Capture One 20 Live : Know-how | Getting the most out of Layers

good morning everybody welcome to today's webinar which is all about on slouching which is all about working with layers so we're gonna start simple and look at all the kind of additional stuff that you can do with layers we look at the simple tool metrics brush brush dynamics I can never say that and then move into more advanced things like luminosity masking using the color editor and a whole bunch of other stuff so I'm going to assume let's just turn me down in the background I'm gonna assume that you don't really know much about layers so as I said we will be starting simple but then we ramped up as we go through now before we start just a couple of housekeeping things just to remind you that we have a maximum of 60 minutes today we could probably talk for two hours about layers but we won't we'll keep it to 60 minutes I am recording this you'll get a automated email sometime tomorrow when it's ready to go on YouTube so don't worry if you miss anything at all you're very welcome and encouraged to use the chat room as you have seen right now so obviously that's public so you can use that for heckling chatting with each other and being nice of course if you want to ask a specific question and you're very welcome to of course then put that in the Q&A tab because that just simply means that I can find you guys all the questions much much easier than rather it disappearing in the chat as there is rather a lot of use so just remember that if you put a question in the chat and it miraculously disappears it probably means that I've just moved it over to the Q&A tour to reply me now if chatting or asking questions is not your thing you can hit the little down arrow in the top right hand corner and then that will give you a bit more real estate on screen to see what's going on with capture one excuse me so let us begin so we need my screen up that would help as I said first of all we're just going to explain some of the basics around working with layers now the whole premise of working with the layer is that first of all we need to know where the layers tool is and in the default workspace it's actually stuck to the top of these three tool tabs or very close to the top so in the color tool tab in the exposure tool tab and the details tool tab and the reason for that is that these are the kind of tool sets that you might like to use when working with layers and the whole idea of a layer of course is that you have different ways to draw a mask for example this could be a brush and then those adjustments will only happen on that masked area so for example if I right-click or control-click to bring up my brush parameters let's just make that a bit smaller or explain these in a second when I start drawing let's just making you know when I start drawing if you press M on your keyboard you can see the mask now wherever I draw this mask if I was to then make an adjustment like exposure then there only happens on that masked area so that's the super basic principle of working with layers now let's just delete that layout like so now there's lots of different ways to create if I just bring that up again lots of different ways to create this mask so we can use a brush we can do gradients we can do radials we can use the color editor we can do all kinds of different things to create that mask and we can also vary how the mask looks in terms of its opacity and shape refining edges all kinds of different things this is why this subject could be quite deep of course so we run through some simple examples so we're just going to look at basic mask drawing we've got a gradient example here and then a radial example that we can look at oops oom out and then we move on to things like different brush dynamics like using flow luma range control which is pretty cool styles on layers and also a bit about color grading and then any other extra stuff that we can come up with as well so let's start with the basics I'm going to pick this photo again and this one is without any layers at all so let's focus on what we're going to do so this shot already has some basic adjustments to it but let's consider you know the kind of things that we could do for this shot that would make sense in terms of a layer so right now if we look at our details tool tab we can see that sharpening is turned off or it's down to zero because this shot it's a shallow depth-of-field shot and there isn't a great deal in focus except for our subject which is our smoothie I guess or breakfast so I could argue I want to make this stand out a bit more so I could do that with sharpening clarity a bit of stretching and so on there's not a huge amount of benefit to sharpening the background because it's out of focus so steps to create a layer good practice first of all let's make a new layer and we're going to call that smoothie it's a good idea to name your layers because otherwise you end up in the situation of having a bunch of layers the maximum is 16 so you can't have more than 16 called layer 1 2 3 4 5 and you have no idea which each one does so giving it a name certainly does help so I'm going to grab my brush like so I'm gonna go over to my shot now the first two sliders is the only thing we're gonna look at right now we're going to come back to these and we've got size obviously how big the brushes and hardness so that's how it rolls off onto the edges so the smoothness now the reason why there's two circles is because the inner circle is where your brush is at max opacity if you like a hundred percent and by the time it's reached the outer circle it's faded to zero so that's if you like the feather pattern so I'm gonna make this a little bit harder so let's go around here and we're going to start drawing now you can see the mask is visible in red so I'm not going to do anything particularly fancy gonna fill this in like so to see your mask or to hide the mask then it's going to be using the keyboard shortcut M so if you press M on your keyboard then you can see the mask on and off like so now I've made a mistake so I'm going to pick my erase brush that's this guy here and then just get rid of that now press M again and now we're free to adjust what we want to so I'm going to sharpen this up a little bit more so let's just boost up the sharpening add a bit of halo suppression that gets rid of any sort of nasty halos and we could also add a bit of clarity as well like so and it's getting a bit dark over here so let's pull up the blacks for example so that's just a real let's hide my browser that's just a real simple edit we can turn the layer on and off with the check mark so you can see before and after like so now also now that we have that layer active if I wanted to add this adjustment anywhere else then I would just need to brush so if I start brushing here as if by magic then those adjustments pop up in that place as well let's zoom back out so like so and again if I press M you can see the mask easy peasy now another way to visualize masks and we're going to get onto this a bit later just so you know it's here under this menu you can see the shortcut for show and hide there's another option which will only show them ask when you're drawing so it kind of pops on when you're drawing and disappears straight away I find that a bit annoying so I like to just manually turn the mask on and off the interesting one is display grayscale mask so this shows the mask is a grayscale now note for the future how this mask looks it's black where there's no masking and white where there is masking okay black and white so you can see where the mask is now the reason why that's useful we're going to come to when we start using more sophisticated brush dynamics like flow so hold that thought now finally if red is not your favorite color and you want something else or it's hard to see on the image you're adjusting if you go to the preferences like so and then over on under where is it I can never remember where it is appearance let's try appearance there we go so down here mask color like so so over there you can change that to anything you like but the default is red okey-dokey now quick check on questions so that should cover off the basics Captain Jack we get back to you Jan says how do you stop losing layers when you upgrade from capture on eleven twelve earlier you shouldn't use lose the layers that was an early bug in capture one twenty point oh one or something like that so make sure you're on the latest dot zero fall and that should be fine if you're on subscription Jim no you don't need to upgrade anything the whole point in subscription never need to upgrade you're just you're just paying as and when and you always have rights to everything Klaus says why do you call a mask when other programs call it a selection well I guess selection can often be like a path selection or Alice sue or something like this so technically it's a mask and in Photoshop the closest thing to this would be the quick mask which also shows in red so there we go pen type stuff we'll come back to in a second because we can talk about that at the end because I'm using a pen it's not requirement but I think it makes the task easier all right let's move on to the next kind of basic example so we saw that you could create masks just using a brush now additionally sometimes that doesn't make sense so we've got some basic edits on this photo let's actually reset it and do that so we're going to straighten up the horizon with our straighten tool up the top here crop wise let's just change the crop a little bit now it's a bit on the bright side so I'm going to bring the exposure down and the brightness which is more a mid-tone adjustment add a bit of contrast and let's move my clarity tool upped and disappeared down there and a bit of clarity as well now I'd like to darken the sky a little more but the foreground is fine so a graduated filter makes sense I could just brush in the whole sky but that's not particularly the fastest way of calling it sorry the fastest way of doing it so we can use this guy which is our gradient mask like so now the icon looks slightly different on screen as you can see up here at the top so when we start drawing then you're gonna see three lines pop up like so now if I hold down shift that's going to keep them horizontal or perfectly vertical or at 45 degrees so I want these nice and horizontal so I'm going to hold down shift and then draw my gradient now if I press M on the keyboard you can see the fall-off that it creates so again if I just hover my cursor over the screen where's my cursor good over here you can see the three lines that it creates that the top line is obviously where our gradient starts by the time we get to the center line we're at 50% and then by the time we get to the last line we're at zero so that's your fall off now if that fall-off is too gradual for you you can make it asymmetric is the technical term so if you hold down your Alt key like so grab the bottom line then we can change our fall-off to be asymmetric not symmetrical so now I've got an asymmetrical gradient like so so if I come off the screen press M now I'm free to adjust that area so I could make this a little bit darker more contrasting you know let's not do that and so on so gradient mask is super simple now any point and you'll see this with the radio if you feel that that's not right we can move it around I can go to the center line change the angle we can change the symmetrical Ness if that's a word so we can change it to be different as well so if I hold down shift I think this is another shortcut if I hold down shift then you see both outer lines will move around the center line like so so you've got loads of control over there to fall off so that's making a gradient mask now important point first of all name Elias red sky now if I wanted to do another gradient then that's got to be on another layer so if I was to start drawing another gradient it would overwrite that previous one so it's one gradient per layer so if I wanted to have one in the foreground I'd make a new layer and then drop that one in like so so very important only one kind of gradient mask per layer now the second kind of gradient mask is let's pull up this shot is a radial so which is like a fancy vignette for want of a better word so similar process to the gradient mask you'll find it over here again it's the radial looking shape and my fit screen yes so when we start drawing notice that the icon looks a bit different it's now got a circle next to it when we start drawing so let's draw a circle then we see a similar kind of shape going on but now radio so same principle applies a hundred percent on the outer circle 50 to zero like so and then we've got four handles around the outside so this allows me to change the shape to circular to more oval and so on and grabbing the inner or outer circle allows you to change the feathering now these are always symmetric we can't make a radial circuit sorry a radial mask I lost my head and we can't make that asymmetric so it's always gonna be like so now again if I press M on my keyboard you can see how the radio looks like so and then now we can use any combination of adjustments to tweak that down etc again namely layers so this is a radial now a couple of other extra things to note about the radial mask as well is that by default when you start drawing the radial mask it's gonna be I'm not sure what the correct term is it's not it's gonna the mask is going to be on the outside if you like so the unaffected area is going to be in the middle so if you want the inverse of that for example let's let's just move this was that peeny was asking how do i incline it Jimi rotate just hover over the center and then you can twist it like so now if you want the opposite effect you want the mask in the middle or inside you can right click and by default you can set it up to always draw the mask inside if that's your preferred or you can right click on the layer itself and say invert so if we do invert then it's going to go like so right click and invert once again and that works on any mask not just radial masks if you've drawn a mask and you want to invert it then you can do so like so the other option is you can grab the outer line and you can force it over the middle and then it will snap to the inside like so so plenty of different options and the nice thing is of course again it's dynamic so if you always want to go back and then just edit that mask you can do so and then you'll see the effect in real time so if I bring the brightness right down and then we play with this whoops definitely saw it in real time then let's spin that again and so on then you can see exactly how it's gonna look so it's pretty neat it's a really powerful radial tool ok that deals with our sort of three basic ways to draw to build a mask so with a brush with a gradient with the radial mask now Kelvin there's no prioritization big and also someone else was asking about collapsing layers remember the is all non-destructive editing so you can't merge layers because that would fundamentally change the pixels or the data in the file so you can't merge layers because we're doing non-destructive editing nor pixel editing and secondly there's no prioritization for the layers it doesn't matter what order they're in again because it's non-destructive and is it the same as Photoshop kind of but again because of non-destructive and also the fact that you can't say have five layers merge them down you know you have a restriction in that that case but you have much more flexibility because you're working with raw data and again it's a non-destructive but there's lots of similarities with Photoshop Photoshop you can do more of course you've got different blend modes you can add master particular layers and you know all kinds of other stuff so it's it's similar but it's not identical alright let's just have a check on other questions does it automatically create a layer when you use a radial mask yes yes and no so let's get rid of this radial mask by hitting - now if there's no layers present and I draw a radial you see it makes a layer for me same goes for if I draw a gradient mask then it creates a layer for me same goes if I grab a brush and start to draw then it creates a layer for me but now from this point if I now wanted to do a radial mask as well if I draw a radial here it's just going to overwrite that current layer so the initial layer creation is kind of done automatically but after that you need to make your own layers as it were so let's see the alt allows isometric radials it doesn't actually Tim unless something's changed pretty sure it doesn't so if I hold alt key down see it's still symmetrical it doesn't change the spacing in between those lines so that only works on the gradient so sorry to disappoint you there and Andy correct layers are totally non-destructive so obviously if you go crazy with pulling adjustments all over the place then yes you might start to see errors but that's not destructing pixels that's over editing cool all right so shortcuts were to come back to because there's a whole bunch of of shortcuts and that can help speed up your workflow I don't tend to show the shortcuts here because then it makes it very difficult for you guys to follow okay so let's go and look at really one of the most powerful aspects when you're drawing masks with a with a brush and that's using flow so we've got an image example here it has some basement so I've done some what have we done let's look at it out of out of the the box as it were it looks like this so it's had a little exposure and contrast bump and some clarity and that's it now looking into this area let's just hide the browser I want to get a bit more kind of life going on in here because there's some fun things going on which I want to see but if I open up the blacks more so let's do that so if I open up the blacks now this is looking a bit sort of nasty fake HDR going on now I only really want to open up this area so just kind of around here just subtly just a little bit so I want to control where the blacks is so based on what you and I have learnt so far what you could do is grab a brush and you could think right I want to open up this area so I'm going to kind of draw a mask here something like that that's kind of what I'm thinking like so hide my mask and now try and open up the blacks that still looks pretty kind of weird and fake so that's not a good way to do it what we want to do is build up this adjustment slowly now I can show you sort of two different techniques the first one I'm going to show you is how I used to do it the second one is how I do it now the second one I believe gives you more control and a better end result so first technique is to do this I'm just going to zoom in a bit so you guys can see easier is that I'm going to look at my black slider and think okay how much kind of do I want to go so I'm not sure so I probably want to push it about this much so I'm going to make a new layer and call this Black's like so and I'm gonna bump it up to whatever it was somewhere around here grab my brush and now start brushing so I can see the effect get painted in now once again you're going to agree that looks pretty bad so let's right-click and clear the mask that just gets rid of your mask but not your adjustment and we're going to right click and we're gonna take the flow down to something nice and low and what flow does is change the way that the mask is built up so at a hundred percent as soon as you start moving the brush it's gonna paint in your entire adjustment so that's plus fifty five black in one brushstroke or one mouse stroke exactly the same not reliant on using a pen if we turn flow down to something like five then that's five percent so one pass of the brush will give you five percent so if I go painting back and forth it'll build up in five percent increments so five 10 15 20 25 30 and so on so I get if you like ten passes to reach my maximum opacity which is set above here which is currently 100 so it'll max out at a hundred which means 55 on the black so now when I start brushing if I brush back and forth here then it gradually starts to open up that area like so so it's not boom all in one go it allows me a gradual build-up which looks a lot more natural so now if we zoom out a bit maybe not that much and we just turned this layer on and off now it's a lot more believable because it was built up slowly now if you think darn it I've overcooked it a bit too much then of course we can switch to arrays and now the important thing is to have this one checked which make sure the brush and eraser settings are exactly the same so now if I start erasing I'm going to be a raising in 5% brushstrokes like so so I can go back and forth I can press B I can say well let's just open up this Hut a little bit more and now if I go to e that was a bit too much so let's just kill that one now if it's happening too fast then you can take flow down if it's happening too quickly sorry that was the same if it's happening too quickly the adjustment is coming in too quickly then you can reduce your flow if it's not coming in fast enough and your brushing brushing brushing brushing then you can move the flow up but I'm normally around five ish percent roughly and equally what you can also do is grab the opacity slider and you can go from zero to 100 like so so that works super nicely now that's the way I prefer to do it I'm going to get rid of that layer is you could argue it's slightly longer but I would say you get a better result and once you get quick at it especially using shortcuts I think you'd actually be faster and less frustrated so what I do is I start with a new field layer so this creates a new layer but it's straightaway fills it with a mask over the whole area so if I press M now you can see my whole shop is covered in a mask so think of this for those of you who are used to Photoshop or affinity photo for example there is sorry I lost my thread then it's like an adjustment layer so it's kind of giving yourself another background if you like so also if you want to separate out your adjustments into from layers even if it's just filled layers that's also a tactic that you can do so it's now filled over the holeshot so what I can do is think okay I want to open up this area how am I going to do it so I think blacks work quite nicely so I can see okay the black slider does this the shadow slider does that so those two work quite nicely maybe I could open up with a curve or something like that so I can play around with different adjustments and see what works quite nicely now I think black probably works just fine for this or a combination of the two so I can visualize what's going on the first method only really works if you're using one adjustment this method works better if you want to combine a few different adjustments like right now opening up the blacks has it gone a bit flat so is it better if I just add a bit of contrast and maybe some clarity as well so I can combine a whole bunch of different adjustments and see what's going on okay I'm happy with that's a good result based on where I'm going to paint it so now I can name this so let's just call this Hut's or whatever right click and say clear mask remember that's just going to zap the mask but those tweaks that I made you can see on the sliders here they're still active so now when I grab my brush same principle as before zoom in a bit right click nice low flow let's make it a bit softer now I can go back in and then we can just open up those areas where I think it needs it and if I brush a bit more here that's going to open it up more and I could even focus a bit on this side of the hut and I'm not being super critical because my adjustment is targeting targeted in the shadow so I'm not worried if I'm over painting over here because the black slide is not going to affect this area so I'm not worried about cutting perfectly around things that's just going to take too much time but I can easily just open up these different areas now if we zoom out a little bit like so and turn on Hut's off and back on then we can see the effect that it's made more sophisticated than the first method timewise probably almost the same but just allows a much better previous visualization of what's going on now if you remember we spoke about that grayscale mask so when we looked at our smoothie let's go back to the smoothie for a second so when we looked at our smoothie option in so that's how our greyscale masked looks white is masked area black is not lost now if we go back to our flow this is our shot with the grayscale masked so now you can see we've got all those levels of density from white to black so we've got grays in there as well so this is maximum adjustment where it's almost pure white and then fading out to a much smaller adjustment around those edges where we've got the grayscale so I hope that makes sense but it's really one of the best kind of methods to improve using of layers to make nice natural-looking masks that don't you know have hard edges or a nasty sort of HDR effect or anything like that okay couple of questions then we do the same thing with this guy as well let's have a look so let's just add this to the QA friend swamp just so I don't lose it so fill mask always goes to a hundred yes actually when you create a new filled layer let's just be specific here when we say a new filled layer that's always to 100% now if you are to right click on a layer and say fill if you've drawn like a 50% capacity brush or something then it will fill 250 as far as I can remember why do I prefer flow to opacity because it means you can keep your mouse or pen in contact with the surface or your desk or what and effectively paint so if you imagine you've got a good old pen and pencil here so if I invite draw with my pencil this is effectively what you're doing with flow is you're making it darker and darker now if flow is on 100 and you have opacity set to 50% it would be like this kind of thing if a passer T was set to 100% then it would be like me pressing really hard so you don't get that those levels of of control what you have to do with the pasady if I set opacity to 5 I could do a similar thing but I would have to draw lift draw lift draw lift whereas using the flow method I'm of effectively sketching so it's much more natural to do it that way the news opacity okay shortcuts we'll come back to those shortcuts for everything so let's have a look is there an easy issue a and he says to mask the horizon line instead of using a grade mask will hold that thought because we use a luma mask example which could help you in in the future Stefan if I have overlapping layers do the upper layers always work on the background image or on the next lower layer it works on everything so just imagine like you've got a 3d stack of layers all those adjustments will be additive throughout the whole stack so it won't miss anything else essentially okey-dokey let's have a look Matthew says last question do you feel the new white and black sliders work as well as or better than using a curve style adjustment it's certainly faster and you have to remember that that sliders have quite a lot of intelligence built into them and smart algorithms which is maybe more than a simple curve can do so since I've got the white and black sliders my use of curves actually has become less and less now curves allow you if you like the ultimate control freak sophistication but it doesn't necessary always do a better job than the slider it's like an old sort of ante slider movement if you like that if you're using a slider you're not being professional because sliders are dumb that's not the case there's loads of smart stuff under the hood of the slider which actually gives a very good result okay so another example with flow actually did this yesterday in a live broadcast so if you've already seen this then I'm sorry but for the benefit of people who weren't watching live then we can see it again by the way this little button I just clicked here this is called the proof margin so that just gives you a bit of space around the shot which is sometimes handy if you're masking near to the edge just gives you a bit more space which I'm going to so again this photo has a few adjustments warmed up a bit of an exposure bump and so on now the sky it has some good stuff going on there so again I'm going to make a new field layer it's call this sky like so and I want to make this guy jump out a bit more so what's going to make that happen is it clarity yes so let's keep in loads of clarity is it contrast not really could I do something with the curves going back to Matthew so I want to make this bit kind of darker so I can grab my curve picker click on that and that tells me where that tone is so now I can think okay let's bring that sky down a bit to something like that now I'm overdoing it because I know when I brush it in I'm not going to go that far so there's that so now once again that's a combination of curve and we've got a bit of clarity in there as well we could even drop brightness maybe a little now I need to right click and say clear mask grab my brush gonna make this nice and big relatively soft flow nice and low again and now I can just kind of almost copy the shape of the sky to some extent just a couple of those darker areas maybe a bit up here and a bit there now I've gone too far this I'm going to press e on my keyboard for a raise and just take that back out go B for brush again do a little bit more here and even if I felt okay this house down here that might benefit from a bit I can throw a bit in there as well and so on so now if I turn this layer off and back on you can see what it's done again if I've gone too far we've got the added flexibility of opacity so we can always go from zero up to a hundred to decide where the balance is about right which I'm going to go for that so nice and easy and again starting with that filled layer I believe gives you the benefit of working with more than one adjustment to visualize what's going on and then painting it in where you seal where you feel fit okay couple of questions and Kevin says so opacity always at a hundred percent I think so because we've got now we've got the ability to change opacity here so I don't really see any benefit in modifying it here so it's always at the max for me whereas flow down here I keep two five now some people prefer having flow at a hundred an opacity down super low and then they do multiple brushes where I just find that kind of counterintuitive and annoying so I use flow like this as it was intended cool mario says the sky's too yellow well that's easy to fix we could go to color balance tool and we could make it whatever we like so we could go towards the blues for example we could just push it any color that we want to so that is an easy fix luma range s we're going to cover that don't worry layers exported to photoshop no remember it's not the same thing because this this is a non-destructive edit it's not going to transpose to Photoshop two totally different things shoppers of pigs I'll edit er capture one and other raw converters work on the raw file and it's non-destructive so it cannot be transferred transferred over to photoshop let's have a look would be great if the tools used in the layer will highlight it don't indicate it in some way it could be nice that's well that highlighted oh I see what you mean so you know okay on my sky layer I'm using XYZ for example now you can see which tools are layer compatible because they have the little paintbrush but I it could be nice when you pick a layer that if they get highlighted that might be small actually that could be good okay pen pressure would come back to as well and I think we're good right now okay how i'll that's actually a really good question how exact you have to be while drawing a mask like four edges as you've seen so far I haven't been accurate by any stretch of the imagination now I think there's a couple of cases where you might want to be accurate but that's probably for like interior photography if you want to go around like a window or a piece of furniture or something like that generally if you start being super accurate around edges that's when it becomes very obvious that you've done some masking so if you look to this shot do you know that the sky has been changed locally probably not if we look at this shot do you know that there's a little tweak going on there or do you think that's just naturally how it looked know if we've done the first method of a hundred percent mask and just gone cut around the edge of this mountain then we're into nasty-looking sort of HDR effect so the more seamless and gradual you can make the mask remember if we look at our grayscale mask they're more believable it's going to be now if you did have an object again there's the mask on this one if you did have an object make you want it to cut round here's a tip so if we grab our brush and make it much harder and I start with a dot so let's press M oops let's go full flow so we can see it and we start with the dot if I hold down shift and click once it'll draw a straight line so if you want to draw around a square for example then you can do so and to save you having to do this and fill it in you can right click and say fill and then it will fill the rest of the masks in like so so shift will allow you to draw straight lines so you could have like it's super tiny brush for example and then we could draw around different objects as we see fit and then of course we can right click and say fill mask like so but generally the more seamless natural varied masks you can make the more believable in matte it looks as well cool let's have a look what are we doing next mental brainfart luma range ok a few of you have asked about this this is an awesome shot and it's actually part of a blog post from a photographer out in Beijing and I picked up this shot he posted about it on reddit in the capture one group and wrote a really nice blog post about how he went through and started with this and ended up with this so next week actually I'll run through the full edit on a live broadcast and we probably don't have time for that now so we've still got other stuff to cover but what we can look at is the luminosity mask side of things so here is the shop with some basic edits but we've still got a fair amount of work to do so this is out of camera this is with a few edits but you can see we've still got a fair amount to do in this section of the shot like so so by using a luma mask then we've managed to get this so how do we use luminosity masks well first of all you can see in the layers tool itself that we've got a button here called luma range now right now it's grayed out so you think is it broken does it not work or whatever but the important concept to realize is that sorry requite you the important concept to realize is that the luma mask is applying a constraint on a mask that you have already drawn so if I draw a mask with a brush or I make a radial mask or a gradient mask or a field mask we're then saying okay capture one here's the mask now apply some luminosity constraint to it so you have to start with a mask for the luma range to work so in this case I'm gonna say let's make a new filled layer and we're gonna call this greenery like so and if we press M we can see that the whole mask now what I want to do and I think this was who was asking but can't remember someone about do I have to cut carefully now I just want to kind of darken this area down at the bottom so I could do a you know a hand-drawn mask and so on but it's quite a complex shape around here and in this case I think maybe fitting the mask nicely would make sense so if I press M you can see the mask is set over the whole shot now if I press luma range then this little tool pops up capture one will work in the background the second to kind of build a map and then what we can do is is cut out parts of that mask like so so we've got shadows to highlights so obviously if I cut out the highlights then we end up with something like that if we bring this one up then we do the opposite we'd cut out the shadows and we'd end up with just the sky pretty neat huh so I want to cut this down until we just have something roughly like that so that's excluded my sky and we've got full masking around this area and then it's rolling off nicely into these distance so the roll off or fall off is denoted by the sliders at the bottom so if I pull this one in like that you see now it gets really binary around the outside if I open this up then that's gonna bleed nicely into the tone so it's not if you like a hard stop so now if I place press apply this is the mask that we're dealing with now what you might prefer is that when you're making luminosity masks is that before you go into the luma range dialog is to turn on display grayscale mask so now if we go back into luma range then you can see really exactly like if I open this up again you see just above my head that kind of bit of flare there we want to get rid of that and now it's super easy to see exactly what areas we're covering so I'm gonna go settle with something like that and say apply job done so that looks you know super super nice so if I press M on my keyboard then we can come out of that now we're free to just edit this zone so what I'm going to do is to fix that I'm going to bring the levels in so we can up the contrast a bit and then working in a bunch of clarity because it's only happening in that area and now also let bump up the saturation as well easy peasy now that way faster to do it like that with the luma range then you know hand drawing or doing a few other bits now one other tip that we can look at so let's look at let's go so lovely shots on a GFX 50 it's super SuperDuper sharp who fancies going up that bridge not me okay so now let's look at the edge of the mask so I'm gonna put on my grayscale mask like so now we can see around the edge it's it's a little bit crude no it's it's quite hard so do we want to soften that up a little bit so we can use a couple of different additional tools to do so and this works on on any mask as well so if we right click I can say feather or refine so if I went to feather mask and I tried to do something let's just bump it up to 100 it's working working working thinking about it nothing's happening that's weird why is that because remember we're feathering my filled mask not the actual result so nothing's gonna happen so that's a bit of a head scramble to get around because you would think okay if I feather the mask shouldn't I see the edge feather no because remember our actual mask is the field mask and the luma range tool is putting a constraint on that so we're actually feathering the edge of a field mask so that kind of doesn't work so we could try something else we could say okay well let's try and refine my mask let's bump this up to 300 let capture one work weird nothing's happening again that's annoying again we're refining the edge of our field mask so let's cancel that out but fortunately in luma range those two functions are built-in so we've got two sliders radius and sensitivity now at zero when radius is at zero the sensitivity slider has no effect because it doesn't have like a space to work because it's at zero so when we bump up the radius then capture one will start looking at how this mask has been built and you'll see as I increase that and it will start to spread out from the edge of the mask and define how those edges look now right now with sensitivity at in the middle we've got a balance between feathering and refining the mask so if I go to zero the mask now gets feathered if I go to a hundred it's going to refine which means it's going to kind of suck around the edges and the bigger I make the radius you will see the more that's going to travel from either side of my mask like so so it makes it nice and subtle now how does that look on the shot itself so let's turn off the grayscale mask so if I go sensitivity to zero you're going to see we've got like the mist is just kind of spilling over the edge of the shot which might look quite nice if we go to a hundred my adjustment is going to snap tightly around the now whatever looks better that's kind of down to you so if we turn that off let's bring luma range back up so if I go to zero so you can see the mist is kind of enveloping over the side a hundred then it snaps around to the edge so I think I would probably go somewhere in between maybe about there kind of thing so this is a super duper powerful tool sometimes it's you know it takes a little bit of tweaking to get use use out of it as well but it's super nice now that was with a field mask now if I'd done another thing so let's just grab a brush let's just say I do a crude sort of mask like this like so now when I hit luma range we can pretty much achieve the same thing like so because it's putting that constraint on the currently drawn while drawing a mask now you can do this on a gradient mask you can do it on a radial mask with the drawn mask with a field mask so any mask that you create and capture one you can then put on top of that that luma range constraint as well so that's just remembered like to get in your head exactly how the process works make a mask put a luma range constraint on it so luma range does not create the mask it puts a constraint on a mask that you have made so that's really important to denote we can invert the range as well and what would happen here so that's just kind of flipping it like so but it really is a super SuperDuper cool tool so to edit this shot without that you know would have been quite difficult and we can see the dramatic difference that we have looks perfectly natural and believable we don't have any sort of weird kind of posterization going on here or anything like that it's just seamlessly blended in from those darker tones to going out into the highlights so it's built the perfect whilst for you if you like okay that was quite a long explanation but it's a really super nice feature let's have a look marvelous savvier says yep and Alice's gonna spare spares so much time and don't forget actually let's say no matter how much you'd kind of spent on this mask let's say we had like a rogue bit of mask up here or something like that I can still erase this part so let's say I didn't want this bit in I could still erase that bit out because remember I'm putting a constraint on that mask again so if there's like a little bit of you know rogue mask somewhere let's just fill that mask again fill mask oh sure they don't clear mask and let's say fill mask there we go luma range just bring that back down so let's say you add like a cloud up here or something like that you can still delete those parts of the mask and so on now this is dynamic so there's one other option which I didn't mention which I should so note there's the little sUNshine next to that layer denoting it has a luma range constraint on it so I can always go back in and tweak that as I would want to now if it comes to the point where I want to really kind of start doing a load of brushwork on there I can right click and say rasterize you can also do this on radial and gradient masks so as soon as I say rasterize it will just kind of stick the mask as it is so now if I say rasterize the little luma sunshine goes away and now this mask kind of behaves as if I'd drawn it myself so I could you know a raised bits of it we could add two bits of it now if I wanted to we could go in and right click and say refine and then I would get my refine tools popping up and they would work as you would expect because it's working on the natural mask same goes if I went for feather mask and just max that out you can see it's just feathering around the Edge's as well so rasterize will stick the mask in its current state but then you lose the ability to retrospectively change the luma mask and so on so long-winded explanation but let's just go back to the one that I did yesterday and you can see the result is super super nice cool my mind is blown Captain Jack that's good you're not bored excellent let's have a look at some other questions so being non-destructive Andy says are there no issues with color ships and capture one when dodging and burning using curves yeah I would say if you're dodging and burning using curves use the luma curve because that's purely just a luminosity change it doesn't affect the color whereas RGB would so if you want to use curves use the luma curve Simon Says will you show the curve picker again yeah sure no problem let's see pen pressure we'll come back to just to fill in at the end conscious we've only got five minutes left so I think we move on I think we've answered most of your questions what was the last thing I was going to talk about very quick things styles styles as a layer something else that pops up so if you're using Styles so let's say you want to apply a style to this shot a bit of extra flexibility before actually applying the style right click because that's a bit heavy-handed it's kind of getting too contrasty right click and say apply to new layer and now when we look at the style it's actually its own style layer which we can turn off and on and we can change the opacity to blend exactly how we like and of course we can mix it with you know our other Corrections that we want to add in and have our nice little style layer as well so that's right click and apply it to layer just something worth mentioning color grading another use of field layer so I'm going to make a new field layer and let's call that color grade like so and now again this is on the whole shop because it gives me extra flexibility to let's say if we go to our color balance tool I just want to do the typical teal EEE whoops teal eyshadow warmer highlights kind of thing but in conjunction with my color grade I could add in well let's let's take the color down on his beard a little bit so let's reduce the saturation on that one and maybe as part of my color grade I could also take saturation down overall so now I've got a layer which is just devoted to if you like a final color look and again if I've gone too far I can grab a pass the team we can go from 0 to 100 so color grading on a layer just kind of gives you that get out clause that if you want to just back it off a bit you don't have to go back and undo all the sort of various steps that you've done on the background you can just change your color grading extras old this was to say copy and apply so if we had some layers on a shot so let's just do that same again if we had a filled layer let's say we did a color grade like so and we do a speed speed grade similar kind of thing that looks dreadful one second so let's take our saturation right down so we're going to end up with something like that it's cool and then let's say we also had a radial radial like so grab that and let's check in or vignette something I should have prepared earlier so let's just do that ok so I want to copy and apply the same effects or the same layers onto the other shots so if I shift select them all and we click on the little copy apply button in the layers tool itself you can see now we have the choice and this is new in version 20 do you just want the radio or just the color grade or both so if I only want to send the color grade across I can just tick this one and say apply and then now when we look at these shots they just have the color grade if I didn't want the radio to be there but of course now if I shift select hit copy apply let's have the radio to say apply and now we've got our radial grade radial mask as well it's actually doubled up because I copied it twice so just so you know you can do that as well and to finish shortcuts so if you go to edit Edit keyboard shortcuts it's kind of there's you know a bunch of shortcuts so it will take a while to find them so if you just type in layer in the search then you can see all the adjustments that are layer related so adding different layer types different layer opacities and so on and so forth so just type layer in edit keyboard shortcuts and then you can set them up exactly how you wish okay last few questions and then we can finish so let's have a look [Music] Q & A okay let's start at the top can you do focus stacking with layers you can't focus stacking capture one but you can buy a plug-in from Helicon focus Helicon focus which allows you to round trip to Helicon and back in to capture one so Helicon focus that's that's what you're looking for why do I never use the exposure warning function the Claude was asking I do sometimes but I'm kind of mindful of what the histogram is doing so I don't necessarily need to turn on exposure warning to see what's going on and and also calibrated monitor it's pretty easy to see where it's it's gonna blow out as well but if I'm worried then I will turn it on to to have a look Pete says can you still get the custom logic keyboard no I don't think the cables long enough to see it it's just just peeking in from the bottom of the frame we did in conjunction with logic create the capture on keyboard they're not producing it anymore because they can't get that Apple style keyboard anymore but you might still find Summits and capture one resellers and partners pin set up for Wacom pen nothing fancy really if we look in way comms system prefs so let's go to a Wacom I change a couple of things I make I don't know if this is gonna focus because it's on face tracking so this button here I use to scroll so if I click the the front button then it means I can if I had a big enough collection hang on so it means I can scroll sorry if I hold that button and go up and down I can scroll and then I have right click just on the top button this one off here otherwise that's kind of about it really I don't use the pressure sensitivity because I'm not deft enough and the only thing in effects in capture one is the size so it's actually not specially useful it would make more sense if we linked pressure sensitivity to flow for example but it only works with size currently which is a bit of a shame in my opinion otherwise I don't really do anything else fancy with the pen I just find it much more comfortable not just in capture one I don't use a mouse at all I use a pen and tablet for email for capture one for video editing I just find it much much more comfortable let's see Andy we asked you with luma luma masking hopefully why does sometimes happen capture one will calculate a mask automatically could be that you've got Auto mask flicked on and what Auto mask will do and it's not something I use a lot but if you wanted to kind of do a very specific mask around something so if we try and mask now let's make that smaller turn on auto mask we have a circle in the center so the circle is my sample point so now if I go along this Ridge right now I'm sampling the sky so then it will just cut its way around but to be honest doing this I find is much slower than just using a luminosity masks or whacking a gradient in and nobody will be none the wiser and you see how long you know this is taking me to do so now we've got this part so then I'd have to turn also mask off make it a bit bigger go around the edge like so right-click say fill mask and then we'd have our sky mask if you like but who's gonna believe that that just looks just looks kind of weird you don't have that phenomenon in real life that you have that hard edge you know light will always roll over the the mountain so to be honest having the gradient just gives you a much more natural effect and don't forget as I said if you wanted to so this is our whoops wrong shortcut come back capture one this is our grayscale mask I could also put a luma range on top of that so now if we cut out wrong direction if we cut out the darker tones you could probably end up with something more like that and then we could just fix the sky retrospectively but I don't think there's anything wrong with how that gradient mask looks currently and the curve pick us Simon was asking so the curve picker just simply means that in the curve tool if I click on that picker and click anywhere it fixes a point for me so I know exactly where that tonal range is to adjust which is pretty nice what's better the vignette tool versus the radial mask well the vignette tool works nicely for a quick fix this one down here but you don't have any control over the fall-off the vignette tall I think works very nicely for a lot of different aspects but if you want more control then you can go to the radio mosque there's no hierarchy hierarchical meaning in the stack so it doesn't matter what order the layers go so if you shift them around there's no change to the the photo it's just if you prefer them in some visual order but it makes no difference to that em result any other webinars planned always you can always go to learn capture one comm and then you'll see if I just bring that page up no no capture one comm so if I bring this page up so learned I'll capture one comm and then you'll see upcoming webinars always in the top row so next one is April 30th and I'll add a few more as well also if you subscribe to Facebook and YouTube so our Facebook page and our YouTube page whenever we go live which is Monday Wednesday Friday currently as we're all stuck at home at 3:30 Central European Time I think that's 9:30 est in the USA you'll be able to see us live on Facebook and YouTube no signup required just come along and join in you can type in facebook comments or youtube comments and so on alrighty I think as we have blasted through the 60 minute barrier we are pretty much about right there has been as sticky offer up but just to remind you so this is probably already on your screen but just to remind you if you're a current user but you're not in version 20 you can go into the store you do have to log in and that means that you can upgrade to any version to capture one or capture on 20 from any version and you can take 30% off the upgrade which is pretty nice as well there's also the code Pro 25 so if you're not using capture 1 you can use the code Pro 25 and that would take 25% of capture on asthma which is super nice so take note of that and now's a good time to upgrade in these times when we're all stuck at home with nothing to do but it photos which is great and fix the house in my cases thanks for joining me today I hope that gave you a good sort of overview on working with layers we tried to cover as much as possible we didn't get as far as looking at creating layers from the color editor but if you go back to previous webinars on working with color which i think was the last one there's a bit in there about creating a layer from the color editor as well so check that out if that's also interesting for you but layers are a great great way for making any tool in capture one more flexible more awesome and so on doesn't slow you down it speeds you up practice makes perfect find a pen is easier but don't feel you need to buy one you can do all of what we just did with a good old mess so there we go so thanks again for joining us and if you want to join us live tomorrow 3:30 Central European time we're looking at color grading just a quickie 20 minutes or so and you can join in on Facebook and YouTube then so take care of everyone and enjoy the rest of your Thursday see you soon bye now you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 22,878

Keywords: capture one, Capture One Pro, raw converter, photo editing software, capture pilot, captureone, Lightroom alternative, aperture alternative, studio software, Switching from Lightroom, Capture One vs Lightroom, Tethered, Shoot tethered, Image capture, Capture One Styles, Captureone styles, capture one pro 20, capture one 20, color editor

Id: bY6fevb4xx8

Length: 69min 5sec (4145 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020