The topic of Lightroom VS Capture one comes up a lot.
I am a little bit of an expert since everyone one of my Lightroom Develop Presets Packs also comes, and a Styles Pack for Capture One Pro and I’ve been using both for many years.
I’ve compared various things about Lightroom and Capture One and I have the main video for 2022 that compares Lightroom VS Capture One in a wide sense so you can decide which one is best for you.
YOu can even try the edit yourself with the RAW file below and the free lightroom preset and free capture one style I’ll link below. You can also share your results on the Shadow Hunters group post for this.
So today is about a simple portrait edit. BUt not really an easy one because of the tricky light. This is a perfect test to see how we use Lightroom and Capture One in the real world for a great portrait edit and which one offers the best features.
Both edits are clean and have gentle differences from Lightroom to Capture OnePro
Watch the video and see side-by-side edits and some tips for editing great portraits in both.
Lightroom is a little more initiative and has better Ai tools. Capture One is more nuance and control. They are close!
In the end, both are good and both have their advantages. But watch the video and I’ll show you some ups and downs. Whether you use Lightroom Classic, CC, or Capture One Pro 22, you can get great results and we’ll see them in today’s video.
Let me know which one you like best and why, or if there’s another app you favor for your RAwe editing, I’d like to hear about it in the comments.
There’s a story here. But the real gold nugget is how to use GOLD tones with color photos. Here’s what I’ve learned…
My grandpa was always buying and selling antiques and taught me when I was young how to separate the value from the junk. At least he tried to teach me.
I remember him talking about the Curtis gold-tone prints long before digital was a thing. Little did I know that 3o years later I would still be obsessed with gold tones in the back of my mind as I developed my recipes. Maybe because they are so hard to get just right.
But today we’re in color, not re-creating early-era gold tones. Enter the Gold-Chrome.
As far as I know, there was never a Gold-Chrome film. But maybe there should have been. Now even if you’re wanting to create other tones and mixes, the tips I’m going to share today will work.
Once we know the settings we create, but sometimes we use the slider in a very basic way. Decades later I still find myself discovering formulas. The sliders are a lot like chemicals. While it may be less messy and costly, those curves and up and downs are not any less subtle.
Mount Rainier by Asahel Curtis – Gold Orotype
Since the early days of photography, it seems people noticed the magic in a gold image. From the Platinum pallidum to the Curtis gold tones that were actually processed with real gold. The Orotone!
Maybe it’s the romance that early black and white created with its impure and often tinted results. Maybe it’s just because we love warm tones. It’s a color emotion thing. It’s why in cinema styles there are a lot of looks with orange and blue hues. Being opposite each other on a color wheel, they pair well.
So I recreated the early era darkroom and platinum looks in my Emulsions actions. They take that toning and make it easy to manage in layers. The platinum has a warm tone, not always Gold, but sometimes it actually feels gold.. In the future, I might add an authentic Orotone recipe into Emulsion actions as they can do more complex things than we create with presets and styles.
Here’s our goal…
Create dynamic gold tones that are not monochrome.
Try to maintain a gold that feels natural with other colors.
Make the gold tones versatile across many image types.
The perfect COLOR-Gold formula is NOT Selective color.
Rather than tinted black and white, these are created by how color is mixed and by the natural light in a scene. So if you have a backlit sunset, gold warmth comes more naturally and feels more at home. Don’t confuse this with ugly 90’s selective color.
You may have used the popular Classic Negative if you use Fuji X cameras. This is based on Superia 200 film, but it’s actually a very low saturation looks, while still retaining colors. I have a preset of Classic Negative that also you can download for free here. that I made to use on any field, like this Fuji XE3 street photo, since this model did not include that profile in the camera.
Not gold – Street workers, Filmist Classic Negative look on a Fuji XE3 RAW file.
You’ve seen this approach used in golden warm sunset photos but may not have even known it. These are not selective colors or black and white. They are shot and developed to focus on the golden warmth, but the color still remains.
I have tinkered with getting this look for over a decade in Lightroom, going all the way back to the first version of Power Workflow. More recently I had a great portrait-focused gold effect in the Muse preset pack called Gold Dust!
UPDATE – Get my Gold recipes as presets for Lightroom and Capture One with my finished Gold-Chrome pack.
Level 1 Gold toning Warm like a sunset but maintains rich color.
Gold Dust – tone from the Muse presets pack. Sony FIle.
We want that look you see in iconic street photos or magazines. It always starts with light in the camera, but if you develop well, that gold can even be added to less warm images and still feel perfect.
Level 1 is gentle. It could almost be mistaken for White Balance but it’s much richer. Complicating matters more, each camera is different. Fuji tones lean redder, Sony more green etc.
We live in a world of internet marketers selling tools that leave people unhappy. I deal with the fallout of that, which is why I always guarantee my products. I am passionate and often obsessed with this kind of recipe. It cannot just work on one photo, it has to work on most of them.
In the Filmist pack I might spend an entire week focused on a single recipe to get it just right. Today I’ll show you progressively more intense gold recipes I’ve developed.
Don’t do this with White Balance!
Yes, it’s fine to warm or cool a photo a little with WB. It’s one of the secrets of making any6 color formula work for YOUR camera. But you can’t get a proper golden tone with a WB cast adjustment. White balance is often used for this, but incorrectly. Toning needs to come from the more subtle color channel and wheels.
Why? First, no WB setting will work in a Lightroom preset or styles for Capture One. They vary on a per-image basis. Second, you want more depth. When you use the color wheel and even more curves, you have dynamic toning that moves with the shadows and highlights.
Take all the colors away, then start from zero.
TIP: If you’re trying to make a color tone, go to the HSL colors and desaturate every channel.
This working in reverse will really well to help you find the goal. Pull them all down… Now start moving color back in a little at a time.
Next, you mix those with color wheels in mids, shadows, and highlights, then tones. As you progress you will see your effect come to life.
I kept thinking about how to explain more simply how to use advanced color features in Lightroom and Capture One. I’ll be making a channel a video and I’ll post it here in the future when I have
Elote Girl – Cine Soft Brown mi.
On the lighter gold side, we’re talking about a warm overtone that has hints of gold. Another level 1 like we see right here with the elotes girl happy over her corn. Yes, they love their Elotes in Mexico and they are always buying them on the street covered in mayonnaise and chili.
This gets more complex as we go to curves. You can do amazing things with the individual color channels in curves. But you can make a mess very fast. The adjustment in the color cruces, whether in Lightroom, Capture One, or Photoshop, is very finite but very powerful.
Level 2 Gold Toning Softer color and more expansive warm tones.
But let’s go to level 2 gold. This is not about a vintage look. It’s about feeling good. I did these with what I call my El Dorado process. This pushes other colors down a bit more and focuses on the gold tones and color wheels. But it’s still a full-color photo.
El dorado process
A Gold-Chrome has colors from every channel.
We’re trying to empathize with a tone and feel of a scene that complements the real-world light. Even at level 2, we have a full-color spectrum, but golden warmth is all over the frame here. Level 2 done right, is actually very versatile.
This works great in atmospheric street scenes. But also fashion portraits and beyond. What we’re doing is using color to extend the existing emotions but in a way that doe snot feel like a fake color. If all color is equal, the image looks rather boring.
The parking garage, San Juan Del Rio Mexico -El Dorado tone
Now it’s starting to go GOLD!
By separating color and focusing on a specific range, we control the hues of a scene. In the case of Gold, it tends to give a warm sunset romantic vibe
IN going further we’re going to take a queue from the Curtis Gold tone. Because gold was part of the chemical process, it results in highlights being ultra gold. We’re still working in color, but let’s curve down those highlights and go further.
El Doroado gold chrome process. Level 2 still retains color well.
Going to level 3 – Ultra gold chrome color
What we’ve done is push curves and colors and how they respond more and more without selectively reducing any one color. The sensation of color is soft, leaving you with gold and warm rays. But the influence of the color is still there.
The boy on the dock. Ultra Gold tone. The color is there but the gold is more intense. In some photos, it feels perfectly natural.
In this photo on the lakeshore where it;’s clear sunset, it feels almost natural, but looking at the original file, you see just how much gold we added. I think with any process this should be the goal. Adding your recipe, while maintaining a feel that does not distract and feels right.
Original RAW file from a Fuji X100V
And yet we’ve all seen an image like this. Radiant golden rays that are intense, but feel natural. Like they convey an emotion that we might have felt in the real place. That’s the goal of photography. We have to convey that shadow, the sensation and to me, that’s what a great color formula is about.
A good Gold process is such that you don’t think about it being processed, yOU think about the feel and the story of this boy standing at the end of a dock waiting for his ship to come in. Or maybe something else.
Yes, Use RAW files and presets!
With any of the deep edits, you want RAw whenever possible. It’s especially popular amount street shooters to shoot JPEGs. The Fuji camera for example has great in-camera profiles. But you throw so much away in JPEG and if you want to deep deep recipes like this, you will be glad you have a RAW file to start from. Take a look at my video… Raw vs JPEG 2022.
It’s also important to have these as presets. We talking about adjustments that take hours. Especially when you refine them. So whether you buy presets like mine or make your own. Save at each step so you can use and compare easily later.
Ultra Gold color in a night street scene. Highlights are deeply affected giving this scene a vintage vibe.
Don’t be afraid to level up and do more.
By being progressively bolder, we’ve created a look that can be intense and still feel right. This post was about creating color gold tones. But it’s also about pushing developing settings.
I admit usually start with a presets or action to help kick me in the right direction.
If I see ten variants of a photo, it’s like adding visualizations to my brain and those adapt to create new ideas that I otherwise would have not discovered.
The level 3 process tends to look natural in photos where there is already a natural gold glow on the boy on the dock. Note the extremes in the highlights where level 3 pulls the upper curve down and fills it with warmth. This can work in other scenes like the night shot above, but it tends to bring a vintage vibe that is clearly a color effect. That’s not good to bad, just be aware.
My Gold Chrome Conclusion.
I like this look, which is why I have chased it for so long. How to edit and tone an image is a very personal choice and often there are many approaches that will look good. But if we become less timid, will draw out shadows and tones in new ways.
This has perhaps been an overly intensive look at gold chrome toning. But I’ve been chasing these tones for over a decade, and really ever since my grandpa talked with reverence about early ere Curtis Gold-Tone prints.
As these formulas are refined enough to work in most scenes, you may see them come out in my presets packs. The first level 1 Gold Dust tone is also part of my Muse Collection so if you have them play around and make your own variants.
20 years later I feel like I am starting to understand what needs to be done to make gold work. I have failed many times to get it right. A really good process is one you will come back to. If I am not there yet, I am on the way and I wanted to share with you and I hope you will share what you have found in the comments below.
Gavin Seim
L3 Gold Chrome church in the square. This takes extreme measures on highlights to give a very darkroom-like gold flavor.
I wanted a more perfect Portra film preset for Lightroom and Capture One. So I made it!
Portra is a classic film, the 160 leans a touch green and is very versatile. The 400 is warmer and probably the top portrait film ever and the 800 is less famous but has a bit more color pop and a rich look.
Portra gen.2 took the Portra presets that have always been part of my Filmist presets and made them so much better. I tinkered and calibrated for days to get the feel of Portra just right. It took a lot of film research and formulation but the result was worth the wait.
You can Get Filmist here– The free pack has my new Portra 160 preset. Here’s my new video on the new Portra looks.
In making gen2 Portra I had to make all 3 presets from the ground up for Lightroom and then do it again for the Capture One Styles. But the result is a film emulation of Portra better than any I have ever used. It captures the aesthetic of Portra and just looks stunning. Watch the video and I’ll show you how it works.
Porta looks amazing on Portraits but also on a lot of other things.
Filmist is a lot of film emulsion presets, but the gen.2 Portra looks along with new gen.2 Natura 1600 which I recently finished developing brings in two of the most versatile films ever as digital presets for Lightroom and Capture 1 and LUT. I’m using these constantly in my workflow. Even if you only grab the free one I included in my Filmist free sampler pack, I hope you enjoy it.
White balance defines the color temperature of the real-world light you’re capturing in relation to your sensor based on middle grey. Then the software can set it to appear balnaced. OK, so what is white balancing in photography? Well, it’s usually second to every other setting on your camera.
Photographers make you fret so much about What White Balance because they don’t understand how it works I’ve been doing this for 20 years and made many arrogant mistakes. So I’m going to explain it practically in this video.
Time to Stop worrying about what white balance is!
So do you need to white balance? Usually, you can do it in the post, leaving it on auto in the camera. If you shoot JPEG only pay a little more attention and make sure it’s visually the way you want it in the camera. With RAW, you don’t need to worry about it at all.
So Gavin, what is White Balancing in photography then?
When editing in Lightroom I’ve often said… Good presets should NOT touch WB. When I make presets for Lightroom and Styles for Capture One like Filmist or Natural HDR, they are WB-free. It’s part of why they work great on any photo you use them on.
White balance helps you control the warm and cool tint of a photo. Like the base hues, separate from other developed settings. WB gadgets are almost never needed. Especially if you shoot RAW since all possible variations of white balance are in the RAW file.
There’s really no WRONG white balance, but…
Why is white balance so confusing then? It was not like this in the film days. The hype over White Balance came after pros started using digital. It gets very technical. But back in the film days, we had two or three white balance options. We even used the “wrong” ones at times for creative styles.
Don’t use it for effects! White balance is for light color correction. If I want a gold look like this, for example, I could crank the temperature slider right and adjust the tint. But WB does not work great as an extreme and it does not copy to other photos. Strong looks should be done with good use of color channels and curves. In this case, I just used the Black Gold preset, from Gold-Chrome.
Digital arrived and companies created products to “correct White Balance”. In reality, most photographers don’t need anything for White Balance. Because anything goes if it works in your final look.
This is not laziness. If you’ve seen my videos or attended my Shadow hackers class, you know I’m huge about getting it right on camera. But on a RAW file WB settings literally make no change to your file. They simply add a marker in the file to tell the RAW processor what you set it to.
Use Auto WB in the camera, not in the software!
You can leave the camera to Auto WHY and it usually makes it look very good. Auto WB in software like Lightroom, Capture One, etc however usually messes it up. I don’t know why, but it’s not at all the same and usually makes the photo ugly.
Look at this example. The Camer Auto WB was fine. After processing this with the Filmist Portra 400 preset. I warmed it up. Not because it was more “correct” but because I felt the warm light worked well.
Keep it simple, instead of making this a distraction. If you follow this guide you will never have to worry about White Balance. You’ll use it as needed to balance your photo to the color tints that work for you. What a grey card says is correct does really matter. Sometimes you want a warmer or cooler look and in the end, the look. Make every photo yours.
I hope this helps you understand what is white balancing in photography and what it’s not. Leave a comment if you have feedback. – Gavin Seim
The Fuji worm invasion came after the film! In today’s video, I’ll show you how to fix it.
I want to tell you a story as we continue the LR vs C1 experiments because today I going to show more important ways to control details like the wormy artifacts sometimes caused by ISO noise.
I was starting photography in the late 90’s when I saved up for a Canon EOS 3. Oh I thought I was the coolest ever (hint, I was not)
I devoured the magazines. In those days we talked about fine-grain films like the new Portra 400, but words like worms and color noise were not topics. 1600 ISO was about the limit and it was noisy. Take it or leave it!
These days I’ll sit for hours and tinker with a formula for presets like Natural HDR 4 to get the best detail and tone from our files. Photographers that use presets actions and tools get better results. Because they see more without working harder.
35mm film was like having 10-20 megapixels.
This was me in the early 2000’s with my prized EOS 3.
Serious pros of the day said 35mm was not enough. Strangely they downgraded a few years later to the 6MP generation of digital SLR’s.
No matter. My EOS 3 cost $1000 without a lens and I used it for years, starting out my portrait and wedding work and being the official photographer at the local speedway. It had eye control focus, meaning it focused where you looked in the viewfinder. It did not detect the subject’s eyes like today’s cameras. It was just cool and it worked, some of the time.
Each Saturday I would go early to the speedway and pre-sell photos for 15 bucks. Then I would sit all night in the center field taking photos, playing with pans, and getting dusty. On Monday I developed 6-10 rolls of film, sort 4×6 prints, store the negatives and give the prints to my racers, hoping to profit about $200
That 35mm film with it’s noisy ISO 800 grain was what I had and I made it work and I learned a lot in that dusty center field.
But noisy was relative and more organic then. It was silver. These films were classic and looked beautiful. The formulas I’ve created in Filmist presets are more high-res than we had then, but they look great because they look like film.
PS: Download my FREE Filmist pack to get my noise presets and the film looks if you missed it. You’ll see what I mean about film color and detail.
Today I think about the hurdles we had to get a good print and how many stages of noise and artifacts and dust and scratches could be introduced.
Today we pixel peep and panic over a little blip in a sensor or a little noise that as I showed in last weeks video is easy to clean up with good use of detail and grain tools
Watch my worms video and learn how to control detail.
I love doing testing. It’s experimenting like in this week’s video that help us understand more. It’s that hunt that results is tools like my presets and like Emulsion 3 and Lumist for Photoshop.
So this week I uploaded another video looking at more grain and noise. It’s a focus on Fuji files, but also another look at LR vs C1 and how it will handle noise regardless of what camera your worms and artifacts come from.
That’s all for this week. I’m hitting the streets looking for light like I found here and processed with Filmist. Come Monday I’ll be back to my experiments, working on formulas and ideas for next week’s email.
See you then, Gavin Seim
Fuji X100V ISO 800, Filmist process and Gavs detail preset
This was me in the early 2000’s with my prized EOS 3.