Avoid Flat Looking Images
January 6, 2011 6 Comments
On very bright locations like a sunny beach, you will often see that your camera has a tendency to underexpose your images. Another phenomenon that can occur in these conditions is lens flare. Because lots of light hits the front lens elements, these lens elements will light up a little bit and add an offset to the whole image. Use a lens hood to minimize as much lens flare as possible already when you take the photograph. However, lens flare cannot totally be avoided.
• Use the Levels Tool in Capture One to check your images for correct exposure.
• If the Histogram doesn’t reach 230-250, it is often a sign of under exposure. Drag the Highlight Slider to the brightest part of the Histogram
• If the Histogram doesn’t start at 0, it is often a sure sign of lens flare. Drag the Shadow Slider to the darkest part of the image.
Using the Levels Tool
The left image is straight out of the camera and shows both lens flare and some degree of underexposure. The right image is after correction in the Levels Tool.
‘Flair’ is what a brilliant photographer has in abundance; ‘flare’ is what a lens suffers from occasionally. Funnily enough, although the article is about the latter, I only see signs of the former
It does seem that my English language “flair” was not sufficient in this post
The spelling mistake has now been corrected!
Just to let you know that I find these regular snippets on how best to use Capture One extremely useful. Thank you!
It would be great if more people knew how to used the levels tools properly … alas many do not. As for lens flare, hmm … I’ve never had success if getting rid of it my photo’s, especially on my Sigma lens. I had this one nice shot planned out in the heart of Poland, a sweeping panoramic of the cityscape of the city center … well it worked! Except for the lens flare.
Sadly no amount of level editing nor magic could save my 36 image HDR panoramic shot on the right side.
Thanks for the tip though
I hope many learn much from it 
.
Thanks for this article!
it is well known that a bright scene as on the beach or in snow will deliver underexposed images from the camera exposure reading meter (as reflected reading), since these scenes usually content more than the camera-calibrated 18% middle grey assumption hence under exposure if not corrected when taking the photograph by adjusting the exposure by +1 EV or +2 EV.
the correction in post by tweaking levels as described in this article from Phase One is only an inferior method than do the right thing first. But nothing else to be expected from a software companie’s point of view.