In the streets of Florence. A second look at Capture One Pro 11

27 Sep In the streets of Florence. A second look at Capture One Pro 11

Posted at 10:33h in Learning, Portraits by Alessandro Michelazzi 0 Comments

After the first look at Capture One Pro 11 for Fujifilm that I’ve written about it here, I went on with a second editing.

With this session, the editing was a bit more tricky: I shot these photos just some weeks ago in the full Italian summer, in the streets of Florence. I was looking for hard contrast and the draws of the light on some inner streets of Florence.

As said in the previous article, there’s some point of strengths of Capture One Pro over Lightroom in the editing of the raw file: I think the algorithm of Highlight / Shadow recover is doing a better job giving back a more natural and balanced image. When I’m using too much highlight and shadow recovery in Lightroom I get that sort of HDR look that doesn’t look so much appeal (at least for me).

There’s another thing that I really appreciate in Capture One and is the layer workflow: I am able to use almost my usual way of editing the photos I did in the past years in Photoshop, using layers with masks that then I feather with blur to act on the specific area of the photo.

Capture One Pro 11 Fujifilm workflow breakdown

As you can see from the above Gif, I did a small breakdown of the editing I did to come to the final result of the cover photo of this post.

On the main first layer I did the general regulation of White Balance, Histogram balance and Highlight / Shadow Recover
On the second layer I applied two curves: one on the RGB to add a bit of contrast (and saturation) and the second curve only on Luma to add a bit of extra boost in the shadow
The third layer I used for the toning of the image. I used a warm toning with some blue cast on the shadow.
On the fourth layer, I’ve added a bit of light of the model face: I’ve used a smooth brush and further gave a feather to the mask to not give any hard separation where the regulation is applied.
The last passage shows another very useful feature of Capture One Pro 11 that allows you to proof the final image for the final Output resolution with the Output Unsharp Mask.

I had another image that was a bit tricky to edit and was the following:

The original image, shot in backlight (yes, I’m a big fan of backlight photography!:) ) present a purple halo that is lot of time present on the X-Trans backlight shots. With Capture One Pro 11 I was able to isolate the area with a mask and apply a slight desaturation with a color compensation.

My complain here of Capture One Pro 11 is that the repair layer (I’ve used to remove the streets sign on the background) can sample only one point for layer. In this way you’ve to build different layer to repair correctly the image.

So I’m getting little by little used about the Capture One Pro 11 workflow. Still my main concern about moving from Lightroom is my huge 15+ years of photography library. I saw there’s an option to read and convert a Lightroom library in Capture One but I’m not sure everything will be converted perfectly. In any way, I will give a try! 🙂