Luminous Landscape Forum

Site & Board Matters => About This Site => Topic started by: jeremyrh on March 10, 2018, 02:54:44 am

Title: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: jeremyrh on March 10, 2018, 02:54:44 am
Like others, I've been watching, enjoying and learning from the Charlie Cramer videos. I don't want to start a religious war, but is there anything he does in the editing that can't be done directly in CaptureOne, with no need to go to Photoshop (hence avoiding a big usage of disk space)?
Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: Jeff on March 10, 2018, 03:24:04 am
Possibly the re-touching ?

In particular the bright spots in the tree pictures where he " removes " them by cloning in darker areas.

Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: Mark D Segal on March 10, 2018, 08:40:29 am
Like others, I've been watching, enjoying and learning from the Charlie Cramer videos. I don't want to start a religious war, but is there anything he does in the editing that can't be done directly in CaptureOne, with no need to go to Photoshop (hence avoiding a big usage of disk space)?

Of course there is no need for any "religious war" over any of this. It's software, which is a means to an end and nothing to be religious about - either it serves the purpose well enough or it doesn't, but thanks for reminding discussants not to "go religious" here. The basic question you are asking is completely reasonable whether talking Capture One, Lightroom or other application suitable for editing raw files. At least in the cases of C1 and Lr, the applications have matured to the point that for a great many photos the whole workflow including a lot of localized adjustment can be contained within the raw converter, avoiding the need to make bloated files consuming lots of storage. I'm much less familiar with C1 than I am with Lr, which I use day-in, day-out, and I believe that most of what Charlie shows can be done in Lr. Cloning and healing however is an area where Photoshop provides for more ease and precision with these two tools. Masking though has become really easy and much more satisfactory than it ever was in the latest versions of Lr, which really helps with local adjustments that need to be well-targeted. So as usual, it's always a question of finding the best tool for the job. Where it's not  a case of "either-or", I would add that the integration of Lr and Ps workflows has also been improving greatly. Perhaps C1 provides some of this as well, but I haven't explored that question.
Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: E.J. Peiker on March 12, 2018, 06:36:22 am
Possibly the re-touching ?

In particular the bright spots in the tree pictures where he " removes " them by cloning in darker areas.
That is very simple to do in Capture One Pro.
Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: dchew on March 12, 2018, 08:42:04 am
That is very simple to do in Capture One Pro.

I agree E.J., although for me it was not obvious at first. I have not had good results using C1's spot removal tool on the background image. However, if I create a new layer set to "Heal" and use the spot removal tool on that layer it works marvelously.

I had some people on a beach in an image I worked on recently. I did my now-normal steps of creating a new Heal layer and tried the spot removal tool to remove them. It failed miserably I think because the spot tool has a size limit; you can make it as big as you want but when you click to apply the spot, it shrinks to what appears a size limit. I then tried the simple brush tool on the Heal layer. That worked very nicely! Flow & Opacity set to 100%, Hardness at 50. Not sure how it will work on large areas compared to content aware in PS, but for reasonably-sized cloning and healing it did a great job.

Dave
Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: dchew on March 12, 2018, 09:21:48 am
Like others, I've been watching, enjoying and learning from the Charlie Cramer videos. I don't want to start a religious war, but is there anything he does in the editing that can't be done directly in CaptureOne, with no need to go to Photoshop (hence avoiding a big usage of disk space)?

I suppose I am stating the obvious, but Charlie's "sloppy selection" approach cannot be done in LR or C1. In LR you can sort of make a selection using the radial filter, but it is not a random, sloppy selection and not technically a selection; it is a mask automatically brushed in or out. As far as I know there is no way to make a selection in C1. Making and adjusting masks in LR and C1 can theoretically do the same thing, and in some sense is more adjustable since you can vary the effect within the selection by utilizing "Flow" and by varying the amount of feather in different parts of the mask as you go. Of course you can do that in PS too, but Charlie chooses not to. What is great about Charlie's approach is how fast it is for certain things.

Dave

Edit: One thing you can to pretty effectively in C1 that is similar to Charlie's sloppy selection:

I am not aware of a way in LR to "Fill Mask" or "Feather Mask."
Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: Rory on March 12, 2018, 11:51:52 am
I am not aware of a way in LR to "Fill Mask" or "Feather Mask."

If you forget about terminology, you can achieve the same thing in LR using the adjustment brush and varying the feather and flow.  Of course Ps will give you more options and control, but for what Charlie was doing I think it would be easy to replicate in Lr, except some of the cloning, as mentioned above.
Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: TommyWeir on March 12, 2018, 12:08:27 pm
I have less and less reason to use PS every year.   It still does do stitching really well and for collage/compositing it's the best and tools like C1 or LR have no capability for that.   I do use other layering tools, Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Photo, as often as PS these days, I can see myself not bothering to upgrade beyond CS6 as these tools improve.

I do 95% of my photo editing in C1.  Very happy with it.
Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: Charles Cramer on March 13, 2018, 04:00:11 pm
Lightroom continues to improve its capability with local adjustments (like the new range masks).  Lightroom gives you a global curve, but no curves for local adjustments.  A Photoshop technique I use all the time, (and used in the video "Print:Waterfall") combines the power of curves with selections. I wrote an article for LuLa several years ago detailing this technique:
 
https://luminous-landscape.com/tough-selections-made-easy-a-unique-approach-to-tonal-selections/

This is the main reason I use Photoshop.  Also, PS has much better display of masks, and ways to modify masks.  So, most of my local adjustments are done in Photoshop.

Capture One does now have curves for local adjustments.  But, they foolishly prohibit the development of Pentax 645Z files!  And, in the past (when I used a PhaseOne IQ180), I did some careful side by side developments of the same raw file in Lightrom and C1, and usually preferred the Lightroom rendering.
Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: Rory on March 13, 2018, 06:04:32 pm
Lightroom continues to improve its capability with local adjustments (like the new range masks).  Lightroom gives you a global curve, but no curves for local adjustments.  A Photoshop technique I use all the time, (and used in the video "Print:Waterfall") combines the power of curves with selections. I wrote an article for LuLa several years ago detailing this technique:
 
https://luminous-landscape.com/tough-selections-made-easy-a-unique-approach-to-tonal-selections/

This is the main reason I use Photoshop.  Also, PS has much better display of masks, and ways to modify masks.  So, most of my local adjustments are done in Photoshop.

Capture One does now have curves for local adjustments.  But, they foolishly prohibit the development of Pentax 645Z files!  And, in the past (when I used a PhaseOne IQ180), I did some careful side by side developments of the same raw file in Lightrom and C1, and usually preferred the Lightroom rendering.

Charles - thanks for the delightful and thoughtful peek into your world.  We have your sandstone marine formations up in my neck of the woods too - just up the coast in Nanaimo, BC.  Back in the 1870's they quarried our local sandstone for a mint in San Francisco.
Title: Re: Charlie Cramer videos and LR/PS
Post by: Mark D Segal on March 13, 2018, 08:34:44 pm
Lightroom continues to improve its capability with local adjustments (like the new range masks).  Lightroom gives you a global curve, but no curves for local adjustments.  A Photoshop technique I use all the time, (and used in the video "Print:Waterfall") combines the power of curves with selections. I wrote an article for LuLa several years ago detailing this technique:
 
https://luminous-landscape.com/tough-selections-made-easy-a-unique-approach-to-tonal-selections/

This is the main reason I use Photoshop.  Also, PS has much better display of masks, and ways to modify masks.  So, most of my local adjustments are done in Photoshop.

Capture One does now have curves for local adjustments.  But, they foolishly prohibit the development of Pentax 645Z files!  And, in the past (when I used a PhaseOne IQ180), I did some careful side by side developments of the same raw file in Lightrom and C1, and usually preferred the Lightroom rendering.

Hi Charles,

I do indeed remember this as I was one of the participants in that excellent seminar at Michael's erstwhile gallery in downtown Toronto. My wish for LR is that one of these days the engineers will find a way of importing the whole of the standard toolset into the masking operation. This would be the ULTIMATE LR version because of the vast increase in editing options it would open up. However, I'd have to say, that right now with the more limited toolset provided within a Lr mask or graduated filter, one can accomplish much of what you are showing here, but not as precisely partly because of the limitations of the tools and partly because the effects cannot be as well isolated between the masked area and the image as they can be in Photoshop - but the general approach is somewhat adaptable.