This is a primer to my Shadow Hackers workshop. If you have not yet signed up for Shadow Hackers do it HERE.
Photography is all about tone, but not how people think.
In today’s primer video, I’ll use Black and white photography as a reference and we’ll start hunting shadows. This still applies to color because with this you can learn to people’s attention ONLY where you want it.
You can’t just have BLACK but you need black!
I love shooting in black and white to help me see tone better, even if I return to color. That tone-based sight makes you see better. It makes you plan your image to amaze.
My mentor Ken Whitmire died about 5 years ago now but I will never forget one of the most important lessons he taught me. Today we’ll look at some basics and histograms and in Shadow Hackers, we’ll go deeper.
The Birds, by Gavin Seim
“Tone” Ken said – “It’s the least used and least understood aspect of photography”.
That knowledge has driven me to discover something more. What I learned from that is that tone is complex but also simple Photographers are not using tone because they are afraid of it.
There are histograms, exposure charts, tools for luminosity making and tone, and RAW and actions. I even make some of them like
I realized that a rich tone starts with blacks. Zone 0, Zone 12 for you Ansel Zones Fans. If you stop being afraid of blacks, it changes the way you see and builds photos everywhere because you start seeing that contrast
Shoot shadows a bit and watch what happens…
Take the time to watch this video till the end. If you apply what’s shown here your blacks, your tone and as a result, your entire photography game will level up.
I’ve also been focusing on the latest editing tools I make to make finding shadows easier. Tools like Blackroom and Lumist. completely change how I can manipulate the shadow.
I also uploaded a FREE sampler pack from my Silver 4, the black and white Lightroom presets. Play with those or the Capture One Styles are also included. Watch how blacks are being used to do what we’re seeing in this video. See tones first, regardless of whether you’re photographing in black and white or color.
Don’t miss Shadow Hackers because in it we’ll go deeper and I’ll show you the entire process to master this – 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
In Lightroom, Capture One RAW, ISO noise is a big problem… Or is it?
There are lots of De-Noise tools. I’ve owned most and reviewed more thru the years. The story behind me obsessing over noise goes back to the early RAW processing days and I’ll show you in today’s video how to avoid that pasty digital noise reduction look and switch it for a rich detailed film look.
I made you noise and grain filmic preset for Lightroom and a style Capture One.
This week’s discovery is so important that I made a free UPDATE for FILMIST with what I discovered. I even updated the Filmist FREE pack to include one of the presets.
Get Filmist complete or FREE here and download my detail and noise preset I’m using in the video. I made it as a Lightroom preset or a Capture One Style.
How to correctly reduce noise and use grain in LR and C1
There are two kinds of noise. Luminance and color. Both need some processing, but NOT as people think. Noise will be the friend you’re looking for to make photos amazing. I started exploring these detail techniques when I made the filmic looks for my Silver 4 black and white presets pack.
I explore this idea more when I made the new Natural HDR 4 presets as I created formulas like Night Mode preset for dark photos.
Then I saw it! That’s what this week’s video is about.
Great edits are about the formulas and how we use light. Whether you make your own or start with tools like mine. To that end, I’ve been tinkering more explain the solution to most noise problems. Including worms and artifacts that can plague our files.
So today I’m finally going to show you what I discovered about the noise that turned into a little workshop of its own. Watch the new video and I’ll make this easy. It doesn’t really matter what RAW editor you use.
Watch the video…
This works like magic and it’s why you need to STOP removing your noise and start leveraging it in your photography. Leave a comment if you have questions and I’ll see you next time.
I promised I would make a video about Lightroom VS Capture One because it’s been a while. The Capture One vs Lightroom workflow is similar, but not the same, and there’s a lot of debate.
In 2022 both editing apps have advantages. So in today’s video, I’m going to get hands-on and show you Lightroom and Capture One, and how to get the most out of both so you can decide which one is better. Should I use Lightroom or Capture One Pro? Let’s find out.
Watch my video: Lightroom vs Capture One 2022
Get my Free Lightroom presets and free Capture One Styles.
Try my Natural HDR , as well as packs like Silver and Filmist film presets. Presets/styles make a huge the diffence in both apps if you usequality recipes. All my develop preset packs have Lightroom Presets and Capture One Styles inluded. Even the free preset packs you’ll find around the site.
Is Capture One or Lightroom more feature rich in 2022?
In the past, Adobe also tended to move slowly, but in the past year, they have started innovating with Lightroom. Probably because of competition from apps like C1, One One RAW, and others. So we all win here.
Lightroom and Capture One are powerful tools, and I’ve been using both for a long time. I develop editing packs for LR and for C1 side by side. I see their ups and downs. You’re here to compare Lightroom vs Capture One. So I will in my conclusion and in the video above.
While they both have advanced, I feel that Lightroom is edging out Capture One and I think it’s mostly happening because Phase One does not listen to customers. There are things in C1 2022 that are just finally improving after many years of customer requests and frustration.
Lightroom AI and auto mask tools are far ahead of Capture One. Capture One in turn has more panels and adjustments than Lightroom. This can be good, but also confusing to new users.
Capture One can be purchased. Lightroom on the other hand is all subscription based. Unless you go with the old Lightroom 6 version bought used. It’s a good app but getting very dated.
But Gavin, Capture One is better for Fuji files and WORMS!
Fuji files in Capture One are always said to be better. Are they really? If you use Fuji you’re in the right place. We’ll look and see if C1 still handles details better in the video, so you can make the best choice for your Fuji workflow in 2022.
The results of both Lightroom vs Capture One are good, but they have distinct differences that may sway you to one or the other. There’s nothing wrong with switching back and forth, but I like to choose a main primary editor each year, and that’s how I manage most of my work.
Lightroom handles Fuji and any other files perfectly in 2022 and so does Capture One.
What about older versions? Like Capture One vs Lightroom 6
I don’t dig into this in the video. But if you’re holding out because you hate the cloud model and won’t subscribe to Adobe. I get it. and for you, it’s time to switch. LR6 is very dated, and the processing tools you can get in Capture vs Lightroom 6 are better, hands down. Stop clinging on and get upgraded to something better like Capture One, One One, or another RAW editor that does not demand a subscription.
Conclusion – Lightroom vs Capture One?
I’m noticing more people starting to switch back to Lightroom as the price of Capture One rises. though available as a standalone, it actually costs more than Lightroom and Photoshop combined in 2022. But at least you own it.
Capture One Pro has some more advanced tools that some of you will like, and Lightroom os more essential. Capture one has a Levels tool and a Curves tool, for example, while LR only has curves. In the end, both these tools do more or less the same thing, but having both can be handy,
Lightroom is improving at a faster pace. For years Lightroom was pretty stagnant, but people moved away from forcing Adobe to up its game. As of 2022, mask tools, particularly AI tools, are more powerful in LR. The layers in C1 are nice, but the interface is dated, and they have not had substantial feature updates to layers in years.
Don’t think you can avoid a real layer-based editor like Photoshop or Affinity by going with Capture One or Lightroom. It’s not a replacement. C! and LR are still RAW editors and if you try to replace Photoshop with it alone, your finished images will suffer.
Since this video, there have been a few interface updates as C1 tries to get more modern. But Phase One is very slow to listen to customers and make changes. Though Adobe is also guilty of this, you would think Phase One would want to be on top of it to gain market share. Sadly, they don’t seem, to care about customer happiness any more than Adobe does.
If I was asked right now… Capture One vs Lightroom Gavin? It will have to be Lightroom. But it’s a personal choice and this could change with an update. They are close. Get a trial of both and see for yourself.
Final Capture One VS LIghtroom Thoughts.
When I first started testing Lightroom vs Capture One years ago, I was impressed, and it seemed like a viable way to escape Adobe. But as time goes on and prices go up, Phase One seems to be ahead of itself.
In the end, these are both very good editing apps. Lightroom is easier to use and has more features overall. Capture One has more nuanced color control, but there’s little I can do there that I can’t find a way to do in Lightroom.
If someone tells you that Capture One gives you better images. I have not found that to be the case in 2022. Lightroom produces equal results. So try them both and use the one that feels best to you. they are both good. In the end, these are simply tools, and if Capture One takes a big leap, I will be right back here talking about it and not afraid to switch.
Meanwhile, Lightroom wins the overall Capture One vs. Lightroom battle, but both apps are good and produce excellent photo edits.
Here’s how I get my one file HDR from styles and presets in Natural HDR 4. And free presets for you.
Thanks for checking out my Natural HDR presets. The way to create better HDR formulas. I’m also uploading a free sampler pack of Natural HDR 4 here for LR, PS, RAw, and C1.
This week’s video is training on my HDR presets, but it’s also full of secrets of how I edit single files into HDR using LR, RAW capture one, and more. It’s truly amazing what we can get from a single file, especially a raw file if you edit well.
Today’s editing techniques come from years of tinkering and I’m going to upload some free presets to help you get started fast without buying anything.
This was me in the early 2000’s with my prized EOS 3.
There are lots of De-Noise tools. I’ve owned most and reviewed more thru the years. The story behind me obsessing over noise goes back to the early RAW processing days and I’ll show you in today’s video how to avoid that pasty digital noise reduction look and switch it for a rich detailed film look.
