Live Editing Sessions - Capture One - 4th March 2021 (Including Soft Proofing and ICC Profiling)

We begin today's session with a dive into the live proofing that Capture One is actually doing the whole time you're using it. Essentially, there's a 2-stage proofing process: The ICC proof (which is live, based on the profile in the process recipe you have selected) and the "soft proof" or "output proof", which includes the recipe's sharpening, crop, resolution and dimensional changes.

While it can be a bit of a head-basher, understanding how these profiles affect your image can be essential to getting the output right.

From there, we look at Petr's image of the snow, and whether it's ready for print. Using the Proofing tool, we can look at how output sharpening will affect the image at a certain size, and how that same sharpening will really help when blowing up a photograph larger than its' native resolution. Remembering the ICC proof, we also look at Halo Reduction in terms of what that does to any oversharp edges and contrast points.

We then focus on two shots from Brian - one of some otters, another of the Grand Tetons - both needing some small "local adjustments" to bring out texture and sharpness while protecting the rest of the image from gaining excessive noise.

We take a look at the white balance on both shots, warming the snow slightly from its heavy blue/magenta tone.

Loading up Mark's sunset shot - it's a similar story, using a white balance adjustment to neutralise the heavily saturated scene, reducing the pink tint on the ground.

((...and at this point, those watching live got a brief insight into my current shopping habits, as trying to fix a bug in Capture One (with the straighten tool refusing to come back to life, fixing on the hand tool only) - resulted in a load of random screen shots appearing on the broadcast. Sorry about that, everyone, but rest assured the boots are not in the edit! ))

With that little hiccup cast aside, we took a look at how we could best straighten Tanya's image of a clock tower using the keystone tool. We look at the differences in using it out at the edges instead of closer to the middle, and the impact of the "amount" field being defaulted to 80 on the tool.

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We recommend requesting the HD option in Chrome via YouTube for full 1440p screen captures.

A trimmed replay will be available in our Facebook Group and YouTube channel following the live stream. (But give those systems a couple of hours to publish the trimmed version!)

To submit your image for a future session, head to https://www.paulreiffer.com/workshops... for more info.

Recorded using Capture One Pro 21 on an Apple Mac Pro 16-core Xeon running Big Sur with 192GB memory, 2x Radeon Pro Vega II Graphics cards and 4TB SSD.

And don't forget, the discussion continues on our Behind The Scenes Facebook group:   / paulreifferlive