Dodging and burning isn’t just an old-school black and white darkroom technique. It’s just as useful on color images, and Capture One’s Style Brushes update this classic technique with powerful digital enhancements.
Recreating the look of analog films is a surprisingly subtle job that can require several different tools. There are of course magic filters for mobile apps that attempt to achieve the analog look, and desktop applications that have powerful and effective analog presets, like the DxO Nik Collection or ON1 Photo RAW. For this project I’m creating my analog effect manually in Capture One – though you can do the same in Lightroom (see the brief instructions at the end) and other photo editors.
The Noise Reduction and Sharpening sliders might be the obvious go-to tools for optimizing high-ISO images, but these can easily leave you with soft, wishy-washy detail or exaggerated noise as you try to play one off against the other. In fact, there are better ways to get your high-ISO images looking smoother and sharper.
The Hasselblad XPan was a classic 35mm ‘panoramic’ camera developed in partnership with Fujifilm. What made it special was its unique widescreen aspect ratio, creating images measuring 65mm x 24mm on 35mm film. You can recreate this unique perspective in Lightroom, together with some of the XPan’s analog rendering. Here’s how.
Lightroom Classic has built-in lens correction profiles for fixing distortion and corner shading in countless camera lenses. It also fixes chromatic aberration, or color fringing, via a separate checkbox. The one thing it doesn’t have is corner softness correction – but there is a way around that.
I’m drawn to extreme contrasts in lighting, which I guess a lot of photographers are. This gets me into trouble, though, because very often a scene will have a wider dynamic range, or brightness range, than the camera can capture.
It’s easy to convert a color image to black and white in any photo editor, Lightroom included, but to get a strong black and white look you often have to do a little more besides. Here’s a look at the B&W mode, B&W panel and the Tone Curve.
What’s wrong with this photo of a boat on a shingle beach? I used a prime lens with a wide maximum aperture to get a shallow depth of field effect for this simple composition and that part has worked well. But the boat is just a little too dark and the sky is a little too bright. This is a common issue in outdoor photography.
What’s especially clever about Lightroom presets is that they don’t just include global adjustments. You can also create presets with masks. These can be either manual masks which you can move around manually, AI masks which adapt to the contents of images they’re applied to, or combinations of both.
The Library module is one of the two key modules in the Lightroom Classic workflow. It’s where you view, organize, search and browse your entire photo catalog. So how is the interface laid out, what do the tools do and how do you find the tools you need? The Library module is laid out like…