in this tutorial I'll be showing you various color grading options that are
available to you in phase ones capture one pro 8
I again my compulsion of a cheer from vibrant shot you can find me on facebook
at facebook.com slash fiber shot and also a vibrant shot com
so in today's tutorial I'm going to be showing you a couple of different
options that you have available as far as color adjustments and color grading
go in these ones capture one pro 8 now we're using this image here which I have
our retouch to the extent that I've done some dodging and burning some healing on
it directly inside of capture one
so if we revert these changes you'll see that this is sort of the original
portrait and this is the portrait after i polished up a little bit with some of
these different adjustment layers
I do talk about this process in a previous tutorial I'll show the link to
that tutorial down here below where i go into dodging and burning for for
portraits and you can then see how that all got created inside of there
so our focus here is really on adjusting the colors here
maybe changing some of the colors and then grading the image
so when you're doing this inside of Photoshop you basically have two options
you can either apply grading on a luminosity basis so you can you know it
just your highlights shadows mid-tones separately and apply color cast to each
of those or you can target individual colors and adjust them so if you use a
tool like selective color in photoshop then you can grab an individual color
and adjust that color itself so we're going to look at for both approaches
inside of capture one and you can sort of ultimately choose what you think
works best for you and for me personally I find a combination of all of the
options really is is it's very nice for creating a good quality
kleancolor great so we're going to start off on this end here which is where a
lot of the color adjustments are done so in the the colors
tab we have a couple of options for us we have this color balance tool and we
have the color editor white balance
obviously it's I wouldn't call it a color grading tool because it's more of
a correction tool now in our case for this image here we see that we probably
could adjust the white balance a little bit because the whole image looks a
little bit green a little bit yellow
so that's really just a kelvin and a tent adjustment but I want to go to use
that to show you what you can do with a color balance so in general the color
balance is designed to add a color cast to your image
now we're going to use that color cast to offset some of the other issues that
we have with this image in the first place
so if we go around the circle we see a variety of different colors we've got
you know yellow here green cyan blue and then we've got in our Magenta's and red
and orange
so if we think that our image has a greenish yellow color cast we're sort of
in this corner of things so we can do is just take the center point and drag it
to the the opposite side of that to offset it so we're going to grab that
and we're going to drag it down and sort of into here and to see whether or not
that's helped hold down the option or Alt key and then click on the report
button here
this is our original and this is where we're at now so it's very subtle
adjustments as you can see we've we've also offset that that greenish tint that
we have to it a little bit and I think overall it looks much better
so that's again you should be probably doing that with white balance but i
think this is a good example of you know showing you how that works now you
really only need to make very small changes there you can fine tune that a
bit using this dial here too so we can for example take that to two percent if
we want to push that a little bit more and I think that's probably a bit too
much so I'm going to just go back to the one percent we have here before so
that's all I really used color balance for is if there's kind of a weird cast
i'm having trouble moving with white balance
I do like to use it to offset that but in general not a tool I use all the time
I generally have my preference is to use color editors levels and curves for
things
so another thing we're going to do here is go ahead and tweak this shirt color
here because i think it's a little bit overpowering so it's a good opportunity
for us to look at some adjustment layers i'm gonna go ahead and create a new
adjustment layer inside my
local adjustments tab and so we just want a new layer here and we'll call it
top and we're going to do is going to go ahead and select invert mask and that's
going to make my entire layer filled so by default the layer is unfilled I want
it filled because i want to pretty much target everything except for the eyes
with this adjustment
since they're blue I don't want them to change I'm just gonna go ahead and hit
and hit the M key and that's going to show us our masks and then we're going
to use the erase mask tool
let's just go ahead and crank up our opacity to a hundred and we're just
going to go ahead and brush out our eyes because we don't want them effective
so now essentially everything is going to get affected with the exception of
our eyes
so that's good enough you don't have to be you know super precise with this you
know really nothing else is going to get affected because nothing else is blue so
we can hit the M key again
that's going to take us out of our masks and then we're going to go into our
Advanced section here and we're going to go ahead and pick our shirt color
so grab the blue color there and you know if we want we can stretch this out
a little bit more to affect sort of a broader range of blues pull this out a
tiny bit just to be on the safe side and now you can just kind of adjust the
saturation take that down we can also you know lighten or darken it
I personally I don't think I want to do either i'm going to leave the luminosity
level unchanged and then we can change the he was well so we can shift it in
this direction which is going to give us more of a green tone and if we go in
this direction it's going to give us more of a bluish tone kind of the
magenta tone so you can always tell which direction you're going just by
looking at the circle so we start pulling it this way you can imagine that
this guy is going to start you know twisting clockwise and if you go this
way it's going to start twisting it counterclockwise
so I'm going to actually pull a little bit this way and give it a bit of a
green tone I think that green tones going to blend better with you know sort
of the the background of the image is going to stand out less so that's our
adjustment on that if we want to see what that's doing we can just kind of
turn that off turn it back on and you can see that that's just sort of muting
that that talk down the next thing i want to do is
start playing with some of these individual colors in my shadows and
highlights and sort of neutralizing some of the things that are going on here so
i'm going to go back into my exposure section and when I start off with levels
and i'm going to actually use levels to get us to a nice neutral baseline and
then we'll use curves to add a little bit more styling
so what we're going to do is we're gonna use these individual colors here and
start playing with those so if we feel that the entire background here is
feeling a bit green
we can offset that by modifying that these are obviously shadows we're going
to modify this end here to take that away so if we actually start nudging
this guy this way we're going to add more green and that's obviously not we
want so we're going to use the bottom end of it here and this is actually
gonna remove green and magenta
so if we ship this a little bit and you can see it's cranking up the magenta in
the shadows always we don't want that much but finding sort of a happy amount
here probably at one or two even one I think is enough to offset some of the
green that was in there now the whole background is feeling a little bit to
read to me I think you know we've we've added some magenta so it also feels a
little bit red so let's go back to our reds and see if we can play with those
so now we're going to be adding sign if we start moving this
so over here at three or two it's not looking too bad I don't think
- is pretty safe i think three is starting to apply a little bit of color
grading but i think i'm pretty happy with with having it there
I'm so I think my shadows are actually looking pretty good now we can play with
our blue but i don't think there's really an issue with blue I mean if we
want to add a little bit of yellow maybe into into their we can just nudge this
guy to one that actually takes it to a fairly neutral level I think
let's just go ahead and see here so what I'm basically doing is I'm kind of
hovering over the background and i'm looking at the RGB values up here so if
I actually look at this
we can see that our RGB we have more red than we have green and
we have more green than we have blue so what we can do is we can we can sort of
add blue or take away blue depending on you know what you think is going to look
at so let's just take blue to somewhere around one and then take a look at that
and as you can see they're kind of all nudging closer together so we've got a
fairly neutral background here and I think that looks good
and then we start playing with the highlights so depending on how you like
your highlights - look I think they're pretty close to what i want them to be
but we can for example warm them up a little bit by nudging the top slider
here and it's going to add more yellow to our highlights so let's go ahead and
just add a bit there and then on green let's see what we get here so this is
going to add some magenta for us into our highlights and I don't think I
particularly like that let's see if we want to add some green to our highlights
again
I don't think that that's really looking good let's check read
so now we're going to be pushing some sign in to our highlights
by using the top slider and actually I don't really mind that too much so I'm
going to probably leave that around there
now I think that actually gets us to a pretty good point where i think the
image looks nice and pleasing in a neutral form like there's really not a
ton of color grading applied but I think everything looks natural and clean so at
this point what I often do is go in and start playing with the skin tone a
little bit so we can go back into our color editor and I'm going to use my
Advanced section here
I do use the skin tone section values are primarily for uniformity because
it's targeting a fairly broad range which we want for uniformity we want to
target you know anywhere from yellow to red because we want to bring those
colors closer together
so that's why i like to use skin tone for uniformity but what I want to do
when I make let's say a saturation adjustment I don't want to do that on
this broad range because then it's going to change the saturation of everything
and in my case what I really want to do is I want to target more the yellow
tones so i can just take a little bit of saturation out of those so that i'm
going to use the advanced tab and using the color picker we're going to sample
any skin tone as a starting point so let's go ahead and just grab a slice
there
and then we're gonna just this little section to tighten up a tiny bit so
we're going to just use this little circle to pull it out and that will just
broaden our saturation range and then when they bring this in and reduce our
smoothness which will essentially take down the feather between colors here and
then again I'm just going to reduce the size of this slice so it's really just
targeting orange and yellow and move it somewhere like that
so what I basically want to do is I want to fix two things here i think on the
skin tone I want to think the saturation level to give it a little bit more of a
fashion portrait kind of feel i think it's it's still a little too saturated
for a fashion portrait and i also want to fix the heel so from a huge
standpoint I think it's a little bit to magenta still so we're going to use our
hero tation options we take it this way obviously we're going to add more
magenta which we certainly don't want
if we get this way we're going to add more green which is what I want
so back over here is sort of our starting point so we're going to just
kind of keep nudging this until we think it looks good
and personally I think around to is a good level I think it's going to
neutralize that magenta 10 that we had to our skin and now i'm going to nudge
down the saturation slider to desaturate of it's obviously going too far and we
can see that it's you know not looking too good
so we want to make a fairly subtle adjustment here i think i'll probably
minus five or so should be good
you know that I think looks good to me so just turn this on and off
there is the before and there's the after so as you can see fairly subtle
adjustment but that's generally how I tend to adjust the skin tone through a
combination of having a yellow slice and a red one now in this case i don't
really need to change anything in the red colors red colors being things like
the lips or around here
I'm in the cheekbones where the blush usually is so if you need to change the
Reds just create another slice in the same manner just sample and then tighten
up the slice so it only covers this sort of thing area and make an adjustment on
that so now that we've got a fairly I think clean image that you know is a
sort of neutral base line we can go back into our exposure section here and this
is where we can apply some more drastic grading to our image
now first thing i want to do i think is most the contrast and again since my
level slider was
more for you know establishing a baseline I try I try not to make
adjustments on and I try and keep it as sort of my clean baseline but to be
honest with you i really like the way you can adjust contrast through levels
so we're gonna do that here anyway so we're going to use these outer points on
our RGB time make sure you're not in the individual colors because we don't want
to change colors in this case we just want to change overall luminosities on
the highlights and shadows
so I'm going to use this now you're probably wondering why I don't just
increase the contrast slider and the reason for that is I don't really like
the end result from moving the contrast like I find it increases saturation a
little bit too much and so I prefer to just do that using the levels are curved
so we're going to reset this and what we can do on levels is if we actually use
the top ones these are more the recovery tabs so if we find that we want to shift
our histogram on the highlight and two with the left and try and you know get
rid of some clip highlights we can use this top one as you can see that's going
to push our histogram to the left and that's actually to take contrast out for
us which we don't actually want what we want to do is we want to boost the
contrast so we're gonna use the bottom end here and that's going to shift our
histogram over to the right and just essentially you know increase the the
highlights in our image so I'm going to move it over a little bit here as you
can see we've already boosted our highlights pretty dramatically so maybe
maybe that's a little too much
let's just take it to around there and we're going to also use curves to adjust
contrast so let's just get sort of 2a you know halfway point here with levels
and then we're going to go back to the curve
now I want to do the same thing with shadows and a lot of people complain
that you can't take the shadow slider negative like you can in Lightroom it
really doesn't matter because the best way to do that is to just use the
opposite end on levels here just on the shadow and we're going to take this
slider we're gonna nudge it and that's going to basically pull the histogram to
the left as well and that's going to just sort of deep in our blacks use the
top one again that will lighten the blacks shit the entire histogram to the
right so we're gonna do this just a little bit probably you know three or
two just to give us a little bit more drama and I think that's pretty good
let's just go ahead and see what our levels is doing in our image in general
so this is where I'm is started
by holding down alt an option that's or alt or option that's what i'm doing here
and just kind of using the reverb key so going back so we started this is what
it's doing for us so you can see what a big difference
just making that levels adjustment has done now we're going to hear and apply
some more dramatic color gray so first thing we can do is again just tweak our
contrast a little bit we're going to create a little bit of an S curve here
going to bring up our highlights bring down our shadows
so that's again just deepening the shadows and ends are bringing up the
highlights for us again creating more contrast now in that process we've
probably introduced a little bit more saturation I'd like so we can just
offset that by lowering global saturation back down and we're gonna go
in to our individual colors and start playing with them so if we want
something that for example has you know a little bit of yellow in the highlights
we can just take this end here you pull that down so now our highlights have a
little bit of yellow and we can start playing with the shadows and injecting a
little bit of blue into those say something like this here
always fun trying to get the exact number that you want
now let's go into our greens let's see if we want to add or take away any
magenta and the shadows
maybe something like that
Ariel so let's say you want something that is a little bit more stylized you
can just gonna keep playing with those points we could go into the red and
start playing with it as well
we can drop a point in the middle start increasing and decreasing those colors
on the mid mid tones but this is kind of giving you an idea is the same process
that we would take inside of Photoshop except were using the curve directly
inside capture one
so again the reason i try to separate those is because i know that at this
point you know I i'm going to hear and I don't really like the way it looks I
have gone too far with my color grading I can always revert this and go right
back to my original sort of neutral level that I like so that was some
something like this then I had obviously a little bit of contrast in here as well
which I have to know
rebuild but as you can see really easy to you know restore that point that I
was happy with and try again
whereas if we start messing around with levels and curves and doing our neutral
. with both then it's hard to get back to that neutral . if we decide that we
don't really like where we're at so i use levels to get me to where my tones
are fairly neutralized and everything looks natural and then any additional
color grading I won't apply
I do that with my curve so basically this is where i'm going to leave the
image i personally don't like to add a ton of stylized kind of colors to my
image as you can see you can certainly do that using the RGB sections of the
the curve here so we compare this to our original image which is this one here
this is where we started
and this is where we're at so as you can see just has a lot more contrast tones
are a lot more pleasing and I think the subject just pops out of the image much
better than before
so thanks for watching and be sure to check out my full length course on
fashion photography and retouching at rgg edu via the link below and also
subscribe to this YouTube channel so you have more updates just like this one
we'll see you next time