post processing – Page 2 – Capture One2Three

Modern K64 III Capture One -style

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I have been tuning some Portra based Capture One -styles and Kodachrome 64 based Capture One -style parallel to each other. I wanted to create a good base setting for the Capture One color wheel that I could use tuning many other styles too. I published the Portra 400 look-a-like style already, and it is time to publish my efforts with the Kodachrome 64 look. This time I used a quite good reference scan as my base and I think the accuracy of colors in this style is quite high compared to the original scan.

PortraMood Capture One -style

This style I is a replication of an for me unknown look I found in the internet. I really don’t know the photographer, I don’t know the medium it was taken with (though I think it was taken on film), and I don’t know what kind of post processing was involved in the final image that I copied this look from. What I know is that it looked beautiful and gave me the impression of a certain Portra 160 look that I have been working through.

P400 V Capture One -style

For the last two months I’ve spent enormous time with Capture One tweaking couple of styles. The style I started with was the Portra 400 -look I have many times approached with different methods and different results. During the process I suddenly jumped to tweak a look that I have not liked so much, but nevertheless I spent a lot of time studying and tweaking a Portra 160 -style. But again I jumped to another look, my another never-ending style, Kodachrome 64. I jumped between all these styles and most of my time went on making a color wheel setup that would work as a base for all of them. I think I made, counting all these three studies, more than 200 iterations. My eyes got sore, for sure :-).

Modern K64 Daylight Capture One -style

The name of this new style is bolder than what I want it to be, but I just couldn’t figure another name as this style is a study of Kodachrome 64.

Obsolete III Capture One -style

This style is having it’s third iteration. It has been an ongoing study of making a Kodachrome look-a-like style for Capture One. The first and second iterations had beautiful look but at the same time there were some color problems that I first could not figure out. This third iteration comes right at the heels of the second iteration and finally I think I solved the problems I had with the colors. These problems were technical problems that were caused by my mistake of making overlapping colors in color editor. The third iteration is still beautiful to me, but I lost a bit of deepness in certain colors when I corrected the look. Still, this is worth publishing and especially, while a bit different from the previous iterations, it gives beautiful alternative for my other styles. And I hope I can finally leave this style in it’s current state.

Update 1.7.2022: I do have many newer versions of the Kodachrome64-look and there is no longer reason to share this old version. Check out the new one.

Basics Nature Capture One -style

I loved Fujifilm’s Velvia film simulation when I used the X-H1. From the beginning of using Capture One I wanted to make a style that mimics the look of the Velvia film simulation. There were two reasons even while I knew I could get that look for Fujifilm’s raw -files in Capture One. First, I wanted to learn how to tune such a style that works well with nature related subjects like landscapes and animals. Second, I think it is always best to have a style that is not dependent of the camera used.

Some monochrome Capture One -styles

It has been a while since the last post. I have had many ideas for new styles, but many of them just didn’t work the way I wanted and so I actually have made a lot of styles that just are waiting either to be finished somehow or just deleted. During the experiments I have made three monochrome styles that seem to work for me. Two of them are “clean” versions, very similar to each other but still different enough to name them 1 and 2. I have added to many of my black and white styles some grain to even the contrast or to make them look “film like”. These clean versions are free from additional grain as there are those moments you just want to have a clean version to start from. The third monochrome style was from an experiment to make a flat, or matte, looking style out of my never published third iteration of Earth Colors -style. While the color version still waits approval from me, the black and white version looked nice enough for publishing.

Hopefully some of these gives you ideas for your own style or even work as is. It probably never is bad to have choices and here they are, free as always.

And here is the link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pru3q49ZyfU-MNMPL6GC9kVwXkpOUY11/view?usp=sharing

There is nothing magical or original in these, so I don’t publish many photos to show them, try them yourself. Below is one photo processed with Monochrome Clean 1 and Monochrome Flat. The featured photo is processed with the Flat -style.

Monochrome Clean 1 (left) vs. Monochrome Flat (right)

About Nikon’s SOOC colors

This is just a short pondering of the SOOC Nikon colors. There are six different main color profiles, Picture Controls, in Nikon Z cameras. Of course there are also many filter-kind of profiles, but as they are more like special filters, I do not count them to the main profiles.

The main profiles are (in no particular order) Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Portrait, Landscape and Flat. Coming from Fujifilm ecosystem having used and tweaked a lot of different film simulations, I am used to the idea of having different color profiles for different purposes.

P400 II Gold Dust Capture One -style

In the beginning this style was just an experiment. An experiment of using Dehaze -tool in opposite direction than it kind of is meant to be used. Usually the Dehaze-tool would remove, well, haze, in your photos. And it seems to be very effective in this, though I have only couple of times tried it for it’s intended purpose.

The Dehaze-tool, when used in the opposite direction, giving minus values, does give the photo a hazy look, a bit like with a haze filter in front of your lens. I tried this couple of time, but other tools in Capture One have given what I have looked for and the hazy look just wasn’t for me. But when I saw that the Dehaze-tool also allows using a “tone”, picked with a color picker, I used enormous amount of time finding some nice tone that would enhance the images with this tool. What I thought this could bring to the table was the effect I have seen in some Portra film-photos: a golden glow that I haven’t otherwise been able to reproduce.

I didn’t manage to get the look I wanted and forgot this tool. Some week ago I accidentally found the tone I was looking for. It just happened to be there to be picked. And I did it to my P400 II Capture One -style. And I immediatelly knew this needed to be exploited.

Basics Portrait Capture One -style

During the time I used a Fujifilm camera I used a lot of energy deciding which of the film simulations work for me best. Surprisingly the one film simulation that I rejected in the beginning started to please me more and more. And that was the film simulation Astia. I liked Pro Neg High for people photos and some others for colorful landscapes for example, but again and again I found so many faces for the Astia film simulation that it just kept coming back and in the end it was the film simulation I used on daily basis.

The main purpose mentioned for that film simulation is portrait because of it’s colors and tone curves, but it worked well for landscapes and with some tweaking I found it worked with everyday subjects best of all the film simulations (subjective, I know).

I wanted to have a similar style to be used with my recent camera’s raw-files and baked a style for Capture One. This style is quite similar to the Astia. The basis I made this style on was my Natural Luma -style. And the colors are matched as well as possible, though these never are exact copies. Especially one can find differences in certain blue hues and the skin gets a bit redder here than with the Astia film simulation. I didn’t name the style after the Astia, but naming it “Portrait”, or more precisely “Basics Portrait”, according to the idea of the style’s origin’s purpose to be aimed for portrait photography.

As always I share my styles and hopefully you find it useful as is or tweaked to your taste. The download link is here (updated with a new version 1.7.2022):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SmnAgdrpoDOLnzMmgabFcbNXU1-SqbdE/view?usp=sharing