Lessons

Lesson Info

Full Shoot Edit in Capture One

What I wanna do next is go through the full process, start to finish, quickly on a set of images from a totally different shoot that was shot on location and kinda go through the full thought process there. So we won't be shooting anymore, we'll just be looking at images. So what I wanna do, we have a drive plugged in, I wanna pick something that's a little different. So I know earlier I showed some shots of the man outside the fireworks stand, we might go with that, let me look through these are. Alright, so those are just, actually, we're gonna go with the guy from the sausage shop because I talked about that image, but I didn't have the, the before and after, so again, we're gonna go in, you can see the capture folder here. It's under Stoysich, that's the name of the sausage shop. And here, we can kinda go through the full shoot, so with this particular shoot, I shot 158 images, they're in no particular order. Just to kind of go through the shoot 'cause this was kind of a fun one. T...

his was just strictly for fun, give you a little backstory here. In Omaha, there's two sausage shops, they're both the same name, but they're brothers, well they're actually cousins, they're dads were brothers, who and their grandpa started the initial sausage shop, their brothers got into some weird competition, named them the same, but slightly different, one of them is like Stoysich House of Sausage and one of them is like Tom's Stoysich, I don't know, but either way, it's kind of a fun backstory in these, these two shops are located just a couple miles from each other and they've been around for probably 70 years. So when you walk into the place, it is like a blast to the past, everything looks like it's straight out of and you'll kind of see, these are just test shots as I'm going through, very dark, but again, I know that there's all this detail there and I haven't added my light, so this is me trying to figure out which angle should I photograph this glass case from? As I start going through, you'll see, you know, we start setting up lights, figuring out how I'm gonna deal with this awful glare because it was unavoidable, figuring out white balance, figuring out balance of my lights to the background and this is all done while tethering, so I can see exactly what I'm dealing with. If you're trying to do this, on the back of your camera, especially with these type of, this type of situation, it is really hard to be able to visualize it and you don't know the potential of the shot as far as what's in the highlight or shadows. You could even look here at my menu over here, I've recovered a lot of highlights, we're at 4800 Kelvin, lot of shadow recovery, just things that are already done to this image to try and clean it up before we, let our man, our man Ken in here with all the meats and as you can see, so this is kind of working through the shoot, these are all the selects. Let me go down, these must be in order by, oh yeah, so what happen was, you can see, these are the ones that didn't get put on the card, these were all shot, you can see the file name, DBP that comes straight out of my camera. The ones that were shot, straight to tethering, were all through here. So here we are. We'll get to that first setup, so we're kind of working through that again, you can see I'm playing with color a little more greens, a little more reds, this is totally, I'll show you, we'll pick one of the final images. Something like this and you can see, that's what it looks like with almost nothing done, so we're gonna totally reset this image, I'm gonna copy these settings 'cause we can paste them in later and we're gonna, so this is what it looked like raw on my camera, so you can, again, this is how important it is when I'm shooting tethered. As I work through this image, I'm gonna rework it now live to kind of go through my mindset of what I was doing. You can see, we have lot of shadow, he's also wearing all white, this was lit with that magnum reflector, the pro photo magnum, but I had a grid on it to really control the light because when I started off shooting, I didn't put the grid and all you could see was this case being lit up by my strobe, so this was just two lights, it was an umbrella directly over my camera, shot straight in, the ceiling was white, so we shot into the ceiling for fill and then the magnum, with the grid was the main light on Ken here, so as I went through, I knew this is gonna look a little dramatic, but what I need to know is if this detail's there, so we can kind of open up the shadows. Look, if I open up fully, that's how much detail is actually in that file, it's crazy. So the details there, so what the light looks up front just needs to flatter him and not blow out the shoulder of this white shirt, it's kind of like for wedding photographers if you have a groom in a black tux and a bride in a white dress, you get that whole contrast, but the cameras do save a lot of that detail, so the first thing I would do here is turn down the highlights a little bit, so you can watch his shoulder, there is some detail there. And now I'm gonna start upping the shadows, so now we're getting somewhere. The next thing I'm gonna do is lower the saturation, so there's a lot of different colors going on here, we're gonna take off about a dozen points of saturation, up the contrast slightly, now where it gets a little bit important. He has some pretty red skin, so what we're gonna do is go down to our color editor, hit the eyedropper, select Ken's forehead here, adjust that range and we're gonna start changing the hue and if we zoom in, we'll hit, we'll hit this, start zooming in on his face. And that way you can kind of see, so we'll reset this skin tone thing, so you can see, he's got some pretty, a lot of magenta or red within that skin, so we can go select an area, we'll select here and it shows that range of skin tones, we're gonna expand it, we're gonna start adjusting the hues so you'll see it's now turning more green, if I go the other way, it's more pink. So we're gonna get rid of some of that red. If I adjust the saturation all the way down, it goes almost gray, we don't want that, we're just gonna adjust the saturation down slightly and then lightness is the overall color or skin tone, so we'll leave that about where it was, again, we want not a lot of red and now we can zoom back out, so he's not quite as red with the skin tones, but that's gonna be applied to every image within this set. Next thing I wanna do, go to color balance, we're gonna give this an overall tone, so this is one where I definitely want a little more blue in the shadows, so we're gonna add that, you can see in the shadows back here, it's added that blue, just to see before, there's extreme, we'll go somewhere in the middle. We wanna add in the mid tones that would be his skin tones and a lot of the stuff in the case, I wanna add a little more of that yellowish orange, so I'll show you what a lot of it looks like, too much, it's actually too yellow, we want more orange. So I'm kind of giving this a little bit of this cinematic, vintage feel and in the highlights, I don't really wanna adjust the highlights that much because that's mostly just his shirt and I wanna keep that pretty white, so we'll add just a little bit of warmth, but we're gonna keep that pretty minimal. Now that we've done that, I'm gonna up the highlights, or the shadows just a little bit more, maintain all that detail in the shadows and highlights and again, we went just to show you, we can go to image, new variant, so you can see, we went from here to here in raw while, while shooting tethered, so I knew right away that that would be what the final image could look like. You know there's things that we have to fix later like glare, that was the best we would do because I couldn't shut the windows completely because they were giving us some ambient light, but just knowing that's what it would've looked like had I only been shooting to the back of camera, that's what it looked like when I was shooting tethered, so we'll get rid of that variant. And you can see if you like those settings, you can copy them, go to another set in this image and apply those settings and now you can see it, it upped the shadows, all those settings are now over here on the left side, so we'll do that one more time, we'll reset an image completely, so here's one where he's looking off to the side, we'll reset that, now we'll apply those same settings and you can do that, you can select in and do that bulk, to multiple, we'll do it one more time, we'll reset this image, so that's what it would look like straight out of camera, there's what it looks like with the applied settings. So that way you can save time, you don't need to go through and adjust all of 'em. And as we work through the shoot, we did all that light setup, you can see when the light doesn't fire, that was like a test frame. Different lighting setups, I like to work through and then we'll go onto the next set, which was kind of fun. Let me show one that's more of a pullback, so working through this shot. This, I had asked him about this door and one of the things I like to do, you know, this was a shoot, he was not a client, this was just I walked into the shop, probably a couple years ago and I've always wanted to photograph it, but it's one of those things were you first go into a place like this, you get these ideas, I come back later and ask when to photograph it and his thought, he's worked there since, you know, 1970, I think he said he was about 70 years old and he's been working there since he was a kid and now he's the owner is that he doesn't understand, maybe because he goes there every day, how unique this space is, so you know, I kind of had to talk up why I wanted to photograph him there and show him a little bit of the potential by showing him some other images I'd done in similar locations and gain his trust and then we're able to make these images plus I also have a genuine interest in this place, I mean it's got a lot of history, so when we got into the space, I asked him what's with this door? This freezer door? It kind of stood out amongst the other decor and his face lit up, he told me, well this is actually my favorite part of the whole shop because my childhood grocery store was about to get torn down, you know 20 years ago, he went in the day before they tore it down and asked if he could buy this freezer door and then had it mounted in his meat shop on their freezer, so I asked him if he wanted to take a picture in front of it and he loved that idea and then I asked him if he wanted to prop it, so he grabbed this giant hunk of meat, which will eventually be turned into T-bones. So here's kind of our work through of getting the lighting set up. Again, shooting all tethered, working through that process, you can see here's one where the skin tones have been corrected, here's one that's totally raw, you can also tell that if you look at the thumbnails, that little icon in the bottom right, that shows that that one's been adjusted, this one has not, so you can how much red was actually removed. Working through the image, that was one I really liked, selected and processed it and then kind of working through an image of getting my frame, getting my light, getting a little more expression and then having him prop it. So I said you know, what would you wanna carry or what would you wanna show in this image? And that's where the giant steaks came into play, so we kind of worked through that image, shooting tethered. I can definitely tell, yeah, these actually all were after it came unplug, I can tell by the file name. So you can see that's why some of 'em are, some of 'em are fully adjusted and other ones aren't and as I went through and made my selects after the fact, you know, your first impression of what, what's gonna work, there's the true light test, so that's, again, as we worked with the model in here, I do the same thing on location, this is just figuring out the angle of my main light with no fill, so you kind of have to have a little bit of a vision to know, your main light's gonna only cause shadow, so where do you wanna fill as we go, it's knowing that I can fill with both an additional light and knowing the capability of these files in Capture One and what you can do to these images to get 'em to that point. So that's a fully edited processed image, where that's basically the shot right before it, but without the processing, so, again, same lighting, same everything, just different processing all done through Capture One. So it's just a unique way to do that, I also, I'm all about getting, if I'm in a location for one of these shoots, I want to get all the details possible, so I want to tell the full story. If, let's say I had a six image spread in a magazine or on my website, how could I tell the full story of this place in those six images? So just to give you a little more background, I also photographed a whole bunch of meat, he was freshly cutting up steaks for, for customers, so things like that. This one's kind of funny, I don't really know what was going on here, but this sign cracked me up, the fact that it said party time suggestions and he's carrying a giant meat cleaver. But just things like that, that, you know, I asked him where do you wanna be photographed next? And he's like oh let's use this antique. So shooting that, again, dragging my laptop around the shop, setting it on meat counter or the floor or an apple box, whatever's handy, just to keep shooting tethered because with so much going on, this is actually light back here from a neon that I was letting bleed into the shoot, where this is all light that was supplemented by me with the pro photos, so it's kind of, you can't necessarily see that balance if you're not shooting tethered because you know, a lot of times it'll end up looking like something like this, so that's what the scene looked like through the camera before the lights and as you work through it, it definitely changes and being able to adjust that on the fly is really handy and really important if it were for a client because if you were to ask a client to, you know, to look at a shot like this. Let's see, we'll go back to the one we edited. You know, to look at a shot like this and it comes out of the camera and they're looking at the back of your camera and it looks like this, they might not have the vision to say, oh yeah that looks pretty good. They're gonna think, oh wow, that looks really dark, I don't know if this guy knows what he's doing, so being able to have them hold an iPad in the other room and this is the only image they see, they don't see that whole adjustment process is really comforting and brings them peace of mind to know that they're only seeing what you want them to see, they're only seeing the images that you've polished up a little bit and obviously, there's work to do on the backend and just to show you one of the final images from this shoot to kind of show you what we did as far as processing and editing goes. We'll go to personal, Stoysich, select here, and yeah, so that's one of the shots we ended up with and then through working through everything that we do with the Photoshop side, you can see, getting rid of, let me just reprocess that, so we can get 'em all in one place. So we have, and you can see here's the low res, so it has a different name, LR on the end, really important for keeping everything straight. I'm gonna open that one in Photoshop. Just so I'll give you a little before and after of what we were able to do while working in Photoshop. So that's file number 4548. Alright and here's the same file, so you saw what we did in raw and now I'm gonna show you what we did in Photoshop, so you can see that glare, that was probably the tricky thing and the only thing we really needed to do 'cause if you look, there's a little bit of glare on the artwork back here and you see this glare on the case, this was all going through with the clone tool and removing distracting elements like I said, I can't stand things that are distracting or a little bit sloppy, the window glare was something that was impossible to deal with, but if you look at this image and you never saw this image, you would never know that was there and you can see, I did a little bit further color toning. If you look like his, the color of his shirt, some of the skin tone, I just added a little more color toning afterward, but for the most part, the only work I did outside of Capture One was that cloning to get rid of that nasty glare and you know getting there really close, making sure all the lines line up with the case with you know, the meat here, with the background, so that way when you go to this file, you really can't tell that it was ever done because if you take your time and do it right, you can really get in there and create something out of nothing as far as structurally with this meat case to build something that gets rid of that distraction, so. We'll go through one more shoot here before we call it good just cause I really want you guys to see the full range of what you can do with Capture One. So we'll select one more folder here, let me, yeah this was another unique one, let me see if the raws are in here, here we go. This is an old, old shoot, but this was one that was really tough for the same purposes of light, we were in another garage, it was a maintenance shed at a go-kart racing track. Again, these are places I end up for fun, whether I'm buying bratwurst or going go-kart racing and you see these characters, you see this texture, this environment and then I go back later with my lighting equipment and ask 'em if I can photograph them, so this was one of those shoots where, again, we had these guys working, I just set up a light. Let's go to one of the closer up images that'll really help tell the story here, so you know, we'll reset this image completely. So this is what it, again, what it actually looked like, you can see I air on the side of underexposing knowing that the details there, so this is actually shot, I wasn't shooting tether that day, but I just trust the files and know what they're gonna look like, I've shot enough photos that I can kind of visualize what's there, so this again, would be one where I come in, just knowing that it looks that dark on camera, upping that shadow value, bringing back, you know, the highlights, I'm fine with, I kind of like that light being somewhat bright, it looks more natural. Upping the contrast a little bit and this is one where he definitely has some red skin. So we'll do a quick selection here on this cheek, expand that range to make sure, it might even affect his beard a little bit, but that's okay. Get rid of some of that red, we're good. De-saturate the whole image just a tad and this is one where we can come in and do some funky stuff with the color, we'll look at what the standard presets do. I think this, oh yeah, we'll start with this turquoise one, can turn down the shadows, it's adding a little bit of turquoise to the shadows, it's adding a little bit of red to mid tones, adding a little bit of red and orange to the highlights. We're gonna up the shadows just a little bit more, but again, this image goes from, let's do a new variant, it goes from here to here in just a couple minutes of raw editing and when you're shooting tethered, again, if you're showing people these images, they can really visualize what you have in your head when you're able to make it come out because a lot of times, the lighting won't initially match the final product, again, there's another one, just some others, there's some that I did some different toning using it looks like for these ones, I added a little more green, a little more turquoise and again, these would be images where if you wanna do something totally different, we can reset the color and that's, that sets that and you can go back down to the styles and this is something that's new, again, I haven't even messed with it that much. The styles within, so you have these film mimicking filters so we'll open styles and presets, user styles and again, just going through and they do affect a lot more than just the color, they wanna just contrast and all those type of things. So I like having a little more freedom to do what I want with them, but a lot of times, I'll just use it for grain and like I said, you can do it yourself in the color balance because that's essentially all it's doing is doing a three-way color balance to its own preferences, so you know, we can actually take these, I like what I did there, we'll clear this one out, reapply it after we copy and paste. Turn down this green just a little bit. Call it good, trying to think of what else we shot. With this guy again, you know with the meat guy shot, not only portraits, but also cuts of meat on the butcher block, I do the same thing here. I like to be able to tell the full story, so you know, looking at this guy's hand, clearly, he's just wrenching away on these go-karts all day with this Chevy tattoo and going through their battered up hands and you know, adding different color schemes and different things like that that I wanna work through, but I'm doing all that within Capture One because it's so easily adjusted and then you know, some of these more graphic shots of the tools, tool bench, so these are things I want when I'm building a section of my website later to try and tell a full story and I think I actually, these guys had some crazy idea of putting me up on a forklift and photographing them racing, which I wasn't too fond of, but I did it anyways, so those images are somewhere in, oh yeah, here we go, so putting me up on a forklift and that was a little more difficult, but you can see their little indoor go-kart track that used to be a carpet warehouse or something, it's pretty fun and those go-karts go 45 miles an hour, so something a little different. And again, that was just shot for fun on like a Tuesday afternoon before that place opened, so there's tons of things you can do with Capture One, that's the main theme. I'm gonna go back to the images we shot today, just to kind of bring it full circle. So you know: whether you're trying to shoot with different lighting setups; whether you're experimenting, trying to figure out your own color palette; whether you're just trying to learn the software, there's so much stuff you can do, so many different ways you can do it, you just gotta really experiment and figure out what works for you and go with it, so again, and then knowing how to mesh that all with your vision. Whether it's the vision you have for the light, the color, the texture, anything like that or the composition. It's just important to play around with it until you really learn it and I think once you get a good handle on it, that's when you can really push it and adjust different things. I know earlier, I mentioned when you start, there's two different ways to work in Capture One, that's where you have new sessions and catalogs, that's also another thing, it'd be important to read up. As much as I know about Capture One, there is probably so much more I don't know, I'm sure there's people watching that are saying, oh I've never heard it explained like that or I wouldn't explain it like that, but again, I'm not formally trained in Capture One, I've just been using it for the last 14 years, so it's, this is all just knowledge that I've gained based on experience and personal preference, so if there's something you like to do if you watch another tutorial online or even talk with people from Capture One, there might be ways that are more fitting to what you like to do, whether it's how you import the files, how you name 'em, how you do the key wording or how you export, but there's so many different tools as you sort through the menus that you can change and similar to Photoshop, it's kind of one of those things where somebody might retouch skin one way, somebody might do it another way and yet, there's probably 10 other ways to do it that neither of you tried. So there's so many different things you can do and ways you can do it, it's important just to experiment and get to know, again, how to set up the file. Just one more time, looking through the toolbar, I know that we're gonna have some questions about this, so I'll try and address them right now. The tools that I didn't select within the toolbar, again, you see this is my main toolbar with the menus. These are all the cursors and these are all the quick buttons, so this is just you know, going back, rotating images, selecting variance and pasting variance, processing, my highlight selection and then are just going to different folders, uploading cards and resetting images. So those are what I like to keep there, but there's all these tools, quickly that, you know whether you're selecting different images and to add these. If I were to say, you want to look at show annotations, you can just drag that up and add it to your menu or if you wanna get rid of it, drag it back down here and poof, it goes away. So, you know, whether you wanna do alignment, I use to do this a little more when I had a bad habit of not aligning my frame, you can actually add this and you can change if it's just, you know, general alignment here or thirds or anything like that. So there's all sorts of different tools that I don't use anymore. Overlaying one image over another, editing different images, you can actually select which ones you wanna apply your variance to, exposure warning, focus mass, so it'll actually, you can, you can actually change within. In some of the settings, there's a lot of 'em that I'm not even gonna show you because I don't know how to use them fully, but you can even do lens correction as far as distortion and things like that within Capture one. So many different things you can change, so many different ways you change it and again, just looking through, I haven't looked through these in a while. So you know, having your different preferences, your styles, automatically adjusting files as they come in, even the battery status, that's actually for your camera, so it can tell you battery status on the camera. I will say one thing, when you're shooting tethered for reasons that I don't know, it will eat your camera's battery quite a bit faster, I don't know if it's 'cause it's powering, you would think that the USB power from the computer would be doing that, but and the fact that your screen's always off on your camera when you're shooting tethered, but something about it, eats up the battery, so watch that, have batteries handy when you're shooting tethered because you will go through them a little bit more quickly than if you were not. And really that's, that's all I have about Capture One, that's all I have to share. You guys now know basically everything I know and hopefully you learned something, hopefully you'll feel more confident going forward, shooting tethered, knowing how to actually shoot tethered, how to adjust your images on the fly, how to make 'em look how you want and apply them and then additionally, how to export the images, import the images and edit them in Photoshop. So hopefully you learned a lot, hopefully you can take this home and use it in your studio or on your shoots and yeah. Get Capture One trial and give it a shot.