meta Data
12:42 12Searching and Filtering Techniques
11:31 13Further Catalog Strategies
07:09 14Basic Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques
15:31 15Advanced Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques
20:54 16Basic Composing Techniques: Cropping, Rotation, Straightening
09:29 17How to Correct for Perspective
12:35 18Basic Tool Behavior
11:04 19Tool Basics Part 1
22:44 20Tool Basics Part 2
06:34 21Converting to Black and White and Adding Grain
10:13 22How to Apply Image Adjustments Globally
08:02 23Sharpening and Noise Reduction
09:58 24How to Create and Save Styles and Presets
07:40 25Why Should You Shoot Tethered?
02:26 26How to Set-Up Your Tethered Hardware
02:15 27How To Set Up A Tethered Photoshoot Project
11:07 28Basic Session Workflow Organizing And Making Selects
21:45 29Basic Session Workflow Exporting
05:44 30Advanced Session Workflow
15:00 31Creating Selections With Smart Albums
06:20 32Advanced Exporting
09:03 33Saving Session Templates
03:14 34Collaborating On Set With Capture Pilot
17:45 35Using The Color Editor Basic Color Adjustment
15:26 36Skin Tone Adjustments
09:30 37Color Grading Using The Color Balance Tool
12:54 38Image Processing Demo Perfecting Color
08:11 39Create Masks for Local Adjustments using Brushes & Gradients
12:31 40Advanced Local Adjustments using Masks
17:15 41Dodging and Burning in Capture One
11:30 42Creating Local Adjustments with the Color Editor
07:15 43How to Use Local Adjustment Masks for Color Editing
03:43 44How to Remove Objects in your Image
09:07 45Image Processing Demo: Local Adjustments
05:57 46Exporting with File>Export
08:07 47Export Strategies and Proofing Previews with Process Recipes
11:49 48How to Export for Social Media
05:11 49More Clever Tricks with Capture One Pro 10
05:57 50Final Q&A
13:11Lesson Info
Dodging and Burning in Capture One
So let's grab an image here. And when we say dodging and burning, we basically mean selectively lightening parts of the image and also selectively darkening parts of the image. And it's a good way to you know equalize exposure or play with the drama of the image and so on. So once again, let's do a quick edit of this one. So let's straighten up our horizon like so, get our base adjustments in. So let's brighten the exposure a bit. like so maybe a little bit of clarity. But you can see this is relatively harsh sunlight and if we zoom into the face a bit, it's kind of sitting in the shadows slightly. And on his shirt here, that's kind of picking up whatever light source, the sunlight, or artificial lighting and it's just kind of getting a bit hot here. So what we can hope to do is just use kind of some dodging and burning just to kind of balance the exposure a bit better. So my preferred technique, and there's no, again, right or wrong way to do this, but my preferred technique is to mak...
e a layer and let's call this lighten, first of all. The reason why I use the terms lighten and darken is 'cause I forget it's dodge, (chuckles) this, or is burn that, or whatever, because when we dodge and burn in the darkroom, we were printing negatives and so on. so, to save my own confusion, lighten and darken. Then I know exactly what's going on. So I'll say lighten and before we kind of do this in the reverse way this time. Before drawing a mask, we can actually go to exposure and just bring this up a little bit, so one and a half stops, or something like that. So now when I take a brush, this gives me, if you like now an exposure change brush. But, generally here we need to start thinking about using a flow. Because lets say I want to just lighten this gentleman's face a little bit, if I start brushing now, kinda looks really sort of bit fake and obvious. It's not very natural. So commands it to fix that. What I want to do is drop the flow down, so that I have a nice slow controlled build up of the mask. I'm not going all the way to my maximum straight away. I just want to gradually build it up. If I need to I can increase opacity as we go if we need to have a bit more. So if I turn down flow to nice low value, sort of around 10. Turn the opacity down and relatively soft brush, then we can just repeatedly go over, and just lighten a little bit like so. Now, the more I go back-and-forth, the more it's gonna build up. So on the right hand side if we need to give this a bit more work, we can do more brushes. If I've gone to far I can press e to get the erase brush back up, and then just correct what I've done before. So if I just brush over here, like so, now if we turn that layer on and off, you can see exactly what its done. If that's to much then just grab your exposure slider, and just dial it back a bit. So that's why don't be afraid to adjust that after the fact. And if we turn that on and off, then you see it's just lifted the face a little bit. But it's not obvious. If you saw this shot now, it's probably unlikely you'd think that there'd be any sort of local adjustment going on. Same applies for darken, make a new layer. Press darken, or type darken. Sorry. Go the opposite way with exposure, one and a half roughly. And then a nice low flow. A nice low opacity. Probably a slightly bigger brush, and then we can just bring down the tone on this a little bit for example. So if we turn that on and off ever so subtle, but just to make a difference. If you want to preview what all the local adjustments are doing, then you can option click the reset button. So we can see before and after like so. So the crucial thing with that dodge and burn is just to use that nice low flow, nice low opacity just to get that more control. If you don't want to use exposure you can also experiment with luma curve just by raising. So if you, we're on the layer where his shirt is. So rather than using exposure you could always just do a slight bump in the curve like so. If you would just want to lift shadows, you could do a curve that just lifted shadows, and brush that on, and so on. So lots of different options with the tools. So lets have a look at another one. So lets press command r to reset. So that's how it came out of camera. I mean really, the subject here is the fantastic selfie stick of course. Before we go further of course, lets just check that. Everything is good, so change the white balance a little. Probably raise the exposure slightly. Add a bit more clarity. But we sort of got a hot spot in the middle, and the phone screen is a bit too dark. So similar process as before. Make a new layer, lets do darken first of all. Grab your exposure. One little trick you can do, as we kind of shooting blind here by just adjusting it exposure. If you say invert mask then that will basically put a mask over the whole image. And now you can adjust that and think, well, where do I want to get my local adjustment to be? Probably you know somewhere around there if I'm looking in the center. So now I know what that local adjustment is doing, but now I can go back and invert again. Take my brush, less low flow, bit lower opacity, probably a bit bigger. And then we can just kind of brush that in. If it's not having a quick enough change, then just up the opacity a bit. And then try again once more like so. So we can just kill any sort of hot spot like so. Preview the layer just turn it on and off. So lets cool down the brighter areas. And now if we want to lighten that screen, make a new layer, call that lighten. Take a brush, probably going to have to zoom in a bit here. Open up exposure. Smaller brush by right clicking. And then we can just brighten up in here like so. Bring up the opacity if I need to. And probably if we take white balance, we could just warm that up a bit, 'cause the color temperature is not quite right for everything else. So now if we do an option click on the reset, we can see before and after. So just changing the balance of a shot to something that you know looks better to the eye is such ancient technique. You know comes from the darkroom. No reason why we can't do this in the digital darkroom as well. Can you show us again how you toggle the red mask? Yeah, sure. That's just m on the keyboard like so. So whatever layer we're on, if we press m, we can see the mask. And good to point out in the preferences, where is it? Appearance, if you want you can change the mask color to whatever color you like. So if you don't like our default mask color, just drag it to any of the colors in the color wheel, and then you'll be able to see it pop up like so. It does also show with a certain opacity too, so you can change the opacity if you want it fully solid or not. At least if it's fully solid max opacity you can actually see the opacity by turning the mask on. 'Cause my darken mask here you can only just see 'cause it was brushed on gradually. Where as a full mask you'd be able to see much much clearer. So it's just down here Jim, always display mask, never display mask. So m just to toggle on and off. You can set it to only display when drawing. And that means the mask will show, whenever you put brush to screen, or brush to image. But I find it easier just to toggle on and off. Cool. Any others? Yeah, Anthony would like to know, if you change the opacity of a brush after using it on a layer, does it affect what you've already brushed, or only affect what you brush next? It will affect what you've already brushed. So if we just go back to this shot for example, and we take a brush, and we have like full flow, but lets say 50% opacity, and I make a brush. And then I brush here. See its darker in the middle. So it has affected that previous one. So if we make a cross you see it's darker there. So yes it does. And we've had this question actually in the chat room the last couple of days. Okay. Folks would like you, could you reiterate all the editing that you do in Capture One, is it destructive or non-destructive? Totally non-destructive. So, I'm always working on RAW files. You can edit JPEGs and TIFFS in Capture One if you wish, but you know you might as well get the full power of the raw processing. So Capture One is a read-only application that's really important to stress. All we're doing here, we're looking at the raw data, and all the adjustments that we are applying is held in the catalog data base, or in the sessions sub-folder as you saw in the earlier lesson. So it's totally non-destructive. So even to the point if I, you know darken an area, and then go against that and lighten an area. Now we're not destroying pixels. We've got all that raw data, it's so easy to manipulate. So it's totally non-destructive. We're not editing the RAW file. We have all that scope in the RAW file to do so. If you think of a finished TIFF, like an 8 bit TIFF, or a JPEG. It only has 255 levels if you like from black to white. So it's very limited what you can do. You know a RAW file, a 16 bit RAW file can have up to 64,000 levels from black to white. So we have so much more scope for these kind of edits, so you're really not destroying pixels. Great, and one last question Mm-hmm before we move on. What is the effect of changing the order of the layers? Nothing, really. Great. It doesn't really make any difference. So there's masks going on between em. So if we did plus minus one, stop here, and plus one stop here. The result would be zero and sort of vice versa. So it doesn't matter what order the layers in.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Stef
This is a good overview of Capture One 10. The course is well structured and presented logically and progressively with clear and concise examples. The software is intricate and the amount of details presented will benefit from a second or third viewing, along with sufficient practice. David is an excellent teacher, slow enough to follow, fast enough to keep the listener's interest. I would agree with a previous reviewer that the shooting session was uninspired but the tethered demo was thoroughly useful nevertheless for someone to become an assistant, for instance. If you have ever used LR in this role, you will appreciate the power and stability of C1 for tethering. With regards to the comment about this class being non-creative; before you can run you have to walk and this course is all about understanding how to operate the software not about what you eventually want to do with it. Capture One is well designed, speedy and its homogeneous interface makes it easy to get to a result once you have a good knowledge of its layout and principles, compared for example with LR which is all over the place with modes, inconsistent and slow operations. Likewise, the C1 color editor is miles ahead of LR color functions, in simplicity and overall efficiency. This class is about mechanics for a reason; creativity is a parallel stream. It would have been beneficial to have a module highlighting major differences with LR for people migrating to Capture One as the word on the street is that C1 is hard. I would suggest to listen in to convince yourself of the contrary. All in all, I recommend this class; it is time well invested if you want to become more comfortable with Capture One and discover its potential.
Maria Baptiste
I recently purchased Capture One because I needed a RAW converter that was more dependable and also more reliable when it came to shooting tethered. I also noticed that many of the photogs I follow really enjoy using Capture One and rave about its efficiency. After looking at a few YouTube videos I decided that I needed something more thorough and of course CreativeLive delivered. This is an excellent course and David Grover is a superb instructor. His in depth and thorough knowledge of the software is obvious but his manner of speaking and the simplicity with which he provides directions makes it easy to learn Capture One and lets you appreciate a sophisticated and expertly engineered software. If you're working with Capture One 11, layers is a little different than in version 10 but otherwise everything David discusses is the same. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and will continue to refer back to sections as needed. Thank you Creative Live and David Grover!!
user-b05602
The course is excellent and David does a nice job. However, I'm an advanced armature, not a professional. I had my own personal color darkroom, then Photoshop/Bridge, and NIK which I still use occasionally. My intention is to rely on Capture One which I purchased about 90 days ago. I would have appreciated a SIMPLE, here is how you load (Import) an image, "save" or "save as" and how to simply export an image (Variant). Yes those items are covered but, David has a tendency to casually and very quickly jump from Tool Tabs or Cursor Tools or the Tool Bar and then magically it's done and he has moved on. How did he do it. Based on David's training, I love the results I get with Capture One Pro. Yes, I know this is not Photoshop - it's much better. I never used Lightroom. I added variant to my vocabulary and I understand all the tools. I still struggle with the simple import, save, save as, and export of a image I worked on and cropped, then trying to consistently open that image as I see it in Capture One Pro. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I don't know why. I will continue to re-review the course materials and I will figure it out. I know there is something simple I missed as David navigated the various tools and pull downs. I recommend this class but it does little for the armature. Capture One Pro is second nature to him and he knows all the ins and outs. I would help me a lot if he just add a 5 minute intro, importing an image from a folder, just crop it, then export the variant and open it in Photoshop.
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