This image is from Namafjall, a geothermic area of Myvatn, Iceland...
taken with a long exposure, 15 minutes, with a 5.6 lens.
The underlying image quality is good, but it almost looks like daylight...
so it needs a bit of work, to create the right mood.
I use the highdynamic range tool, to pull the highlights back.
It allows me to see how the moonlight affects the image.
White balance is an important part of any landscape photography process...
and unfortunately it doesn't mend itself well to any formula...
you have to evaluate the colors based on your own memory and experience...
rather than using a greycard, which is appropriate for other types of photography.
Here I might need more Magenta, to get it to look light.
I adjust the Kelvin scale in order to make the picture 'warmer'...
but for this image, I will keep it 'cool'...
with a little of 'warmth' in the lights at the bottom.
These formations are the geothermic vents in the area...
and with a car headlight illuminating them from the back...
it gives a mysterious quality.
But the color balance is a matter of personal taste.
By quite often your saturation and contrast changes...
and they are important in setting the tone and feeling of any image.
With an image like this, it is important not to overdo it...
because that could potentially take some of the mystery out of it...
so it is always a matter of balance.
I am using the vignetting tool here
because the lens renders the image so perfectly making the scenery almost too flat,
due to the lens' quality, a 55 mm. Schneider Kreuznach.
But by using the vignetting tool, I can darken the corners subtlety...
which improves the mood.
You don't want to notice the vignetting, but holding the edges...
adds a feeling of light to the image.
For all photographs, it's important to control the contrast and saturation consistently...
with your memory and feelings of the event.
This particularly shoot had a sense of mystery and night time about it.
In order to maintain those senses, I might have to reduce the exposure a bit more...
to get that sense of night.
Now I can afford to increase the contrast...
and bring out the detail of the smoke leaving the fumerals.
The saturation tool in Capture One is really good...
because it enables you to increase the color saturation.
The way it works is, that it detects the less saturated colors...
and helps to pull them up.
So it is possible to apply quite a degree of additional saturation...
without the image looking unnatural.
I often use a preset around +15 points of saturation...
and as you can see it does emphasize the colors without making them look strange.
And of course color is an important part of bringing a photo to life.
Here the blues and the oranges are nicely balanced...
which shows, as the white balance itself is also correct.
Finally, I'll show you the easy 100% tool in Capture One.
Double click with the hand and it takes us to the image.
For me this is a extraordinary break through...
because this is a 15 minutes exposure image.
The lens is set at 5.6, the image is perfectly sharp...
the fine details are extraordinary, I have applied no additional capture sharpening at all...
and there is no noise at all even in the deepest shadows.
It is exciting, but it means I need to do a lot more work in the future...
doing night photography, and I already work hard enough...
so I am not sure whether it is an advance I'm really happy about.
If we look at the overall amount of information on this image...
I can see there are elements that aren't essential...
to the main message of the picture...
which is around the mountains and the fumerals...
so because the moonlight is intrusive...
I'll crop the top, using Capture One's crop tool which is very simple to use.
And also at the bottom, where there is a large area of snowfield that isn't working well.
If I click on the hand tool, it allows me to the see the photo as it is now.
The beauty of using a high resolution camera, is that I don't have to worry with cropping...
as I can crop up to 50% without any fear for the print quality will suffer.
If I am processing an image for output in Capture One...
I have a variety of ways of doing it.
One of the nicest features is that you can create your own recipes...
and those recipes, most photographers find are the ones they use on a regular basis.
If we create a process recipe, we open up the process folder within the process directory.
If I was creating an image for print and wanted TIFF rather than JPEG...
or I could create PSD, this is a new feature in Capture One 7...
but for this example I going to use TIFF.
I use a 16 bit output, no compression and Adobe 1998.
I use a resolution of 360 as it is the preferred resolution for my printer.
Fixed scale: 100% means that it is a native file.
If I want to open the file in e.g. Photoshop afterwards, that is possible too.