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Get The Most Out of Your Photos with Capture One Pro 10

Lesson 38 of 50

Image Processing Demo Perfecting Color


Get The Most Out of Your Photos with Capture One Pro 10

Lesson 38 of 50

Image Processing Demo Perfecting Color


Lesson Info

Image Processing Demo Perfecting Color

So we've got an image here with a few different variations, as such. So, this is how it came out of camera. And then just playing around I got sort of around to a few sort of different looks, basically. So what we'll do is, we'll take this image as it is and actually go through a few different, or just one master edit if you like, to see exactly what the possibilities are. With color, for example. So let's open this up. This is how it came out of camera. Let's just press reset to make absolutely sure I'm not faking. So that's exactly how it came out of camera. So if we start from the top of a typical sort of image processing workflow, we can see probably, let's just go back to my default workspace, excuse me. That's better. We can see probably that exposure-wise it's not too bad but it's a little bit dark. If we look at her skin, sort of a bit more detail, probably slightly on the heavy side. So I would probably just take my exposure and just lift that up ever so much, a touch. White b...

alance wise, probably pretty happy with that. I mean we could experiment with a few different options. It depends really on what kind of look we're going for. That's as shot. And to be honest, I think I'll actually pretty much stick with that. You know you can always experiment with what potentially might look a little bit better. But I'm going as shot, like so. So simple exposure fix, easy in that respect. As I might have said in earlier lessons I tend to try and personally crop earlier on 'cause it helps me visualize exactly what's happening. So in the crop tool, if we click and hold, I'm on constrain, that's good, so I can pretty much freehand draw exactly what I want to do. Remember, you don't have to apply that crop. If I just press v on the keyboard now then that pops out to it's cropped amount, like so. So pretty happy with those sort of default corrections so far. Let's put in a bit more contrast. Remember, don't be afraid of the contrast slider. It's doing that nice job between a full on RGB contrast adjustment to somewhere in between a luminosity adjustment. So very simple to just do that. Let's take saturation down a little bit as well. Again, if you wanna preview what you've done, just option, click, and we can see just a few tweaks on the exposure to what the difference has made. High dynamic range, probably don't have to do so much for that. If I felt that my adjustments maybe made the skin a bit too hot, could just pull that back a little bit, like so. Generally, clarity I tend to try to avoid on people 'cause it can sort of exaggerate skin tone differences. Structure, certainly, is probably something that you perhaps want to avoid. But you can experiment with actually negative clarity. To sometimes just soften off the skin a little bit. Again, that might work better on a local adjustment, as well. Let's just do a tiny bit of negative clarity. Color wise we actually got some options here for sort of editing a color as well. So let's just go to our color editor. Let's decide, you know, that our background, maybe we just wanna manipulate that a bit. So if I click on the background in the advanced color edited tab, pretty sure that we're not gonna affect anything else but if we turn on view selector color range, just move that off a bit, and you see we've pretty much now, that color selection 'cause she's not wearing, you know, anything else in that same tone. Now that's real nice. If we just wanted to play around with that background very easily we could do, we could even just de-saturate it if we wanted to, but I actually quite like it, but I'm just gonna brighten it up a tiny bit, like so. We could put on ever such a small vignette, that might be nice. I'm not gonna edit her shirt at all. That looks pretty good as it was. In terms of skin tone, her skin tone's actually pretty good, to be honest. So what we could do if we just target her skin tone, if we wanted to perhaps just change the saturation and slightly just change the lightness, and remember in the skin tone tab, it's a little bit more subtle with the changes, what we can do. So we could just maybe warm that up a bit and so on. So slight increase in lightness, just to brighten up her skin a little bit, but it's very subtle. You could see if I move this slider all the way to the right, all the way to the left, it's very, very minor. You know, nice subtle changes just for skin tone. Fit to screen. That's s on the keyboard, by the way, s and d, that's a good shortcut if you're using the logic keyboard. Or indeed if you're not using a logic keyboard there's nothing to stop you using the logic set which'll give you the same shortcuts anyway, so s and d is a good one to zip between the two. So let's look at our color balance, and what could we do here. Maybe let's overall just warm it up ever so slightly. If we go kind of call our shadows, that would just put a nice tint, like so. And then highlight wise, again it's such a, an easy tool to experiment with. That's pretty much predominantly just messing the background, which you've already played with. I could lift or darken the shadows if I want to. And also with these sliders, if you wanna reset this slider, double tap and that takes us back to zero. So, not too many adjustments really, if we look at where we started. So let's say image, let's say new variant, and let's see what we've done. So that's how it came out of the camera, and that's how it's looking on the left hand side. Again, nothing sort of too drastic with the changes we've done but just a few subtle tweaks here and there we can really make a difference. And yet we haven't really done anything else, which we could do with local adjustments. Like if we wanted to, we could easily throw in a local adjustment on her skin tone, which is something we'll look at at a later lesson. A couple of, oh we've got a little blemish here so let's go to our spot tool, I missed that, and let's just take that away. If you're getting rid of spots, try to make the outer circle just by dragging it on the edge as close to the spot as possible. So we could just take away a few bits and pieces, like that. Like so. Let's just have a look at the one image, that'd be easier. So just a few little, subtle spot changes like that, and then last but not least, I say that but then I'll think of something else, let's just put in a tiny bit of grain. 'Cause all guys like me remember film and we still like the film grain, so just a nice little, subtle touch like that. So let's look at them side by side again, hide our tools, command t, so that's how we started, and that's how we ended up. So, no local adjustments just subtle tweaks here and there. Slight change of contrast, saturation, color grade, a little bit of a color edit in the background, and there we go.

Class Description


Here's what you'll learn: 
  • Techniques to grow a searchable and automated image catalog  

Software Used: Capture One Pro 10, Adobe Lightroom CC 2015



  1. Introduction
  2. What's Possible with Capture One: Quick Edit
  3. Capture One Versions: Installation Basics
  4. Interface Introduction and Customization
  5. The Power of Keyboard Shortcuts
  6. Image Management Basics
  7. Organization Best Practices
  8. Building your First Catalog
  9. Image File Management Automation
  10. Advanced Catalog Organization
  11. How to Add Meta Data
  12. Searching and Filtering Techniques
  13. Further Catalog Strategies
  14. Basic Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques
  15. Advanced Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques
  16. Basic Composing Techniques: Cropping, Rotation, Straightening
  17. How to Correct for Perspective
  18. Basic Tool Behavior
  19. Tool Basics Part 1
  20. Tool Basics Part 2
  21. Converting to Black and White and Adding Grain
  22. How to Apply Image Adjustments Globally
  23. Sharpening and Noise Reduction
  24. How to Create and Save Styles and Presets
  25. Why Should You Shoot Tethered?
  26. How to Set-Up Your Tethered Hardware
  27. How To Set Up A Tethered Photoshoot Project
  28. Basic Session Workflow Organizing And Making Selects
  29. Basic Session Workflow Exporting
  30. Advanced Session Workflow
  31. Creating Selections With Smart Albums
  32. Advanced Exporting
  33. Saving Session Templates
  34. Collaborating On Set With Capture Pilot
  35. Using The Color Editor Basic Color Adjustment
  36. Skin Tone Adjustments
  37. Color Grading Using The Color Balance Tool
  38. Image Processing Demo Perfecting Color
  39. Create Masks for Local Adjustments using Brushes & Gradients
  40. Advanced Local Adjustments using Masks
  41. Dodging and Burning in Capture One
  42. Creating Local Adjustments with the Color Editor
  43. How to Use Local Adjustment Masks for Color Editing
  44. How to Remove Objects in your Image
  45. Image Processing Demo: Local Adjustments
  46. Exporting with File>Export
  47. Export Strategies and Proofing Previews with Process Recipes
  48. How to Export for Social Media
  49. More Clever Tricks with Capture One Pro 10
  50. Final Q&A






Maria Baptiste
