Editing A Photoshoot in Capture One / I Photographed a Friend I Hadn't Seen in 30 YEARS!!!

a couple days ago i photographed someone i hadn't seen in 30 years we actually grew up together we were in grade one together i believe we were in kindergarten together she's a teacher now prior to the pandemic i started working on a project that i never even got to start i had reached out to a number of people when i'm working on a new project i want to work with people i i know or am familiar with or people who are sort of open to allow me to figure out what i'm doing as i'm going my background and improvisation is i think my greatest strength as a photographer and so i like to keep it loose i like to have an idea have some some images in mind when i go into a shoot but i i want to be able to have room to explore and play and to figure out shots that i might not have otherwise planned but i think end up being great shots we have some of that here in the shoot when i go into a space what i want to do first is i want to take a look around look at the environment and figure out what is going to work in that environment how can i take what's there and make it into something interesting having a plan is great but oftentimes you don't have a lot of time why don't we take a look at the shoot and see what we've got we got 82 frames here we are in capture one here's all 82 images first thing i'll do is increase my grid and then i can see these five images right at the top here just me testing lights so i'm going to select them and get rid of them now i'm going to take a look in and that i'm just going to skip i'm just going to start skipping through until i start to see images i'm going to select that one images that i like i saw that i love that smile i love that expression let's keep editing here that's okay that's out this did not work out as as i was thinking so these these sort of top-down ones are out if you look here i'm gonna just zoom in here if you look in this background you can see this is my beauty dish and this is on a grid it is firing a very focused light right on to uh the subject which is kim in this case so for most of these shots i'm using this beauty dish here it's a bowens mount i'm shooting on kneeware vision four i like these battery powered inexpensive so i'll just take this drop the beauty dish right on there so i'll keep looking through that's interesting to me i'm gonna select that no and that's out that's okay i'll say in for now that is definitely in what i told her at this moment was to give me her best impression of a kid in school i like this look i like that one better i'm gonna take that one back out that looks fun got some good expressions here go through these a little quicker that's not bad that's nice i like that better the reason the lighting is different is i actually changed my modifier here instead of the beauty dish i used this here pop-up softbox with a diffusion panel no grid this is made for these kind of speed light modifiers pop that around the edge drop a speed light in the back and you've got your soft box but i don't like speed lights this is a little adapter is about 27 bucks like that i can just use that soft box that was my setup one light so this shot not something i like i didn't really like the light i didn't really like the expression you know the expression is not good it's not there i moved the light a bit here don't like that didn't like this and uh oh i like that this shot i had taken the transceiver off the top of the camera just so i could shoot with the natural light there was massive windows coming into the classroom they were giving off some fantastic light so i'm gonna take a look at this shot for sure and then we went out into the hallway hello this fun expression you know she's angry at me i'm i'm not in class but uh yeah i thought the hallway was good this you know single point perspective good so here what i'm doing is i'm dragging my shutter so that i can get more of that ambient light in not bad one thing you'll notice here is the haze around the lights because i'm using a quarter black promise filter on these shoots as well i want that hellation around the lights this shot is great because this is her personality this is my personality in a photo that's exactly what i like we were only able to get these two frames though because the locker smelled horrible probably because of these gross running shoes and she got in there she squeezed herself in and then she was like that's it i'm done uh understandable but let's take a look uh now how many uh selects we have okay so i have 16 selects that i can work with so i'm gonna look at these all a little closer so let's jump back in first thing i'm gonna do here is i'm gonna crop this i'm gonna give this a 16 by nine come in and and just grab that full table cut into that uh background that already looks a lot better not sure about the balance here so i'm going to change it a bit have her sort of leaning into that third i don't want all of this in but i definitely didn't want that chair in the frame either so i think this is a good crop here for me this shot this to me looks like be a good uh one to one rotate this i'm gonna grab my rotation tool and just bring that nice and flat and then adjust my crop a little bit bring it over a bit because we do have this element here of having her name in the shot so i want to keep that in there a little bit i'm not sold on these this one i like i think i'm going to do this portfolio size that would be good for my book and i'm going to bring this in here have her looking off keep keep the crop coming in tight when i'm cropping uh i like to have this so you can see this vertical line i like to have one of these either a vertical line or a horizontal line on the eye and if not like a cross point right on the eye as well i'm definitely gonna refine this a bit yeah much better so that's a good starting point not bad this one i like i'm gonna put this in more of a four-fifths vertical is more like like a magazine cover again use my rotation tool to drag across the bottom of these boards here get a nice horizontal line yeah that's pretty solid i just want to make sure that element that playful element of having her name in there is in the photo one of the things i'll often do when i'm editing an image are i will come in and i'll draw a radial mask over the face so that i can isolate the face and then this line here uh feathers out that mask you can see how that mask feathers out as it increases and decreases something like this if you're to make adjustments you can really see that line but if we drag that mask out you can see it feather out so the effect isn't so centralized so i tend to use a large mask when i'm making adjustments to a small area so that it looks a lot more natural it blends a lot better across the image so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to increase the contrast slightly and i'm going to increase the brightness slightly so it draws a little more focus onto the face now i'm going to label this layer face then what i do is this is a trick that i i like to do and i do this a lot i'm creating a new adjustment layer i call this vig for vignette now what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click here i'm going to copy the mask from the face layer so you can see the mask is the same on this layer and the face layer but what i'm going to do is on the layer i can right click and i can invert the mask so now i have one layer that has the complete opposite of that face mask and then i will use this to act as a vignette on the other areas so i will decrease the contrast and then i'll also slightly pull down the exposure i will drop the highlights i'll drop the white point i'll decrease the shadows a bit i'll bring the brightness down might drop the saturation slightly but then the main area of focus i'm going to be doing working with is the exposure you can see you can go too far too quick very easily i want this to be subtle i think that's okay open up the contrast a little bit more i'll pull the shadows up i think this is better i'm going to open the shadows up decrease the contrast pull the exposure down so i'm sort of generally flattening out uh the contrast in the rest of the image increasing the contrast in around where her face is what i could do as well is if i come in here i can increase the structure on her face i'm gonna only increase that very slightly and i think that's a good spot for that image now i'm just gonna edit a little bit and freestyle this and and i'll probably speed this up in post uh so you're not watching me just uh fine tune uh bits and pieces of these images [Music] [Music] [Music] you can let them know if they forget it cause we got it [Music] every time we get involved [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay so this is my first edit uh complete what i'm going to do now is i'm just going to select all of these head to my export and i'm going to put out a quick res full edit proof you'll see this preset is called 100 retouch that's something i'll get into in a future video but i do have this attached to a droplet that uses ai to handle the retouching i'm going to export that 10 variants going out we'll take a look at the export queue those get processed nice and quick if this is something that you'd like to see more of you know hit subscribe i'm going to do more of these videos i'm going to dig back into some of my older shoots and show you how i process them as well [Music] [Music] if you found this video helpful please hit like and uh leave a comment let me know what you found uh interesting if you have questions about anything it's my first video doing this so uh i'm gonna figure out how to get better at this as time goes on so i'm gonna do more of these and and work this into the channel a lot more thanks take care