Lessons

Lesson Info

Using The Color Editor Basic Color Adjustment

We're gonna spend most of our time in this tool tab. So this one here there's kind of three circles which is the color tool tab funnily enough. So this is where we find all the tools we can use to manipulate color in Capture One. So what we do is we start off with the color editor, and what the color editor is really all about is taking a color and just changing the appearance of it slightly. So that can be any color in your image, just to kick the hue a little bit, change the saturation and so on and so forth. The color editor is divided into these three tabs. So we have basic, advanced, and skin tone. So a specific tab just for editing skin tone which is enormously powerful for doing quick edits evening up skin tones, just manipulating the color in slight ways. Now the basic tool tab just really has some basic color tones which you can sort of pick like so and then use the sliders to manipulate. But really to get the best effect you kind of want to fast track straight to advanced, an...

d the fact that it's called advanced really shouldn't worry you because it's actually very simple to use. More powerful than the basic tool tab. The reason why we have the basic tool tab there if you're wondering is that in Capture One Express for Sony, if you remember that one of the versions of Capture One which is free for Sony cameras is only the basic tool tab. I spoke about some differentiations between those versions of Capture One and that is one of them. So let's go straight to advanced because if you have the option to go to advanced it's actually way more powerful and you're gonna get a better result. So when you first look at the color editor it looks a bit strange because everything is grayed out, you can't adjust anything, and the way if you like the theory behind the color editor is that you first define the color that you want to edit and then you make the edits on that color. So the first step of the process is define that color range. So in the bottom right hand corner of the tool is the color picker, and then we can select this and we can go onto our image and choose the color that we want to edit. Now I've chosen this particular image not for its amazing photographic result or whatever, just it has a lot of similar tones that all set next to each other, so it's quite a challenge just to define one particular color tone without affecting all the others and this is really the strength of the color editor. So let's pick here. Oh, I did two picks, let's take one away. And straight away Capture One gives you a suggestion of the color range that you want to edit. Now if I zoom in, the spot in the middle, that was the exact color that I picked, and then the boundary box around that point is the color range that we are going to adjust if we start manipulating the sliders. Now it's very difficult of course to visualize exactly what the at color range is. If I'm looking at this range I can't really correlate that to how it's going to affect my image. I can start dragging sliders around and sort of seeing what happens as such. But fortunately we've added a very simple checkbox down at the bottom which says, "View selected color range." So if we turn that on, everything will dip to monochrome which is not part of that selection. So now we get a very clear idea. Obviously the center of the circle there went straight to monochrome and also the center here too because that's way out of that range. But what if I specifically want to just adjust that outer ring? Then I need to do some work on adjusting the color range, because this really is only a suggestion. You will find on your own screens at home and everything that a good plan for the color editor is to actually drag it out and you can actually enlarge it somewhat which helps to adjust your color range a bit better because it just makes the tool physically larger and scales up, especially if we're on a high resolution monitor it gets very difficult to adjust that range if the tool is quite small. So now with each of those boundary lines you'll see when I hover each of the boundary lines it changes to the up down arrow so I can now change that. Now with View Select Color Range still on, if I start to squeeze down the range like so, as I get closer to the pick color, very subtly a few more things start to dip to monochrome, but it's still not good enough if I just wanted to do that outer ring. So you see this specific boundary, it has this kind of hazy motion around the outside of it. That's the amount of roll off we have into the nearby colors. And that relates to the first slider, is smoothness. So with the default smoothness we have this kind of nice roll-off into the neighboring colors which generally works okay. But if we need to do very specific selections like this we can bring that smoothness down, down, down, down, down, down, and then gradually you'll see that our selection gets extremely targeted to my picked color. Sometimes you'll probably find that as soon as you pick the color you don't have to adjust smoothness, the range will be fine, but if you need to do a really specific selection like this which has very close neighboring tones then it does make sense to just try and manipulate that range a bit better. Now you can see we've got a perfect selection of that outer circle. Without having to do any masking, color toning or anything like that. So now we're ready to turn off View Selected Color Range, we're happy with that. And then we've got the remaining three sliders which are very simple, very self explanatory, so we've got hue rotation, saturation, and lightness. So dragging the hue rotation will just walk that color around the circle, but it's very subtle. It's not like a bit sea change going from a yellow all the way to the purple. It's just a little tweak if you need to give that color a nudge. Saturation you can guess, if we drop saturation down it will cause desaturate. If we bring it up the other way it will increase saturation. Unlike the saturation slider in the exposure tool which we looked at in an earlier lesson, these is no sort of limitation to the saturation slider. So if the color tone is already very well saturated, then of course it's gonna look quite wild as you go up to the end of the scale. And then finally you've got the lightness of the color edit, so we can make the color brighter or we can make the color darker. Now that's just one pick. So the color editor in the advanced tab gives you up to 30 different picks that you can make. So if I want to then grab the picker once more, let's go here and click again. You see that gives me a suggested range, we can probably guess if I turn View Selected Color Range, let's just pop that out the way. Very easy to see exactly what color we're gonna manipulate, there's no nearby tones to that, I really don't have to bother playing with the range or playing with the smoothness, or anything like that. I can just go straight ahead and just start playing with the various different sliders to manipulate like so. So don't think of the color editor as maybe just a tool that changes one color from something else. It's to change the appearance of the color, and that could be just making colors a little bit lighter or a little bit darker. If you've got a landscape scene and there's some guy in the background with a bright blue tee shirt which it kind of totally taking the focus away from the shot. Select, knock the saturation out. It makes a big difference. I was just wondering actually, is there a way to also make a color selection through a hex code? Um no, but that's now a bad idea actually. So the standard light hex codes that you see in Photo Shop and so on. Just be able to isolate and then move from there if you know the actual hex code. No, but that's not a bad idea actually. You can see the IGB codes down at the bottom, the IGB numbers and this gives you a before and after representation. So before and after on the numbers and also on the hue, saturation and density as well. But no, that's a great idea. And then we did ask someone from the chatrooms, potentially another no as well. Asking about is it possible to dial in a specific pantone color? No. Sorry about that. Good suggestion, but that could be something nice for the future. Thank you. Okay. So up to 30 different picks. And again let me just kind of make a drastic change to sort of this one. 30 different picks we can have. We can tap the checkboxes on and off so you can see the difference of your edits like so. So just a preview. If you need to remove an edit then you can click minus and that will take that one away. Or plus will actually give you a new edit as well. So various different things you can do with that advanced color editor. Down the bottom there's a couple of quick shortcuts too. So you see here two icons. So let's say again let's just remove that one. Let's take my picker and click here once more. If you want to very quickly capture everything in that saturation range of your picked color. So just to reiterate the spot in the center, that's the picked color., the boundaries, the range that we're gonna adjust. Towards the edge of the circle is more saturated version of that pick if you like. Towards the center is the less saturated version of that color. If you want to span the entire saturation range of that picked color you can just click here, sorry here, and then it will just quickly expand out that range so we know we've captured everything of course. The next one is actually an inverse, which is really good if you think that. I want to protect a color in the image but I want to manipulate everything else. So in this case if I was to then invert, we'd get the opposite. And if I changed saturation you'll see everything gets affected except for my picked colors as such. So that's again a really good way of just protecting one color and affecting everything else. So its technical term is called invert slice. You can see the help. And this one, Span Full Saturation Range, like so. So if we look at just another example so you really get the idea again once more. So let's grab this one. Similar thing again, tricky because there's lots of neighboring tones. If we take the color picker and click over here. Turn on View Selected Color Range. See it's not bad but we're just picking up a little bit on the desk, some of the warm tone there. So again if you make your color editor that bit bigger, remember Command T to hide those tools. And then squeeze down that range closer to the picked color you can see just a couple of tweaks like that we're almost there. We're never gonna be able to isolate those of course because that's the same tone. But there's a trick we can do with local adjustments later on where you can specifically target one area and a color selection within that area, so there really is no limits to the possibilities. So again if we turned down smoothness, keep going, keep going, keep going. Then pretty much that's a really nice specific selection of just that color tone in the image itself. Sometimes you'll see if you go a bit too far what you might see, let's just get rid of that one. If we go too far on smoothness, if we go right down to zero, almost possible sometimes you can get a bit of a halo because there's no sort of roll off at all, it's just a dead stop as soon as you come out of that color range. So just be aware. Don't automatically slam smoothness to the lowest because it might not look quite right. So you really want to get it just on the cusp. So you see we've got some warm tone up here. So if we just bring that down, down, down, down, down, before you know it your perfect color section. Without really having to do too much work. We didn't have to do any masking and so on and so forth. So again once you're happy with your selection turn off View Selected Color Range and then you have the freedom of playing with the specific sliders for that like so. Any question on that? Jim? One of the questions, yes David, that we had is, is there a way to completely change one color like if you wanted to make that piece of chalk red? Is there ways to do that? There kind of is, yes. We're on this one here. So the hue rotation slider has a max limit of 30, so that's what it'll allow us to do. But if you pick, or I just deleted it (laughs). Wrong button. Let's do that again. Squeeze that down for example. If we repeatedly pick on the same place, so let's go to that one and then go again. Do another pick. Go again. Then eventually we can kind of walk that color around the circle as such. So in theory what we could have is like a hue rotation on speed adjustment where it'd give us a much bigger draw, but it's currently limited to 30 points, but it might make sense to open that up and give a much broader range of hue rotation. First step is try the color editor, see if you can do it with the range tools, but if by looking at an image straight away, if we just reset the color tool. If by looking a the image straight away you can see no matter how well I manipulate the color editor there's similar colors in the same gamma which I can't restrict but I don't want to edit them, then think local adjustment plus color edit. That's really powerful. Any others Jim? We're good. We're good. Okay, so don't be afraid of the advanced color editor. As I've said it looks sort of daunting because everything's grayed out when you first look at it, but begin, select color, restrict the range, make the edits, and then you're plane sailing really.