The Flow of Light

May 29, 2012 by 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/

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Removing Color Moiré with Capture One 6

May 10, 2012 by 3 Comments

Capture One Pro 6 includes a powerful tool for fixing color moiré. It can be used both globally on an image and in a local adjustments layer.

Many cameras will, once in a while, show color moiré if high frequency patterns are part of the image.

Most DSLR and Micro Four Thirds cameras use antialiasing filters to avoid or minimize the appearance of moiré. However, many new cameras use lower strength antialiasing filters, or have no antialiasing filter at all in order to prioritize sharpness.

When using these cameras with the kit lens, typically you would hardly ever experience problems with moiré because these lenses are not sharp enough to provoke moiré on high frequency patterns.

But, if you use high quality primes to achieve really sharp images, you also run the risk of getting moiré.

The image on the left is shot with a mirrorless camera using a sharp prime lens. The high frequency pattern on the balcony fence shows strong color moiré. The image on the right is after fixing the color moiré in Capture One Pro 6.

When you suspect a moiré problem in one of your images, you need to zoom to 100% in Capture One’s viewer to verify that there is a real moiré problem – sometimes it is only the low-resolution preview that shows moiré.

Once you have located a real color moiré problem, like in the example below, select the Detail Tool Tab where the Moiré Tool is located.

Color moiré can be removed globally from an image but when you remove color moiré, you risk color bleeding in other parts of the image that you may not pay attention to. Therefore, it is better to apply the color moiré correction in a Local Adjustments Layer.

Step by step guide to remove color moiré:

1. Add a new Local Adjustments Layer

2. Inverse the mask. This is only an intermediate state. By inverting the mask, we work on the whole image which is necessary when setting up the parameters for the Moiré Tool.

3. Set the pattern size to maximum to make sure that the color moiré filter covers a whole period of false colors.

4. Now drag the amount slider until the color moiré disappears. You should use as low a value as possible to remove the moiré.

5. Reduce the pattern size to the minimum size that still fully removes the moiré. Now we have found the minimum values required to remove the moiré. This is important, as it will minimize the risk of unwanted color bleeding.

6. We only want to use the values locally, so invert the mask again.

7. Select a suitable bush size and brush away the color moiré.

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Photography through the lens cap

April 1, 2012 by 8 Comments

A Phase One IQ back on a medium format camera has an extremely large dynamic range allowing you to open up really deep shadows while still retaining the highlight details.

This extraordinary dynamic range makes for really extraordinary photos!

No matter how skilled we are, we all make mistakes and so did I the other day. I was shooting with my favorite lens which is marked with the “focusing sweet spot” (See my tip about finding the focussing sweet spot here) and I forgot to remove the lens cap. I noticed it after the first shot, and removed the cap. When I got home, I imported all the images, including the shot with the lens cap still on, to Capture One.

Out of pure curiosity, I tried to see if anything was actually captured in the image with the lens cap. To my big surprise, the extreme IQ180 back had actually captured some information. Naturally, the colors did not look anything like the normal visual spectrum but I still managed to get a quite interesting image with colors that remind me of IR photography. Some heavy noise reductions were needed but then I got this image:

The left image is the original capture shoot with the lens cap still on. To the right is the same image after opening up the shadows in Capture One Pro 6.

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Open up the deep shadows with Capture One’s Levels Tool

March 28, 2012 by 4 Comments

Capture One comes with several tools for dealing with high dynamic range images, such as the High Dynamic Range tool, the Local Adjustments Layers tool and traditional tools like the Levels and Curves tool.

Despite having these different tools, opening up shadow details while retaining highlights and mid tones can sometimes be quite a challenge when you go for an overall natural and pleasing look.

For some images, the “Mid tone” slider in the Levels tool is the right tool to use.

The “Mid tone” slider works mainly on the mid tones for minor changes, but it increasingly prioritizes the darker tones in larger adjustments.

The left image is without any adjustments. The image is exposed to ensure that the clouds do not clip. As a result, the castle ruin, cliffs and the coast are underexposed and almost without details.  The image to the right has been adjusted in Capture One.  The “Mid tone” slider in the Levels tool has been used to open up the deepest shadows, and this has been combined with some highlight recovery and color edits on the blue sky.

In a previous blog post, I showed a trick about how the LCC tool can be used to deal with images with a large dynamic range. This LCC trick will often lead to fantastic results, but sometimes it causes a problematic halo effect around hard contrast edge as is the case with this picture.

On the image to the left, it is easy to see the halo effect on the castle ruin. The LCC has been used to open op the shadows, but because the images contains such a high contrast between the edges of the hill, the ruin and the bright sky, a strong halo appears. Therefore, another method to correct this image is required.

By using the “Mid tone” slider in the Levels Tool, I primarily brighten up the darkest part of the image. Naturally, using the “Mid tone” slider also brightens the mid tones and highlights. To counter this, I also apply some highlight recovery with the Highlight slider in the High Dynamic Range tool and some negative exposure compensation. The result is much better details in the shadows without the halo effect.

If I need still more details in the shadows, I try to use the curve tool too. The curve preset “Shadows -Brighter” is a good starting point as it is specially designed to open the deepest shadows in an image.

Finally, I add some saturation and set the highlight slider in the Levels tool to ensure that the final image utilizes the full data range.

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Photography Travelogues: Black-Browed Albatross

February 16, 2012 by 5 Comments

West Point Island, Falklands

I’m not an expert wildlife photographer, but I love photographing wildlife! And they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I know enough to know I’m just a beginner when it comes to fauna and flora.

As with so many genres of photography, to be a true expert requires thousands of hours in the field and, for wildlife, a good understanding and knowledge of your subject is a great help. I know next to nothing about birds, least of all the majestic Black-Browed Albatross. Its huge wing span is deceptive and it isn’t until you’re up close to these birds that you realise just how large and impressive they really are.

The cliffs of West Point Island, Falkland Islands

As part of my Antarctica circuit with Peregrine Expeditions, we left Ushuaia in Argentina and sailed north east to the Falkland Islands. The Falklands is an amazing group of hundreds of tiny islets, many only a kilometre or so wide. Some are almost completely flat, others have towering cliffs, many are inhabited. One wonders what people do to survive as the nearest town (Stanley, the capital of the Falklands) can be easily a day away by boat!

And the weather is so changeable that you simply can’t predict it. During our few hours on West Point Island, we experienced rain, hail, snow and brilliant sunshine. It was wonderful!

Looking across the bay to the tiny farm on West Point Island

West Point Island has a generous harbour around which the four or so farm dwellings stand, but it is on the other side of the island where the Black-Browed Albatross has its colony. It’s possible to get remarkably close to the birds’ nests, but there are strict rules against approaching too closely.

One thing that’s certain on these expeditions is that you can never get intentionally lost. This is because most of the passengers are wearing bright red suits to keep out the elements. I guess the birds have become used to the strange crimson characters that walk carefully around the outskirts of their colony!

I found a spot on the edge of a cliff looking over the colony and the sea below. Every now and then an albatross would glide effortlessly past and so I set myself the task of tracking the birds with my camera and lens. I used a Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III with a 300mm f2.8 telephoto. The combination feels a little heavy towards the end of the day, but the results are spectacularly good.

What I enjoyed the most sitting on the cliff edge was the opportunity from time to time to look down on the albatross. So rarely am I above birds that I found myself intentionally waiting for one of the huge albatross to soar below. It’s not the perfect shot, but I like the way the broken water and cliff edges are slightly blurred. The only element within the frame that is tack sharp is the albatross – the 300mm f2.8 is very good wide-open and the 1/2500 second shutter speed (helped with the lens’s Image Stabilization) ensured there was no motion blur either.

The Film Strip mode in Capture One makes sorting your files very expedient.

Of course, not every photograph I took was a winner. In fact, my success ratio was particularly poor, which is why I like the Filmstrip Viewer in Capture One – it lets me slide through my photos and I press ‘3’ every time I think I have a good one. Once rated, I can have a closer look later on!

To show how I worked on this file in Capture One, I’ve made a little video which you can access here on the Better Photography website.

Peter Eastway is a professional photographer and photography magazine publisher based in Sydney, Australia. To see more of his photography, visit http://www.petereastway.com. Peter also offers an online Landscape Photography MasterClass. Details can be found at http://www.betterphotography.com.

Another angle of the amazing black-browed albatross

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EIP file format – Enhanced Image Package

February 2, 2012 by 15 Comments

With Capture One, you have the unique option of moving your image folders including all necessary information to other computers.

If you only want to move a single file to another computer, you have a simpler possibility which is to use Capture One’s .EIP file format. The .EIP file format packs your original RAW file with all necessary settings files including LCC files and custom ICC profiles into one file.

The .EIP file format doesn’t change your RAW files; it simply uses standardized zipping technology to pack all needed components into one file:

The possibility of moving just a few selected images including all necessary components to another computer can be a great advantage in your workflow.  Many photographers use laptops for shooting tethered with their camera and they often do a few adjustments upfront directly at the laptop. When they have selected the images they want to continue working with, they move them to a desktop computer with a high quality monitor.

Even though Capture One can use the .EIP format directly during import or capture, I always keep my files in the manufacturer’s RAW format until I need to move them. Then I just pack the images into the .EIP file format.

From the file menu, you can select the “Pack as EIP” to pack your RAW file including all necessary settings files into one single .EIP file.

After moving the .EIP file to another computer, you can simply use Capture One and browse to the location of the .EIP file. Capture One will display it with the identical settings as on the laptop where it was originally generated. You can keep the image file in the .EIP format or, if you want to see the original file format of the camera, you can simply unpack the .EIP file with Capture One. During the unpacking, all the needed components are installed correctly in Capture One.

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Custom ICC profiles on multiple computers

January 26, 2012 by 3 Comments

The Color Editor in Capture One Pro 6 allows you to set up your own custom-made camera ICC profiles enabling a faster and more efficient workflow.

Another advantage is the option to share these custom ICC profiles among several computers.

If a custom ICC profile is used in an image, the profile will be included in the settings files located within the image folder. Therefore, you can move the image folder to another computer that runs Capture One and still have all the necessary components available for viewing the image with the custom ICC profile.

If you want to include one of your custom ICC profiles on another computer running Capture One, you should simply locate the relevant profile and install it on the other computer.

How to import a custom ICC profile from an image to Capture One:

When viewing an image with a custom ICC profile on a different computer than where the image was first generated, you will see the image with the right colors because the custom ICC profile is part of the settings files in the image folder.  If you want to use the custom ICC profile on other images, you need to import the profile and install it. You find the camera ICC Profile selector in the Color Tool Tab’s Base Characteristics tool. In the bottom of this selector, you find the Import option as shown in the image below. Select the image with the custom ICC profile and chose Import.

On a Mac system the custom ICC profile will be placed in:

Users/UserX/Library/Colorsync

On a Windows system the profiles will be placed in:

Users/UserX/AppData/CaptureOne/Color Profiles

How to install a custom ICC profile on a computer:

If you want to use one of your custom ICC profile on a different computer, you need to copy it manually to the above locations depending on the system.

If Capture One is already running, you need to restart it in order to make the new profiles visible in the ICC selector within the Base Characteristics tool.

If you do not follow the standard naming conventions, the ICC profile will still be available, but you will need to select it under the option “Other” rather than under the camera name.

For more information on the naming convention see last week’s tip on Color Edits as ICC profiles

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Color Edits as ICC profiles.

January 19, 2012 by 8 Comments

A unique feature for Capture One Pro 6 is the ability to create custom camera ICC profiles.

In Capture One Pro 6, you can make advanced color corrections on RAW or JPEG images.  As with any tool in Capture One, you can save your corrections from the Color Editor tool as a Preset for easy reuse the next time you have a similar image in need of color corrections. But any color correction done in the Color Editor can also be saved as a camera ICC profile.

This is very convenient as the created ICC profiles can be selected directly in the Base Characteristics tool or in the Capture tool tab in the Next Capture Adjustments tool when you shoot tethered.

If you, for instance, are photographing food, you often want the food to look nice and more colorful than it really does. Use the Color Editor to tweak the colors and save the result as an ICC profile. The next time you shoot food tethered, just select the desired food ICC profile to correct the colors as you shoot.

The left image shows the colors from the default ICC profile for the camera. The soft cool light doesn’t give the apple a very appealing color. The right image was shot using the special ICC profile made for this particular lighting condition.

How to create a custom ICC profile for your camera

I open the Color Editor and start in the Basic tab to add some global saturation. The saturation slider in the Basic tab is safer to use as it is specifically designed to prevent oversaturation of the colors. Then I move on to the Advanced tab where I use the color correction picker to select the color of the green apple and push the saturation, hue and lightness until I get a fresh looking green color. When satisfied I save my corrections as a Color Editor Preset. This step is not essential, but it is easier if I need to iterate my color edits.

To create an ICC profile I simply click on the Action menu for the Color Editor tool and chose “Save as ICC profile” as shown below.


ICC profile naming

When creating a new ICC profile it is important to use the right naming convention to ensure that the profile will show up in the drop down menu for the used camera.

By default Capture One suggest a name consisting of

1)     Unique camera model name

2)     “-“

3)     “color corrected” (This is the only part which can be changed)

The application uses the unique camera model name and the “-“ to match the ICC profile with the right camera model.

The last part of the name should be changed to a meaningful description of the profile.

In the example above, I save my Color Edits made on an image from a Canon EOS 5D camera changing the name to a meaningful one:

Next time I shoot tethered I can select this ICC profile directly in the Capture Tool tab in the Next Capture Adjustments tool. By doing this, I ensure that every new shot will show the colors exactly as I want them.

Learn more about Capture One

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Search and Filtering in Capture One

December 1, 2011 by 9 Comments

The Search and Filtering functionality in Capture One 6 is an often overlooked feature. Learn how to use it, and you will find it to be a very powerful tool that can help you improve your everyday workflow.

You can search among your images in any selected Image Folder or Album; or you can search among all the images in all the folders associated with a Session.

Searching a selected Image Folder can be done with a simple free text search or by setting up multiple specific search criteria. A free text search will match the search text with the context of more than 50 search criteria within Metadata and file names.

To show the result of search criteria applied to all the images in a Session, Capture One 6 uses Smart Albums. Smart Albums are dynamically updated and will therefore always show the latest search results.

The dynamic nature of Smart Albums make them very useful for workflow related search and filtering. By default, a new Session includes a Smart Album named “Five Star Images”. This Smart Album will always show all 5-star rated images in a Session. Immediate after rating a new image with 5 stars, it will also be visible in the “Five Star Images” Smart Album.

Searching within a folder: To enter the search setup dialogue box, click the search magnifier icon, above the thumbnail browser as shown above (if Capture One’s thumbnail browser is placed to the right of your screen, you may need to click again on the magnifier in the small search dialogue to get the larger search box)

Selecting images:

In my workflow, I use the Smart Albums in the process of selecting which images from a shoot I would like to work with.

First, I create a new Session for my shoot. When using the Search and Filtering options, I can search among all the images in this Session except those in the Trash Folder.

Then, I set up an extra Smart Album for holding my 4 and 5 star rated images.

The image above shows the search criteria for finding all images rated with 4 or 5 stars (using one of the preset criteria). To extend the search to all images in the Session, press the “Create Smart Album” button.

When browsing through my image folders, I use the keyboard shortcuts to rate the images with stars. I only rate the images with 3, 4 or 5 stars, and I am not extremely methodical when rating, as I will complete the rating in at least 2 steps.  In the first round of rating, it is not too important if I initially rate a 5-star image with only 4 stars or the other way around.

Next, I select the Smart Album containing all my 4 and 5 star rated images. Now, I have isolated the best images from the shoot and it becomes much easier to reevaluate the images in a second round of selection to really nail down the best 5 star images.

When I am done rating, all the images I want to work with are placed in the default Smart Album called “Five Star Images”.

In the Library Tool under Session Albums, you can see the list of Smart Albums and normal Albums created for the Session. Note that the icon for a Smart Album differs from the normal Album icon by the addition of a small cog-wheel in the lower right corner of the icon.

Separate Variants:

Smart Albums can also be used to separate variants. This can be a big advantage if you want to show a client images from a shoot in a series with the same look or style applied. I use it quite often to separate Black and White image variants from the Color variants.

Here I have generated 2 variants of the same image; one of them converted into Black and White.  In order to separate the color version from the Black and White version, I have color tagged the Black and White version with Purple

An easy way to do this is by associating a specific color tag to those variants I want as Black and White images. I typically use the last color in the color tag list (Purple) as it is easy to select from the drop-down list and it still allows me to use Yellow and Green for tagging my final selects.

Here I have selected the Smart Album named BW. This Album is set up to find all Purple tagged images. As you can see only the BW variants are visible in this Smart Album.

Using color tags to separate the BW variants is just one way of doing it.  Another method could be to add the keyword “BW” to the Black and White variants and set up a Smart Album containing all images with “BW” in the Keywords. This solution requires a little more work, but will free up the color tags for further selection possibilities.

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Optimize your workflow with Albums

November 24, 2011 by 3 Comments

One of the key organizing elements in a Capture One 6 Session is an Album. It looks like a normal image folder, but it is just a virtual folder with internal references to the real location of the images.

  • You can create as many Albums in a Session as you wish.
  • You add images to an Album simply by drag and drop.
  • An Album can contain images from different locations.
  • Images in an Album can come from any folder location both inside as well as outside the Session folder.
  • When deleting an image in an Album, you only remove it from the Album.  You do not delete it from the original folder.

If you move an image containing multiple variants to an Album, the Album will also show the variants. Variants of an image will always stay together.

An image in an Album will always reflect the current corrections made on the image at the original location. There is only one original, and changing an image in an Album will also change the appearance of the image at the original location.

I typically use Albums to create small collections of images sharing a common theme, which could be something as simple as my Black and White images. I love Black and White so in each new Session, I always create an Album for Black and White images even though I may have gone out shooting without having Black and White shots in mind. I keep all my originals in the Import folders inside my Session folder. When I go through my Import folders, I immediately add files to my Black and White Album when I see images which will work great as Black and White. By adding the files to an Album rather than moving them to a new folder, I still have all my originals in one location, which I like. Browsing through the Import folder again, I continue to have all the images there, and I can make another selection, which I can add to a different Album.

By using Albums, I am able to keep one Album with images for Black and White work and another Album for working on images in full colors. I just need to create Variants: one Variant holding the Black and White version and one Variant holding the color version.

To add an Album you can right click on any Session Album, Favorite or folder and select the “New Album” from the dropdown menu.  You can also add an Album by selecting the Library Tool action menu icon.  The Session above already contains 4 Albums as indicated by the blue circle.

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