Colours

Most of my pictures are in black and white. And this is for two main reasons. Firstly I think I can express myself a better way by creating contrasty black and white images. They come naturally to me and represent quite well what I want to express. Secondly (and that is at least equally important) this has to do with the fact that I find colour images more difficult to process and due to a lack of precessing skills on my side I just can't get them the way I want them. 

The latter is something that I am certainly not happy about. You don't want your artistic expression to be limited by lack of technical skills. And there is a clear need to fix this problem. In the past I have been struggling to use Photoshop mainly because it is not intuitive to me. I just couldn't retain the information of how to use certain tools because the workflow and particularly the logic of layer masks just doesn't make sense to me. 

And it seems that recently I've got a better grip on how to process pictures in PS. Maybe this is because they have developed their software further and have made it a little more user friendly. Maybe watching dozens of tutorials had an effect on my mind. Now I can even enjoy using certain tools like 'hue/saturation' adjustment layers. And Capture One provides quite a few great options for colour processing anyway.  

The result is that I have been trying it again and in the past days I have processed some colour pictures with results that are at least kind of acceptable. 

With regard to artistic expression I have clearly not yet found my purpose. What exactly do I want to say in a colour picture? It is obvious to me that I want to continue shooting and processing dark and contrasty pictures. I feel at home with this type of photography.  And eventually it is probably about developing series of pictures similar to the way I work with monochromes.

Some months ago I discovered the photographer Rémy Soubanère on Flickr. He is my current hero of dark colour photography. I love his pictures and the way he processes them. I don't want to emulate or copy his style but I find him highly inspirational. Here is the link to his Flickr page. https://www.flickr.com/photos/remysoubanere
And his website  http://remysoubanere.com

 As a result of all this I will be posting some colour pictures that I have taken and processed in the past few weeks. That's a starting point. And then we will see. 

Capture One

I had enough of Lightroom. After the recent upgrade to LR 6.2 I could not work with this software anymore. The laptop got completely stuck and each single processing step took ridiculous 3 to 5 minutes. And it also felt as if the computer slowed down in other programs too. I have to admit that my MacBook is now 8 years old and certainly not the fastest computer on earth. But this kind of slow-down was new to me.

Taking a look at the web and viewing articles of hundreds of frustrated users confirmed my suspicion. Lightroom is a bulky piece of software that gets harder to utilize with every upgrade they make.  

To get my computer going again I deleted LR from my MacBook, removed also the two older versions that I had accumulated over the time and went to Phase One's website and uploaded a trial version of their Capture One software. First impression when uploading - it's sleeker than Lightroom, it has 400MB instead of 1400MB that LR has. And thus it's running clearly faster and smoother.

I had read about C1 some weeks ago and that many people who have enough of LR consider this as a very valid alternative. And not only because it's quicker and less bulky but first of all because of better image quality, particularly in colour images.

So now I am reading the instruction and I'm trying to get my head around how to use it. To me it's not counter-intuitive as many people have written. However I still need to understand its workflow and idiosyncrasies.

My first impression is that I can work with it. The structure of the software makes sense to me. I don't know about image quality and the final results as I have not done a whole processing cycle yet.

What I clearly miss is a history panel where I can go several steps back and start at a point of my processing history that I can define. C1 does not seem to have this tool.

It would be great to hear from people who use C1 and who can compare LR and C1. What do you prefer? And why? Please write me either a comment here or an email (Flickr email or c_ms@gmx.de) or send me a Facebook comment.