The Flow of Light
May 29, 2012 6 Comments
Although I am an advocate of the ‘get it right in camera’ school of photography, I strongly believe in the role that editing plays in our craft, just as the dark room did when printing from negatives in the past. The raw file is the negative, Capture One the darkroom. I continue to use graduated filters for balancing exposure in camera, but sometimes the light still needs a little help.
Before image editing, there is session editing. In this example I made five tripod-mounted exposures. In the original selection I chose CF008429, but a few months later on reflection I marginally prefer the way the rocks are slightly more concealed in CF008428, and that is the exposure I am processing here.
Very little of this image is truly sharp, it is really all about mood and the swirling motion of the water. But what should be sharp needs to be checked at 100%.
Having worked on the image I have saved a clone variant (F3), and then reset it using the reset adjustments button. Thus the ‘original’ is on the right, with the finished image on the left here. The unprocessed raw file looks OK, but I felt the magenta emphasis was too dominant so I have tweaked the white balance, reducing magenta considerably and yellow slightly.
A local adjustment is the digital equivalent of dark room dodge and burn, and I still feel these tools are the ones that best enable tonal balancing, a vital prerequisite of good printing. The first of my local adjustments (layer 1) selects the stones and some of the water, lightening and adding a little saturation. I have avoided the white water areas in the middle zone, which are already bright enough.
The light on the horizon is extremely strong, bright and somewhat ‘clipped’ so layer 2 calms this down. It is painted on using a soft edged brush, the adjustment parameter being Contrast -50. I applied these strokes quickly with an oversized brush to get a feel for the effect, and then I refined the selection back with the erase tool.
The brushes in Capture One are superbly configurable, and with zero hardness they give a wonderfully soft edge, allowing for extremely organic adjustments. I try to imagine I am painting with light.
Layer 3 simply increases the contrast in the sky, which is otherwise rather bland contrasting with the much busier coastal landscape. The contrast increase of 30 is balanced by a saturation reduction of the same value, as contrast would otherwise increase the saturation unnaturally.
The final layer lifts the stones and the ‘forewater’ by quite a bit, increasing contrast (and decreasing saturation accordingly) as well, to enhance their physical presence in the picture space.
In addition to the local adjustments, a small amount of vignetting has been applied on the background layer to ‘hold the corners’. The overall exposure has been reduced marginally (-0.2) and contrast and saturation have received small increases to give a more filmic rendering to the image. For sharpening I use the minimal ‘pre-sharpening 1’ in the sharpening presets. A few dustspots have been removed, and I have straightened the horizon with the straighten tool, resulting in some minor cropping. It’s hard to frame the camera completely perfectly when the light is changing this quickly!
The overall colour the IQ180 produces is usually very well balanced and while the white balance sometimes needs tweaking it is rarely necessary to do further changes to colour when seeking a natural result.
In the end all these changes are very personal, and in keeping with my current thinking, and desire to emphasise the physicality of nature, and ‘the flow of light’ in a print. I can imagine coming back to it in five years time and preferring the softer and more dreamy feel of the original raw file!
PS The “Dummy” title of the session indicates that I have not created a session for this shoot, but rather browsed from my computer hard drive to find the files. The Dummy is simply my default title of this type of session.
Joe Cornish is a professional landscape photographer, writer, printer and broadcaster based in North Yorkshire, England. Joe is a regular contributor to http://www.onlandscape.co.uk/, and his gallery website is http://www.joecornishgallery.co.uk/
Lovely image, interesting flow. I am too an advocate of getting it right in camera and only then tweak in post for enhanced Woaw-effect.
Estoy siguiendo su blog desde hace tiempo con mucho interés, me resulta de lo mas interesante y útil, y, como bien ha dicho alguien por aquí, no da tiempo a aprender todo sobre este sofware, por lo que, sus aportaciones resultan claves para procesar y mejorar la imagen final. Yo trabajo en estudio, con luces de flash y de apoyo, agradecería un análisis sobre las luces y sombras extremos y modo de equilibriar en Capture One… Gracias!!
I am following your blog in a while with great interest what I find most interesting and useful, and as someone rightly said here, not enough time to learn everything about this software, so that their contributions are key to process and improve the final image. I work in the studio, lights flash and support, I would appreciate an analysis of light and shadow ends and equilibriar mode in Capture One .. Thanks!
Beautiful! I adore your work
I’m a fan of Joe since his book “First Light”. Seeing him using C1 in such a delicate way reassures me to be on the right track. I’ve always thought he did not retouched his shots but I appreciate him admitting that sometime it is proper and useful. I hope to be able to attend his workshop and discuss about C1 use with him in the near future.
Well done Joe.
As long as local adjustments are not processed as separate layers, or at least with the option of exporting to separate layers… it is a bit of a waste of time and may as well be done in PS… with the option of adjusting transparency and blending it is just far superior than local adjustments…
Maybe in C1 v.7 ??
That rather depends on whether one gets on with the layers concept. I don’t and I know a few others who feel the same way. A mental block I suppose.
On the other hand the local adjustment concept in those products that offer such a feature seems far more logical for photo processing (as opposed to graphics manipulation). It always has done in all the products I have worked with that use the idea. It is LightRoom’s approach as well of course so even Adobe recognise the differences in approach.
There are benefits, in my opinion, to being able to get a print (for example) directly from the RAW file with adjustments applied and without having to go through PS type functionality and layers. C1 can produce excellent directly printed results without any need for any intermediate files – just the RAW and the edit adjustment file.
No doubt the scope of the local adjustments will be increased as time goes by but in the meantime they do seem to have some interesting attributes built it that just seem to work without having to rely on user settings to tweak the results to suit different circumstances. That may have bene luck but I suspect it was judgement.