Lessons

Lesson Info

Next Level Editing

we've got some additional tools, clarity, structure and curves and also brightness. Actually, we should talk about so before we get to Claritin structure, let's look at this. Hence a man and I'm gonna reset so we can see it as it came out of the camera And think about how brightness works as well. So once again, I'm gonna throw in a crop. Let's just do something squarish. Incidentally, if you wanna square crop with the crop tool enabled, right click and you'll always get, like the sub menu pop up for that tool so I can go in and say, Well, I want to square. And then as soon as I grab the end, it's snaps to square like so H on my keyboard to go back. So this guy exposures pretty good at the box. We can see her might brighten ever so slightly and say, Hey for auto. Not much happens in the levels, too, but his face is kind of a little bit, sort of maybe too dark for for my liking. If I hover the mouse over his skin tone, or if I move the mouse around the image, you'll see this little oran...

ge line dance around in the levels tool, so if I go to a shadow, you see it drops right over to the shadow side. If I goto a highlight, you can see it dancing around here, so this gives you a good indication of where a tone sits in an image. So I feel his skin is maybe just a little bit too dark. And if I put the curse on his cheek, that's pretty much sitting right on a midtown. And the brightness tool or the brightness slider, I should say, does a great job of lifting the mid tones. But it has less interaction with the highlights. So if you see where the end of the hissed a gram is, it's sitting down here. If I bring up the brightness, see this middle part of history. Graham starts to slide across, so the mid tones of getting brighter but not a great deal happens to the tail into the history. Graham like So. So if we move this across, you see his face is brightening up, but not so much is happening on the right hand side. So brightness is really lifting those mid tones Now, after a brightness adjustment like this, I might be tempted to go back to levels and hit auto because it moves it just a little bit. But it's much, much less than exposure. So if I grab exposure and we do something more dramatic, then you see these peaks are also moving across as well. But with brightness, it's just slightly less. It just gives you a little bit more can control. So if you're happy with how the levels look and the exposure looks, but it's just a bit dingy in the middle, then brightness is is a great way to lift that up. Lost one saturation. I'm sure you'll understand what that means, but if we have the need to make a color more saturated or less saturated, then we can do so with the saturation slider. It does have some intelligence built in so colors that arm or saturated will actually get less treatment than those which are not saturated. So if we have something like this, let's say all food plate, something like the tomatoes here, they're already pretty well saturated. So when I lift saturation, much less happens to those. So it has, like a constraint built in, so you might be used to other tools or other raw converters where it's called vibrant or vibrancy. That's pretty much what this is in capture one. So saturation has quite a lot of intelligent control in it. If we compare this to, let's say, if I picked a little sneak preview off the color editor, if I picked Red in the Colorado Eater and played with saturation, then it goes off the charts because there's no control, if you like, or no sort of safety limit on the saturation slide in the color editor, which will look at later. That's you know all the power is on you in that respect. But in the exposure toe, let's go back to this one. There is this in Bill intelligence so that it tries to ramp down the saturation on over already saturated things like his running jacket and skin tones as well. Okay, so moving on Teoh clarity and so on, so forth, some of my favorite at it. So let's return back to this image, which we've already started working on and look at what clarity conducive for us. So clarity is very much a kind of contrast adjustment, but again, it has some intelligence built into it, and it tends to work a lot better than a pure contrast adjustment itself. And again, I'm talking about the history Graham a lot. But this is a really easy way to visualize how adjustments work, so clarity. Let's just move it up So it sits next to this clarity is a contrast adjustment that only affects the mid tones. So in this case, if we wanted to give us, um, pop or contrast this image, you might be tempted to walk up the contrast. And if we do that and we go to aggressive very quickly, we start to lose detail in our shadows on the highlights. Get too bright and it's just just kind of ugly now. It's not nice to look at, but what the clarity does is to do that contrast adjustment. But it leaves the shadows alone, and it leaves the highlights alone. So I shadows don't block up. But we get this really nice pop and dynamic effect on. We can push it quite hard as well. So if we bring up clarity on this image, so let's let's really push it to a higher value. We haven't lost our shadow detail. And if we click on the clarity name to see before and after, you can see what it's doing. A swell. So just giving us that nice pop in the mid tone. Almost any image that's great with a bit of clarity, sort of developed in there as well. It's a really great adjustment, and don't be afraid to push it into the high numbers. You'll very quickly see if it's not working because it just tends toe look ugly. Eso If we pushed clarity in this respect, it works really nicely. And again if we look at the history. Graham, if we push contrast up, you see how it's like parting the Waves is pushing the shadows in the highlights by the side. So it's making all the shadows darker and all the highlights brighter and very quickly. That's when it starts to look ugly. If we watch what happens with clarity much more subtle, so we're not seeing the shadows and highlights move out towards the end of the history. So don't be afraid. Now. There are some different methods of clarity when you're just starting to learn capture one I would strongly recommend you don't touch anything, and you just dickweed natural gives you the best results. Best colors on DSO on. You might want to experiment with Punch, which pretty much does the same thing as natural, but it bumps up the saturation a bit as well. It actually works quite nicely on this image, So if we push it a bit harder, if we go to natural, let's look at the numbers. And then if we go to punch, GS gives it a slight little nudge on the saturation spectrum as well. But for 99% of the time, natural works super well. So clarity versus contrast really important. That that you see them was two very, very different adjustments doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a touch contrast, but you should probably just use it with, you know, slightly more finesse if you like. Okay, so, um as well as having the ability to use contrast and clarity. But you also have the ability to use curves as well, and curves are a bit more advanced. It's probably out of the scope for a quick start, but if we look at what a curve does in relation to what the contrast slider does. You can see that well, maybe I don't actually need to use curves. The slider actually does a pretty good job. Often, when we talk about control sliders, you're told, Don't touch the contrast slider. It's really aggressive. It doesn't do a great job as you're going to be an expert, You should learn to use curves now. There is some argument to that, but there's also no reason why you shouldn't be ableto just be satisfied we use in the contract slider. So let's do a little demo on. We do it on a few different image images, So let's take this one, and we're going to do, um, a cloning again for a new variant. It doesn't matter because it's reset, so we're gonna make four examples, and we're going to bring them all up next to each other and I'll hide my browser. So we've got a bit more space. And let's hide the viewer labels view, uh, labels. So we've got even more space and we do a little test. So top left, we're gonna leave zero. So we're not going to touch this one. This is our if you like, compare one that we can look everything that we can compare all the others too. This one over here, we're going to use the contrast slider, and we're gonna put in relatively aggressive 25 points or something like that. Eso you can see if we double click on this one, we've got an increase in contrast. So let's say before and after. So a nice, healthy dose of contrast this one on the bottom left, we're going to use a curve. Now we're running out of room a little bit on the resolution. We're running. So let's close a few tools and we're going to draw an S curve, which is a very standard way. Teoh Just increase contrast. So down here in the shadows, we're going to say, Make the shadows darker and up here in the highlights were going to say Bright knows I'm going to try and match it. So it's roughly similar to what we did with the slider. So let's make this slider a bit more aggressive on this one. Okay? And now this one in the bottom, right. We're also going to do a curve, but we're going to use loomer curve, which is short for luminosity. So when we play with the Loomer curve, all it effects is contrast, so color is unaffected on saturation also color, but is also unaffected. So if we do a similar thing, let's darken or shadows and let's bring up or highlights and this is on the loom. A curve. You see, we've switched tabs from RGB two Loomer. So what we ended up with, So let's zoom in on a handy way to zoom in everything up here. We've got our zoom slider. If you hold your shift key down and click on the plus, that will take everything to the same zoom level and equally, if I pan and hold down shift, it'll pan everything at the same time. So where's our dude gone? Zoom out of this one. So he's over there and another little handy tip where you have the pan tool up. If you right click, you get a mini navigator so you can easily right click on, then find the same spot. So when the pan cursed at all is up, right click for a 1,000,000 navigator like so. So let's look at these roughly the same Okay, so this woman's are zero and this one was are 29. Let's just go to 30 points of contrast and bottom left was Are RGB. Let's look a bit more jacket on bottom. Right? Was our loom occurred so straight away we can see some color differences. If we look at the RGB curve, we can see that the color and the saturation of his jogging top has gone up quite a bit. Because when we play with an RGB curve, we can't help but to affect saturation. If we look at the loom, a curve, this one here, even if I really push it, see the color stays completely stable. It's actually very similar in color to the 1st 1 the original like So Now if we look at this one, this was done with our slider. Where does it sit? It actually sits really nicely in between the two. So the contrast slider is a really good balance between RGB curve on a loom, a cough. So when you first start using Loomer curbs, you might find Well, this looks a bit weird because when contrast goes up, we kind of expect saturation to go up a swell. So if you think of a super gray Seattle daylight today, everything the color looks a bit flattened, a bit un interesting and so on. If we go back to a few days ago, when the sun was shining, everything is punching colorful great blue skies. Everyone's happy and so on, so your brain is kind of tuned to that. High contrast. Great colors, low contrast flat colors. So when you start playing around with the loom, occur if you might find that this looks really strange because I'm expecting or my brain is expecting the colors to go up a swell. But what it does give you is tons of control, because now I can adjust my curve, and I can also play with saturation to get it to the level that I expect with RGB curve, you cannot help that it will change the colors. So now you're sort of fighting with adjustments against each other, thinking that's a bit too saturated. So I need to maybe just tone it down a little bit. So rather than that approach of tryingto take something away from another adjustment, you can add luminosity, curves and saturation together to give you the best of both worlds or, if you want to keep it really simple just to use the contrast slider because it gives a great result. So if we look at a similar example, let's hide my viewer, uh, thes handsome people here, loads of color. It's gonna hit you set. So that's as it came out of the camera. So let's do another variant, another variant. Another variant, because it's also good to see how skin tone reacts as well. So let's shift select. So we get four on screen. Come on, be told my browser. Same thing again. Top left. Zero top, right? Let's throw in 30 or points. Maybe not that much, but heavy handed for this image. So let's give it 18 or so Bottom left. Let's chuck in RGB curve to some extent on bottom, right? Let's throw in the luminosity curve. Well, a bit too much shift click again on the whips helps if you actually get it. Let's do that again. She have click again. Shift to move around. So was Chappy here? Quick. So So Top left. Zero top Right contrast, Slider. A few points bottom left RGB and you can see their skin toners dramatically changed a fair bit now, shifting too much red and orange and then bottom right. That was our luminosity curve, and you see, it's pretty much identical to the one with zero, but just more contrast. So if you work with people portrait and someone, often the Louima curve is you know the great way to do it if you want to separate out contrast from color and gives you the ultimate control. But once again, as I said, the contrast slider really does a nice job. A friend of mine who's ah, who's a retouching, obviously very experienced with using curves much more experience than me said he was really astounded by the contrast slider because it was really hard for him to match what it was doing. Curve Wise said. It's a really beautiful compromise between pure RGB and pure luminosity. Okay, so, uh, let's bring back the browser and one last thing that we need to look at, which it's kind of in a slightly funny place because which one to use? Let's grab this image on find clarity, which is right here. 01 last thing that should mention when it comes to customizing your workspace. If you had more room on your interface, were maxed out on a single screen. But there's no reason why you can't have two of the same tool in the same tool time. So if you want to have an RGB curve and AlumAl curve up at the same time, then we can simply right click and say, Add to for curves and then we'll end up with to curve tools. And then one can be RGB and one could be Loomer. So there's no reason why you can't sit the same two tools in our organizational organization like that. Okay, good thing is, I saved my workspace. I'm gonna reset Teoh David's workspace and then we're back. Okay, so let's returned to the last Clarity slider, which is structure now. It's maybe in a slightly strange place because it's kind of a definition almost like a sharpening tool. So if I double click and take us to 100% what structure does is really improve on edge definition and fine details. But you have to be a little bit careful. You can push it too hard as it starts to get ugly But if I raise the structure on this image, then you can see all that metal and rust pop out much brighter. So it's really good for, you know, animal for this kind of thing. Fine detail, architectural details, landscape details and so on. It can really bring out some fantastic stuff. So if we go to ah landscape quickly, something like this, and then we throw in some structure, it will just enhance all of that detail in a really, really nice way. Obviously, if we go too far, it just starts to look ugly and over shop. And so it's one of those adjustments that you have to use with a little bit of care. But it can really bring out a nice snap to your images. Okay, lets go back Teoh where we were. So structure is great. Just maybe used it with a little bit of caution. Unlike clarity, which we can push in a much broader sense