Capture One vs Lightroom: Why the Brightness Slider Sets Them Apart

there are many reasons why capture one is the best raw image processor on the market one of those is the the brightness slider well i want to take a look at what the difference is between exposure and brightness and why the brightness slider which doesn't exist in lightroom makes a world of difference so i have an image here that i created in photoshop and it's just a uh has 11 different levels of black from 100 black to zero percent black so we have 190 80 70 all the way down to zero in these different sections i've created this custom layout in capture one specifically so that we can look at what is actually happening um at the histogram level i've i've got this big floating tool version of the histogram here that we can follow along with so you can see this a lot better let's just take a look at what all the sliders do individually first so if we bring the exposure down you can see everything gets pushed to the left and even at that you can see it's not going all the way and just going to pure black so it is protecting the image as much as it can if we go in the other direction those whites are getting pushed all the way up to the end and they're smashing into each other just absolutely smashing into each other brightness when we take a look at this what we can see is happening uh compared to exposure let's bring the brightness all the way down and we'll reset that and bring the exposure all the way down you can see the difference in those two histograms right there so let's take a look at it uh in opening up the image a bit so we can bring the exposure all the way up you can see that's just crushing all those whites together but in the brightness if we bring that up you'll see the histogram this this far point this 10 there is still image data in there if you look at the numbers at the top of the screen it shows you the rgb values two four seven two four seven two four seven two four seven and those are not two five five so brightness is protecting the highlights and if we go the opposite direction with brightness to decrease the brightness you can see it is also protecting the shadows this is a massive massive benefit because what you're doing here is you're working in the mid-tones it's not too different from working in the levels tool when if you're taking this middle slider and you're bringing it down you're seeing the histogram isn't hitting all the way over um and the same when we're you know darkening the image and lightening the image because what we're doing here is we're working in our mid-tones if we were to take a luma curve and we could we could see that we can replicate this process with a luma curve with our curves a bit more right so we can we if you're good with curves you can sort of control this aspect personally i'm just not a fan of curves because my ability to fine tune uh a curve is not as good as capture one's math and their color corrections and all the color scientists they're much smarter than me so i'm gonna let their math i'm gonna trust their math and i'm gonna let that do the work so i'm not gonna try to outsmart it that's the major difference between exposure and brightness now we can see the same thing happening with the hdr sliders if we decrease the highlights you can see those highlights coming down and dissolving to dark and if we open that up we can see we're blowing out some of the highlights here on the left so this here which is normally 20 is pure white now same thing with the shadows this is the process of opening up the shadows you can see these sections of the image are becoming less and less dark less impeded by those shadows and if we look at the white slider that white comes down what was pure white is all the way down to 197 now and if we go the other way we can see that white comes all the way into the 30 percent here and it's taking that 30 not all the way up to a pure white but it's getting pretty close and with the blacks by now we can see what is happening it's kind of a nerdy overview but the brightness tool makes such a massive difference when you're processing images especially portraits which are my specialty okay i'm going to make this histogram tool a little smaller so that i can come in here and grab this image of jeff and the histogram is now no longer taking up so much real estate on the screen but i want to see the bottom here all right so if we look at this image and we bring the exposure up remember it's pushing all of those values off to the right to overexpose them and you can see how this image gets overexposed and blown out very quickly if we reset that and do the same thing with the brightness slider you can see the mid tones are coming up but those dark areas are being protected and also this is all the way up full the uh light areas are being protected as well this is the whites of his eyes and that's not that hasn't gone to a pure white whereas with exposure that will blow the whites of his eyes out very quickly i encourage you to take a look at your images if you're if you're not a capture one user i highly recommend that you start using capture one get the 30-day trial i'll link below to capture one so that you can check it out and get the free trial get into capture one it's really important for you as a commercial photographer to be using capture one thanks for watching check out more capture one videos right here