Lessons

Lesson Info

Shoot & Edit While Tethered

We're gonna start a new session, so for this shoot before we get started I'm gonna start and go up to file within Capture One new session and we'll call this CL Test. Then, again, like I said I like to have an underscore within my file naming. All the folders are already set up because this is a template that I've saved. Oh, quickly, once you set up Capture One has a lot of different toolbar settings. If you go here, customize toolbar, these are all the possible tools. A lot of them are displayed default within these white bars those are all the spaces these tools can go. I've set my toolbar up to the specific tools I like. Once you do that you need to go to Window, Workspace, and then Save Workspace, so you can see there's all these different workspaces. DV1 is the one I use that's the one I've saved, so then it always looks the same when I open Capture One. If you don't do that it will go back to a default, or another workspace and it can be a little annoying. I like to keep the work...

space the same every time, so that's how you save that. So back to tethering. Now that we're plugged in I'm gonna go to the Capture tab here on the toolbar we're gonna open that, and you'll see this area where it says Camera is Blank. As soon as I turn my camera on it will start to display you can see there's coming in there's all my camera settings, so I'm on manual, I'm at 200th of second, ISO 100, f/5. You can adjust your color temperature it's in K for Kelvin, so I'm at 55, 60, or something like that. You can even take a picture live from your computer screen if you have to have your camera mounted on a tripod, or something, you can actually remotely trigger your camera from Capture One. You can change everything all your settings within here. Your shutter speed I can adjust that up, down, wherever I want. You can adjust all that within Capture One. I try and do that within the camera, but just knowing you can do that if you're, you know, photographing something remotely you can have full control over your camera from your computer, so with that said let's bring in our model, Michelle. We're gonna do a simple two light setup here, and we're gonna shoot with Capture One, so I'm gonna move the computer out of the way a little bit here. All right, how's it going? All right, perfect. So we have a white seamless here pretty basic backdrop. I actually want to make it darker to start. I always work with white seamless because it can be gray. If you get far enough away from it with your lighting setup it can almost be black so it's very versatile. I'm gonna have you come up to about right here, and like I said we're just gonna do a two light setup with a lot of shadow, so I'm using a Beauty Dish with a grid, and that's gonna be our main light. We're gonna set that up here. We should make a couple of adjustments. We're gonna keep it pretty close to her because I want the light to fall off quickly, so this background goes dark. I'll make a couple of adjustments, and we're gonna place it off to the side because I want that shadow, and I don't want a lot of light hitting the background. I'll turn that on we'll do a quick meter. I want to shoot at about f/5.6 or so. Then this will be our fill light. This is just that Profoto umbrella with no baffle at all it's silver. It's probably about 40 some inches diameter, and that will be our fill light just to give a little bit extra, and I'm gonna keep the fill light fairly close to the camera, again, because the farther that light is from my subject the more light is gonna hit the background, so we want to keep the background pretty dark. When I'm doing this just a quick lighting lesson I like to do one light at a time when I'm doing my metering, and when I'm doing my testing, and that's another good thing about shooting tethered you can see what each lights doing as we go, so, again, I want to shoot about f/5.6, so we have our light on we're gonna meter, and we're at 200th of a second, ISO 100, and we want f/5.6, so I'm just gonna meter real quick. You don't have to do anything. We're at 6.3 which means we need to go down a third of a stop, and we're at 5.6, so we're square on for our main light. Now that we're tethered I'm gonna reconnect my trigger to my camera. The fill light is totally off so we're gonna get one image that's gonna appear pretty dark. I'm gonna have you turn just a little bit this way, and now with your head I'm gonna have you look almost back towards the doorway, yep, right in there. We're gonna take one test shot. I'm gonna shoot just from about the waist up, or a little below just so we get her hands. Again, we have this white background, and I'm gonna leave a little bit of space. I'm not too concerned about the background at this point. So this brings in our base image. You can see very pretty light, but it's very dramatic as far as the background goes, and now once we go into our tools we can start adjusting some of the shadow, some of the highlights things like that, but this is mostly just so I can see the light. I like the light position it focuses good and all that. Now what I'm gonna do is introduce our fill light, so we're gonna start with it pretty low. I like to start with fill just barely filling in the shadows, and then we'll slowly turn it up as we go, so that's another thing. With tethering I can glance over, and see how it's affecting the shot so, again, you can stay in the exact same position. I'm gonna keep shooting a few different frames with different powers of fill. Oh, and what do you know, we came discounted, so I meant to teach that and it happened anyways. There's our image on the back of the camera where it came disconnected, so you can see that's why we have to card it. Now the only thing you need to do to reconnect is go back to Capture. It actually automatically reconnected this time, but if that happens just turn your camera off for about one second. Turn it back on within five seconds it will be reconnected, so it happens. Again, I've used this camera for about the last 3-1/2 years, and I've tethered probably hundreds of photo shoots with it, so my tether port is just a little wonky right now, and it easily comes disconnected, but we should be good from now on, so another test shot there one, two, three. There we go, so now you can see what the image looks like. That's just a little too much fill for me, so we're gonna go ahead and turn it down about a stop and a half. Take another test shot, and then we'll start our adjustments with tethering. Okay, so I'm good with that. Michelle, you can relax for a second. So what we're going to do now is come in and make our adjustments, so I'm going back to this local adjustments tab. This is where we're gonna find all of the settings. Again, we'll go back and start from square one, we can reset that image, go to exposure. I'm gonna turn up the exposure just a tad. Again, if you ever want to see where you're at you can just take the eye dropper, and we know highlights are on her forehead, so if you look here 223 that's the brightest point, so 223, so we're not even close to 255. Nothing is close to being blown out. We know that because the image is dark, but you can just take the dropper, and go over any point of the image, and it will tell you where you're at as far as highlights, so we're gonna add a little bit of contrast. Now we're gonna go into our highlights and shadows. Bring down the highlights I always do that, and then up the shadow just a little bit. I do like the general mood of this image, and now where it's gonna get fun is we're gonna go into color balance. Before I do that I'm gonna go into skin tones. We're gonna select her skin tones. I'm just gonna go from not the brightest point of her forehead, but just a little bit off expand that slightly. Her shirt's a similar color, so we got to make sure not to affect that too much, and we're gonna adjust the hue, and the saturation of the skin tone, so you can see as we desaturate it changes the look of the image, but I'm pretty happy with that, and now we can go back to color balance, and that's where we can start adjusting, so you can go through the general setup there, and see the presets that they offer whether they're, you know, things you like, or things you don't like or just the starting point, so let's say we I'll just pick one, and we'll kind of go with that, so let's say we like this cold orange, but it's a little bit orange for me. You can see if you look at all the sliders it added quite a bit of blue to the shadows. We'll turn that down just a little bit. It added a little bit of red to the mid tones, not much even worth dealing with, and then it added a decent amount of orange to the highlights. We're gonna turn that down just a little. In fact, I'll turn it down all the way so you can see. Go back somewhere in between, and I kind of like it's a little bit of like a cinematic color grading feel, but I enjoy that for what we're gonna do, so now we'll go ahead we'll look at our levels. We can up just a little bit of contrast there by adjusting the levels, or bring in the highlights a little brighter, and then add a little contrast. I'm not really gonna adjust anything else. Just so you guys can see if you went to styles there's these built-in styles like color effects how they effect, you know, they're basically like more presets and you could see, you could apply something like this to all your images, whatever one you select is up to you. There's different black and white settings that you can see live as you go, and it will apply this setting to every image that comes in. Legacy styles these are, you know, just different looks, different feels depending on what you like, but one thing I will say, and skin effects, so there's different ways it's effecting the skin tones, but one thing I will say is, and then built-in presets, sorry, so those are, actually, those are about the same. There's user styles here where it has these are the ones you can purchase so this is films white with grain, so you can go in here and look at all these films whether it's Fuji or Kodachrome, anything like that, and these will add the grain. Again, I don't do this within Capture One. I like to do it elsewhere after I start editing, so I leave that alone, but I do like to see the options, and same with film grain and things like that, so we're gonna go ahead and take our styles editor, and start that over along with our film grain, and we're gonna start with this basic image here with this toning. So now you'll see we have all of our settings. Now we can go ahead and we can just photograph the model, and as we go those settings will apply to all the images. If you want to go back and apply that to other images later you can copy those settings and apply them. So, Michelle, I'm gonna have you start just kind of straight onto me weight just on one foot or the other it doesn't really matter, and then I kind of just want your hands across like this, and I want your head off this way almost like you're looking towards the computer there, yep, and we can do some shots that are a little more zoomed in. It doesn't matter if you zoom in or out it still finds those skin tones, and it applies everything how you want. I'm gonna have you go ahead and turn completely this way, and now look back over that shoulder again, and almost down towards the ground a little bit, yeah. Maybe eyes up towards the door just a little bit. We'll zoom out so you can see how it doesn't matter which way you shoot, and as we continue to shoot you'll see on the computer that it's constantly applying all those settings that we used from the very first one, and you know that because, again, this little icon on the bottom right on the thumbnails shows that it's applying those settings, so it's pretty easy to do. It's a great way to get, you know, if we went to see this image if you want to see it what it looks like just totally raw you can come up here and click the reset button. Again, it's just a little bit darker. You can always go to edit, undo, and it will bring everything back that we did, so that's applying, you know, all the highlights, the shadow control, everything, and if you change it like let's say we shot all these images, and I just changed it to this image it's gonna apply these new settings to every image going forward, so it won't affect the images you already shot unless you want it to, but it will affect all the images going forward, so we'll leave that there. I'm gonna have you stand straight on again. Take a tiny step back, and then again I'm just gonna continue with you looking that way just because of where the light is. So we'll just do another farther away vertical. I'm actually gonna step back and then zoom in myself. So I'm using a 24 to 70, and I want to get all that background behind her from a lower angle. I'm gonna have you turn this way again looking over that shoulder. Now look almost like towards the light. Yeah, right there, okay, so just so you can see, oh, we came disconnected, so the images are right here on the back of my camera, so we'll actually reconnect. I'm gonna turn my camera off. If you look at the icon here on Capture One on my screen you'll see this little camera up here. As soon as I turn on it reconnects. It will light up that icon. There it is we're reconnected, so we're good, so we'll shoot the same shot one more time here. Look down just a little lower, and now I'm gonna do something that's really wide to have more of the background and much more closeup, so you can see, again, those images are reconnected, and going into the camera, and it's applying all those settings from this shot to all the future shots, so that's how I would tether on the fly for a darker image. Now I want to switch lenses, and change up this lighting just a little bit just to show you how we can adjust things a little bit further within Capture One by keeping the same outfit, general lighting field, but I actually want to change up the color and mood, so we can do that on the fly, so I'm gonna make two adjustments and then switch lenses, so what I'm thinking here is I'm gonna move the lights a little bit further away from Michelle here, so that way we get a little less falloff. A little more even light from head to toe. We're still not gonna include her feet, but I want to use a longer lens and get further away, so we're actually gonna raise I know I'm gonna have to power up because we're gonna move it further away. I'm gonna raise the light up just a little bit, and move it this way, so we're actually gonna create even more shadow. Again, the more you move your light away from your subject you have to raise it up to maintain the same angle, so we're good there. We're gonna meter because I still want it to be f/5.6, and since we moved the light away we're definitely gonna have to turn it up. I already did a little bit but maybe not enough. One of the things that I like about the Profotos is that you can adjust the power from the trigger so I don't have to lower the light to adjust the power I can meter. Again, we know we want 5.6. We're at 4.5 so we need to go up. It should be about good here, 5.6, so we had to go up two-thirds of a stop. I could do that right from the trigger by going up 0. and we're good there, so I'm gonna switch to the 70-200, so we're turning off the camera which means it's gonna become untethered momentarily. Now we're gonna get another test shot without our fill, so, again, this is gonna be dark and moody. We're gonna reconnect. I can look for that little icon to pop up back on Capture One. There we are, we're connected, and I'm gonna have you take a tiny step back. Again, I'm gonna have you turn this way slightly, and looking over that shoulder back towards the door. Yep, right in there, and these are gonna be pretty well zoomed in. I'm just going for a different compression, different look using the 70-200, so there we go. One test shot, oh, you know what? I didn't put the trigger back in my camera so the lights wouldn't have fired. I do that more than I would care to admit. There we go. All right, so we should have, you can see the light didn't fire in that first one. Capture One let us know that because it's a totally black frame. So there we go. Now we need our fill light turn that back on. We're gonna leave that the same. We didn't change the placement or anything like that. We're still shooting at the same aperture, so now it should start to look a little similar, and then we'll make our adjustments. I'm gonna take two frames, one horizontal, and one vertical with the 70-200, and now what we're gonna do going forward is I want to make adjustments for what I want this new set to look like, so we're gonna go and change the color up a little bit, so we'll go back up the shadows a slight bit, get rid of that tab. Get rid of that tab gonna go to our color balance. Again, you'll see if you go down to your color editor and skin tone it's still applying those adjustments to the skin, which I appreciate. Now we can chose a different selection as far as what we want the color to look like here. So for this one we'll go with this adding even more blue, play with what's gonna happen to the mid tones. We're gonna keep that pretty minimal, and then our highlights. One thing I do want to do is adjust the brightness, so we're gonna get those highlights up a little bit, play the mid tones down, and we're gonna adjust the shadows to add this little hazy feel to it, and then what I'm gonna do is go back to exposure, and adjust the overall contrast. Just for fun I'm gonna add a little clarity to it, and we should be good right there, so now, again, similar to before I'm just gonna keep shooting from some different angles, some different looks as far as how she's posing. We're gonna keep the same overall feel because this is more about the tethering portion than posing, so I'm actually gonna have you stay right like that. Turn your body this way about a quarter turn, yeah, and then you can be looking right at me. We're not gonna get a lot of catch lights here. It's gonna be dark and moody, and I'm gonna be shooting vertical with this 70-200. So we're still tethered we can see everything coming in here. Love the toning it's just something different than what we did before. You can see all those settings I just applied to the previous frame are now carrying forward to this frame, so, yeah, you can stay just like that. Basically, I'm just gonna have you keep moving that's perfect. I'm gonna have you turn completely this way so we get even more shadow, and look almost towards the monitor here, so her face is gonna fall off in a shadow almost completely, and now looking back towards camera, yeah. Now looking over your head again towards the door, and down to something a little more moody. Chin down, eyes down, eyes to camera, great, and you can see as I'm shooting Capture One is having no trouble keeping up even though these are pretty big files. We're gonna switch to some horizontals. Okay, one last set change. I'm gonna have you look away one more time. There we go, one last setting change I'm gonna say we want to do some black and whites, generally, this might be something you would do and post in Photoshop, but just because of this high contrast light we can go to our styles and presets our black and whites, and we can actually select some sort of grainy black and white we want to apply, or you can do it manually, too, by just desaturating the image. In fact, let's do that so we could go up to exposure. Adjust our saturation all the way down. Now we can start playing with our contrast, and this is where you can get into your curves, and you can adjust your RGB, so even though this is a red, sorry, a black and white image there's still a lot of detail in the RGB channel, so as you adjust the red I just want to add a little bit of warmth there. Overall, I want to add a little more contrast through the curve so we're just making a general S-curve there, and then the last thing we'll do is I reset the color balance, so we don't have those blues in the shadows, or any of that, so now we have our black and white image. You'll see as we shoot going forward I'm gonna switch back to the other lens, and as we shoot going forward these images are gonna come in with that black and white look. Even maybe we'll just add a little grain for fun, so we can go over to our presets. Oops, sorry, where did it go, and our film grain it's down at the bottom here we go. I knew I had that in here. So we have fine grain. We can kind of see what these do real quick, just so you can see the options, so we'll bring that up. We'll just add a lot so that way it's really obvious, so we have 73 impact on grain. If we go through the different grains you can see soft grain, more harsh grain, so we'll do something that's more harsh and gritty. You can actually change the granularity of it so it's the size of the grain, so you can see it gets larger. It just looks a little different the more you play with it, and that's the intensity. So we have a decent amount of grain. I'm gonna have you stay right in there, and I'm gonna have you look almost towards the light real quick, so shoulders closed off to camera so this way, and then looking up towards that light a little bit, yeah. Maybe a little under it, and then this will have some nice light, but definitely a different look, and you'll see how all those settings we just did now apply to the next shot, but, again, I came untethered. So we have the shot on the camera in full color. Let me disconnect, reconnect, and when this comes up all you need to do is hit OK, and we're already retethered, so same thing. So you can see now we have these nice rich high contrasts black and white images coming through. Again, it's applying those same settings that we did from the previous setting to all the images that we're taking now if we want to get in there a lot closer. Yep, perfect. One more looking off that way, and we'll go with the vertical. Then I'm gonna actually move my position so you can keep looking towards that light. This will have even more contrast as I get away from that main light. If you want to up the contrast we could actually take our fill down slightly, and this will make the main light pop even more, and add more contrast to that black and white, so there we go. That's kind of three different ways within the same lighting setup to get three different looks whether it's more neutral toned images just showing the general setup to going with that more blue tone with the orange feel kind of that cinematic color grading, or, again, switching to black and white. Once you do this let's say you enjoy this image, but you really like this color tone you can just go up here copy those settings. Go down to this image paste those settings. Again, we got to get rid of the black and white there. Then you'll have similar settings from, you know, these type of images down to here, so you can always adjust those. You can even select which variants you want to copy, so if you don't want to copy all the variants, you can actually go within your adjustments, and select certain variants that you want, so let's say you don't want it to touch the exposure, but you do want to add the color you can go through and actually pick which variance when you hit copy and paste which ones it will copy and paste, so it doesn't have to do them all. I like it for it to do them all because I do them all individually on purpose, but some photographers might have other reasons for making adjustments, and they might not want to adjust everything at the same time. Again, it's totally up to you, totally personal preference, and it's one of those things where the more you play with it the more you learn what you like what works for you, and at any time if you want to go just go back to the normal original image you just hit this back arrow, and, again, that brings you back to that. If you want to apply those settings let's say from this image to that image you just adjusted there you go. So you can do anything you want. You can do any adjustments you want, and you can fine-tune change on the fly. Again, all these are adjustable. For instance, this image we see it's a little bright here. We can make sure it's not blown out. Oh, what do you know, it's approaching that 235, or whatever I have it set at. If you want to see and change that preference, too, you can go up to Capture One preferences. You can go all the way to warnings, and you can see it will warn you for different types of settings, so you can see warn when moving images there's all those, but then within your exposure you can actually set your exposure warning, so you can see I have it at 245. You could adjust it lower, and it will obviously make more things show up in the red. You can even adjust the color that you want like let's say you want exposure warning to pop up in green on anything over 245. I don't know why you'd want to do this, but maybe you don't like looking at red, so now if you hit that warning it makes everything green, or maybe you were shooting an image with a lot of red, and you couldn't see it, so you can always change that. You also probably saw when you go to preferences you can even set a shadow warning, so if things are too dark let's say you want shadow detail in anything under 10 on the RGB scale there you can see it's starting to creep in, so you're losing things to complete darkness here, complete shadow down in the bottom of the image, which I don't necessarily care about. I'm more concerned about saving highlights than shadows that's why I usually turn off the feature of enabling shadows, and I usually keep my highlight warning as bright red. Oops, let me reselect that. There we go, and you can even pick target levels and things like that depending on what you like. There's so many adjustments you can make it's really easy to do. Again, I keep that warning there. I usually keep it off because it's a little bit obnoxious, but it is nice to have to know that we're approaching that, and that's something you can, you know, within our HDR tab we can actually bring those highlights down a little bit by upping the shadows. Let me zoom in real quick and show you that, so you could actually change you can see it's brighter, or darker as you adjust that highlight slider, so it's totally up to you how you want to do it. I just like to show you all the options you have, so when you start playing with it you know what you can do, how you can change it, how you can adjust it, and more importantly how you can save it, and make it work for you every time you open the software. So we're gonna move onto a different lighting setup. We're gonna have Michelle change. I'm gonna adjust some of the lighting. We're gonna do a second setup that is totally different. It's gonna be less dark and moody, and more bright and airy, so we're gonna actually make this white backdrop white, and not dark gray. We're gonna change some of the color settings we're playing with, and basically do an entirely different setup, but I'm gonna show you how you can make those adjustments work for you with white, and how if your background isn't completely white when you're shooting in camera you can use Capture One and tethering to make it appear more white just through the adjustments you use, and how those apply to every image, and help you know what your final image could potentially look like after you make those adjustments, so you can go ahead and change. We'll work on that setup, and then we'll get started on the white backdrop.