hi i'm robin whalley welcome to lenscraft this week i'm sharing some tips about landscape
photo editing in capture one if you follow me already you'll probably know that i'm a
landscape photographer and that i shoot using a fuji xt camera when i first switched to fuji
i was skeptical about the claimed image quality because my results were poor the problem i had
and didn't realize was that lightroom doesn't make a great job of processing the fuji xt
raf files at the time i blamed the camera it hadn't occurred to me how much difference the
raw converter can actually make until i tried capture one now despite capture one improving
the quality of my raw conversions i found it a struggle to use i had used capture one some
years earlier but it had progressed significantly and i needed to relearn a lot of things and when
i talk about relearning the software i don't mean learning how the controls work i'm talking about
learning all the tricks and techniques that may seem minor but can make a big difference to the
quality of your landscape photos in this video i want to share some of the things that i've learned
whilst editing my landscape photos with capture one and trying to keep the results looking natural
this is the starting image which is a raw file captured using the fuji xt2 and the fuji 18-135
lens if we look at the metadata in capture one you can see that the focal length is 20 mm
this lens isn't known as a great performer and it's probably at its worst at the wide end of its
focal length it tends to have a lot of distortion and isn't as sharp as at the longer focal lengths
especially in the corners of the frame i also used an aperture of f-14 which is quite small for this
scene so we might see some softness creeping him because of diffraction now the problem with this
shot is that it's a high contrast scene with deep shadows ideally i should have used a filter on the
lens but i didn't so this is the best we have to work with my first step when producing all
my images in capture one is to check the lens profile and settings in the lens correction
panel you'll see there's a drop down at the top where you can select the lens profile the two that
are usually worth checking and a manufacturer profile which i'm assuming is the one that's
embedded in the raw file and the default profile which is the one that ships with capture one
the capture one profile tends to be better with some lenses with this lens it also enables the
sharpness slider which i'll come to in a moment by default the distortion setting is at 100 which
is correcting the lens distortion if i move the slider over to 0 it turns off the correction
a useful tip when comparing these two settings is to click the slider wording
when i click the word distortion you can see the slider temporarily returns to the default setting
until i release the mouse this is something that works with all of the sliders in capture one
comparing the two settings i prefer the image with the distortion removed another useful tip when
adjusting sliders is that you can double click on the slider itself to reset it to its default value
i'm also finding the browser thumbnails over on the right are a little bit distracting so i'm
just going to hide them by pressing command and b if you're using a windows pc that's control and b
using this shortcut will toggle the browser off and on now let's check for any softness
in the corner of the frame when i zoom to 100 magnification looking at the corner of this
image it isn't too bad this is probably because the distortion correction is cropping away the
corners if i can see any softness though i can reduce it by using the sharpness falloff slider
watch what happens in the corner if i set it to the maximum value and then toggle it off and on
whilst we're looking at the corners of the frame you can probably see a coloured fringe along some
of the branches in the trees be sure to have the chromatic aberration reduction turned on to remove
it sometimes that doesn't entirely remove the problem and you're left with a faint purple fringe
if that happens also use the d fringe slider the final option i want to discuss in the lens section
of capture one is the diffraction correction this can be a great way to sharpen up the
detail in an image that's become slightly softened because of your lens suffering from diffraction
watch what happens to the fine detail in the tree branches when i turn it on they snap into
focus and if anything just become a little bit too sharp now i'm going to leave the diffraction
correction turned on for the moment whilst we look at the sharpening settings in the sharpening
section capture one applies a default sharpening based on the type of raw file you're processing
if this were a raw file from my panasonic g9 you'd see different default settings here but
just because these are the default settings in capture one it doesn't mean they're the best
with landscape photos where there's a lot of fine detail i'd like to change the settings
to emphasize that detail typically i reduce the threshold to around 0.5 so that the sharpening
is being applied to less well-defined edges i also like to reduce the radius to 0.5 so that
the sharpening halo isn't as wide along the edges finally with an image like this that's been shot
at base iso i'll remove the noise reduction the noise reduction has a slight softening effect but
it isn't needed in this image if i like to find i can see noise i'll add the noise reduction back
with these settings applied i can now increase the sharpening and mount slider until the fine
details become crisp at this point i'm just going to switch back to the lens correction
and disable the diffraction correction because i don't think it's required
i personally feel that diffraction correction can make fine details appear too strong and a
little unnatural so only use it where you really need to sharpening alone often produces a nicer
effect where the distant detail is a little bit softer and more difficult to see with
all that done i'm now going to look at the base color profile i'm using for the raw conversion
in the base characteristics panel i can see the type of camera and the profile curve in the
profile curve drop down you can see the various fuji simulations supported by the xt2 i found
with my fuji landscapes that the three variations of the film curve work well most of the time if i
hover over these with my mouse you can see the difference between them now at one time i would
have been tempted to choose the film extra shadow option to help control the contrast in the scene
now i feel the contrast helps make this image and opening the shadows everywhere causes the image to
lose something instead i'm going to use the film standard and i'll correct the deep shadows shortly
using an adjustment layer next i'm going to warm the light slightly by increasing the kelvin slider
to around 6000 but what i don't want to do is warm the entire image too much if i increase
the kelvin slider further it makes the trees look great but it doesn't suit the sky or the shadow
areas this is another place that i need to use an adjustment layer to selectively warm just the
light that's falling on the trees now it's time to correct the tones in the image currently the
image has a little bit too much contrast with the shadows appearing blocked up in the wall
and the reflection on the canal the sky is also a little bit too bright causing the blue to fade
out to white i'll start by fixing the dark shadow areas in the scene by slowly increasing the shadow
slider but if i increase this too far it makes the shadows appear unnatural so i'm going to limit it
to around a setting of 15. it's tempting to try to correct the darkest areas of the image but that's
a mistake if you want the natural result try to ignore the very dark areas and instead correct
the overall image now for the highlights and blue sky which i want to address with the white slider
whilst i can reduce this all the way down to -100 the sky loses the white above the canal
which again looks unnatural instead i'm going to set this to -50 and then the highlight slider
to around -20 this is enough to recover most of the blue in the sky without making it appear false
i'm now going to add an adjustment layer to address some of the problems i mentioned earlier
the first layer i want to add is to selectively open the deep shadows the way i'm going to do this
is by adding a new filled adjustment layer this means that any adjustment i apply to the layer
applies to the entire image i'll call this layer wall i'm going to apply my adjustments whilst
zoomed in at 100% on the wall area zooming onto the area i want to adjust stops my judgment being
clouded by how the rest of the image appears notice that i'm using the blacks and shadows
slider to lighten the wall but this also reduces the contrast and makes the area look a little flat
to counter this i'll increase the clarity and structure slider
another problem when you open the shadows in this way is that they don't have much saturation
so i'll increase that slider as well i can then see clearly that the colour balance in the wall
has a pink tint i'll therefore reduce the tint and the kelvin slider to make it appear greener
and bluer when doing this be careful because it's extremely easy to make the adjustment too strong
if i know zoom out you can see the effect this is having on the entire image the next step is
to restrict the adjustment by right clicking on the layer and selecting the clear mask option
this allows me to then use the brush tool to paint the adjustment onto selected areas
if i right click on the image when i'm using the brush tool i open the brush settings i
find when using capture one it's better to use a high opacity setting and control the brush
strokes using a low flow i can now paint onto the wall and the tree trunk to open up shadows there
i'll also apply a little adjustment to the shadows and reflection on the opposite back of the canal
i don't want to apply too much though as it will make the area
appear too green and it will just look wrong
now it's time for another layer to enhance the golden light on the trees as before i'll add a
new filled adjustment layer and zoom into the trees that i want to enhance i'll also rename
the layer to be trees so i can remember in the months to come what it's suggesting
i'm going to start by increasing the kelvin slider to around 6700 which gives the light on the trees
a nice golden feel i might also reduce the tint slider as it's appearing a little bit too pink now
because this area has sun falling onto it i want it to be a little lighter and have more contrast
i also want to increase the saturation to make those colors stand out a little bit more as i've
been stressing in this video limit the strength of these adjustments to help retain a natural feel
if i zoom out you can see the image has a golden feel now but it doesn't suit all areas
when i clear the mask it hides the effect and i can again use
the paint brush tool to paint in the effect onto the trees
i then have an opacity setting on each of the layers that i can use to balance
their overall effects on the image now i could carry on with further adjustments but i'll stop
there the key things to remember when adjusting landscape photos to achieve a natural look are
ask yourself how this image would look in nature rather than thinking oh i like that effect let's
make it stronger make small adjustments and build them up using layers rather than making
a single large change divide your image into separate areas and then adjust those areas using
independent layers once you can achieve a lot with a raw conversion you can also treat it as a
first step after raw processing it often helps to continue your editing with the likes of photoshop
affinity and the nik collection i hope you've enjoyed today's video and found a few useful tips
you can use i'm robin whalley you've been watching lenscraft i'll see you soon for another video