Anyone familiar with Karl Shakur's work is aware of his creativity, extreme attention to detail, and recognizable style. This video he produced during the COVID shutdown takes a quick dive into how he achieves his consistent color grading and clean aesthetic using Lightroom and Photoshop (although I was able to accomplish all of these things using Capture One Pro).
Karl does a wonderful job here of clearly and concisely addressing a couple of key aspects when it comes to processing and the importance of consistency in color grading across whole projects or portfolios and the process for cleaning up your image to produce a professional-quality final product. Whether the images he produces speak to you or not, objectively speaking, there is no denying that his portfolio is incredibly aesthetically pleasing based on his obsessive consistency with color. Furthermore, there is no denying that there are no frivolous objects or distractions in any of his compositions. This quick video is an opportunity for you to get some insight into how he achieves this throughout his work.
There are so many helpful videos out there that address challenges we all face with basically any aspect of photography. Sometimes, the techniques or solutions are so simple, but it takes a bit of outside perspective or explanation to achieve that "ah ha" moment. For me, this video provided a couple of "ah ha" moments that have undoubtedly improved my workflow. I'll leave it up to you to watch, learn, and have your own such moments.
Why the Capture One mention?
I use Capture one and I just wanted to point out that I was able to accomplish the whole RT workflow he used in LR + PS in just C1. It may not have come across that way, though!
how were you able to mimic calibration in C1?
Well, what to say? That is on the level: manipulate heavily a bad snapshot to make it look somehow better. The text of this article has not much to do with the video. Honestly: a waste of time. Sorry.
Fully agreed !
Just another useless video from guy who's looking for watch time !
Appreciate the perspective, Jan and Franck. I would encourage you to look at this as useful to some and perhaps obvious or not so useful to others--but not necessarily useless. For folks who don't have consistent workflows down pat, I think resources like this can be helpful.
Thanks for the response, Mitch. If you argument like this, any video, even of the lowest quality, will be useful to some one. The above video is not up to the standard one can usually expect here and it should not being posted in fstoppers. But who am I to tell this?