Capture One 21 Live | Get the most out of Layers

good afternoon or good morning morning to those of you on the other side of the world uh thanks for joining this very busy webinar this afternoon where we're going to be looking at layers so layers is a is a big subject we will struggle to squeeze everything into an hour but i won't go over an hour so hopefully you'll see today as a way to inspire you to look at the potential of the tools and apply that to your own work so we're trying to squeeze in as much as possible without being confusing and set you off on the road to working with layers or getting the most out of them yourself before we get to the content just a couple of housekeeping things uh hello to those of you on facebook and youtube please feel free to put your questions and comments in the chat they will come straight through to me here as well for those of you in the webinar room just so you know let's just bring up this picture if you want to ask a question it's probably better if you put it in the q a tab you can already see from the chat room that it's definitely uh very busy um so do just keep your questions out in uh the q a room because not only am i in the webinar we've also got my colleague diego who's also helping out in the webinar room yulia who's out on facebook and is also keeping an eye on youtube as well so there's three of us who have uh your attention today so we'll do our best to uh answer as many questions as possible if you're not interested in chatting and all those kinds of things you can give yourself a bit more real estate by clicking that small arrow and that will just collapse down at that panel and give you a bit more space for capture one all right so without further ado let's get to uh the subject in hand so today's all about layers as i said in the introduction so first of all what's uh the purpose of a layer so really the purpose of a layer is to target your adjustments to a particular spot now generally when we think about layers we tend to categorize it in dodging and burning like selective brightening or darkening adjustments but it really can be a whole myriad of things it could be localized sharpening it could be localized noise reduction could be the way we do a gradient or a vignette which we call a radial mask and so on so try not to limit your scope on what layers can actually do it is rather broad and extensive and i'll show you a couple of examples in a second the way we create layers can also vary greatly as well so we can draw a layer or a mask in i should say using a brush we can use it or create it with a gradient mask we can use a radial mask we can ask capture one to analyze the brightness of the photo and create the mask based on luminosity as well so there's all kinds of different ways that we can create and shape these masks as well we will try to cover as many of those as possible too we start off simple and then we build it up a little bit so you can see the greater power as well now in terms of you guys asking questions i won't be able to get to every single question i'm afraid so what i do is i'll pick out some of the common threads that i see whizzing past me on the screen to try and cover off and as i said diego and yulia will do their best to answer as well so here's a fantastic shot on screen uh this is from miloch uh i'm sorry midluch i forgot your surname but milotch is currently being featured across our social media channels if you've been present across our channels you would have known just previously we had a competition around red now we've switched to green no prizes for guessing what the next color's going to be but this is one of milochi's shots that he shot for us around that subject and it was around lockdown and food as you can probably guess uh so this is just a great example of how mill archers exercise layers just to selectively adjust parts of the shot so if i hold my option key down and click on the reset button in layers then you can see that's without his layers and then that's with his layers so he's very much used it for local density and color changes and so on if we actually look at the before this is actually as it came at a camera and as he's done his edit so that's that is you know a brilliant example of just what you can do in capture one hopefully we can get match on a live session and he can take us through his shoot and editing process because they're really fascinating shots anyway so layers allow you to target the adjustment to a specific part of the shot so let's go through some simple examples and build up as we go all right so let's start off with something easy it's going to turn up my screen brightness so i can see what i'm doing and wonder why i was looking into a bit so let's just start with something easy which helps us think about drawing masks with a brush how the brush dynamics change or the settings of the brush how does that affect the the photo and a few other bits as well so we've got a nice food shot here relatively shallow depth of field let's just hide my browser with the command b relatively shallow depth of field so the focus is falling off here but we've got a nice sharp area so what if we wanted to just target a bit more sharpening um and a bit more um you know accuracy sharpness or whatever just on the main part of our subject so an easy way to do that would be just to do a quick layer so we're going to do this in the most basic sense so in our layers panel over here and you'll see the layers panel sits in the color tool tab the exposure tool tab and the details tool tab by default now as we're going to be working mostly in this tool tab today i've just made this tool a little larger so if you look on the three dots you can go small medium and large like so so this as we might be working with several layers this just helps you guys to see it a bit easier so i'm going to grab my brush down here this icon and then move over to the shot let's just zoom in a touch and straight away you can see the cursor change to those two concentric circles what does that actually mean well the central circle is where my mask is at 100 and if you think as we move out to the outer circle that's where the mask feathers down to zero so that gives us a nice soft edge so if i right click this brings up our brush settings panel now for this short exercise we're only going to worry about the first two adjustments which is size and hardness so let's give ourselves a fully hard brush i'm going to lose that outside circle and let's make it a bit bigger and then just draw on the shot now why can't i see anything because i haven't activated to see the mask so remember the mask will be shown in red when i press m on my keyboard so just a simple toggle with m on my keyboard like so just turns the mask on and off so that's just simply indicating where i've drawn my mask now if we change that first parameter hardness let's just drop that down a bit and do another drawing you can see the difference of how the edge of that brush is feathered off generally what we're looking to do is try to make masks as believable and natural as possible because you don't want to be looking at a shot and seeing it super obvious that someone's kind of done a bad mask around the edge of something so two simple things that we can do now i would say a golden rule of masking is not to get too obsessed with trying to cut perfectly around things all the time sometimes it makes sense like if you're doing interiors and you want to work around a window to just to change the density of the light coming through the window you would want to be accurate but generally you want to keep it nice and soft and subtle as we go through this exercise as well so i'm going to delete that layer so we can do a proper one with minus and then hit plus once more let's just call this salmon as we're going to do a little work on this guy let's zoom out a bit i'm just going to do a quick mask around the edge so i'm not going to be super accurate but nothing too fancy just in this area like so once again m hide your mask let's zoom in to 100 and then go to my sharpening tool and then just pull up the sharpening a bit like so we could also combine in a bit of structure remember your local adjustment or layer doesn't have to be restricted to one tool it can be a combination of tools so now if we turn this layer on and off with the check box then you can see what's going on i've pushed it a little bit harder than i perhaps normally would just so you guys can see on screen a bit easier now the nice thing is we've kind of created ourselves a sharpening brush so if i go over to this area and just drag over the shot like so then we can kind of apply our sharpening anywhere else so if we go to the graphic on the knife here we can sharpen that up a bit bit the lettuce and so on so just a very simple premise of how to use a layer to add one or two simple adjustments all right i can see lots of questions whizzing past about shortcuts and a few other bits and pieces so when you're adjusting the brush what i will do in this webinar is always right click and show you this panel mostly so that you can see what's going on now there are shortcuts there's a few different ways you can do it you could use your square brackets so with my square brackets over here if i tap those then you can see the brush size getting smaller and bigger if we do shift scrub square bracket that will change the the hardness uh maybe a slightly faster way to do it is if you hold down these two at least on a mac its control and option and then we drag now the reason why i've put my pen down and dragging with the trap pad is so that you can see the little heads up display and notice that the cursor stays static so if i drag left and right that makes my brush bigger and smaller if i go up and down that changes the hardness with your third spider finger over here if i hit shift then we can change our opacity and flow by dragging left and right more on those adjustments later now sometimes with wacom i need to sort my drivers out the little heads up display doesn't show up so that's why i wanted to show you without the wacom so yes jim that was gym asking that and giving a tip there are various shortcuts there's more layer shortcuts i'll mention them as we go through as well okay let's up the game a bit now that you're aware roughly what's possible with layers and let's just go to this shot we're going to reset this back to normal nice wildlife shot from my buddy let's hide overhead camera nice wildlife shot from my buddy chris gibbs out in alaska great shot pretty close out of camera so why would we want to use a layer on this shot sometimes it's worth thinking about layers when you come outside of the scope of what's possible with selective adjustments and when i say selective adjustments i mean things like the highlight slider the shadow slider and so on obviously it targeted to different densities of the shot but sometimes that's not enough so in this example if we pull the highlights down that's great i can just improve the the brightness here now underneath his legs his or her legs shouldn't discriminate i just want to lift the shadows a little bit it's getting a bit too dark so i think fair enough i'll pull up the shadows that's fine for mr or mrs bear but then it's also having a pretty broad effect to the rest of the shot that's not great what about if i pull the blacks up also the same effect so even though those are what i would call targeted slider adjustments we still need to narrow that range further now there's two different ways we could do this we could do this the way that generally we tend to do the first time that we use layers and then realize it wasn't such a good idea and then we can do it a slightly more sophisticated way so you saw how he did it with the tuna as someone has just corrected me um i saw um we just drew a quick rough mask on and added some sharpening and that worked just fine if we try to do the same thing with this it might not be as good and also we don't quite know what adjustments we want so if i grab the brush and then just start guessing where i think i want to have my adjustment so it's kind of around here and maybe down here a bit let's try that and then i can go back to my sliders high dynamic range pull open the shadows and then maybe the blacks a bit and so on it's okay but it's not great because there's no finesse to the mask itself we've either masked it or we haven't masked it so this is where the all-important parameter of flow comes into play and if you can really get your head around how flow works and use it proficiently then it just makes masking so much better faster and easier so let's do this in a slightly different way so we're going to kill that layer and we're going to click and hold on our plus button and choose this option which is called the new field adjustment layer so that will add a layer if we press m then you'll see that's the mask over the whole shot so we've literally added a mask over the whole shot why on earth would we want to do that a couple of reasons color grading which if we've got time we can talk about later another reason if you want to separate out your adjustments into different layers because we can also vary our opacity with this guy over here this slider so we can vary our opacity of our adjustment so it gives you a bit of flexibility post adjusting to lessen or strengthen the result but for this case i'm going to fill that layer as we saw and now i'm going to dial in the kind of adjustments that i think that might work now i'm not going to care what happens around the outside all i'm thinking about is what's going to look good around here so a bit of shadow i might cook it more than i would open up the blacks a bit because it's getting flatter i'll add in a little bit of contrast and also some clarity so it's not too flat now i'm only looking in this area i don't care it's messed up my highlights or it's messed up the background it's going to do its job there so now what i want to do is right click and say clear the mask now very important that will only obliterate my mask but it will keep those adjustments that we've dialed in carefully using our eyes that we think are going to do a good job so let's say clear mask the shot is going to darken down again because it's got rid of the mask but we've still got those underlying adjustments now we can grab our brush go over to our subject and think about what flow does now if we do this without flow we're back in the same situation that we're either masking or not masking and now it looks a bit fake it's too bright where the grass is and so on so that's not much good so let's clear that mask again now what we're going to do is drop our flow right down and this is one of the best parameters of using the brush because it now makes everything much more flexible essentially what uh flow does is allow you to build up the address adjustment per brush stroke so with the flow of around four think of that as percentage so if you think if i just drag my pen or mouse whatever you're using doesn't matter if i drag my pen across the image it will do four percent of all those combined sliders so just a little bit if i drag back again another four percent and so on so like painting with a dry brush on a wall then it's going to build up that adjustment now the greater the flow the faster it's going to build up but let's keep it nice and low and now we're just going to brush i'm going to make that a bit smaller we're just going to brush in those areas and the nice thing is it's happening before my eyes but it's very gradual so at the point you think that looks better then we can stop now you might be thinking um well that hasn't made any difference david but if we turn off let's just bring the layers out if we turn off our adjustment layer you can see before and after like so so it's subtle but excuse me we're all about subtlety of course now as i said before or like we did with our tuna then if we want to lift up any other areas then we've made ourselves like a brush which we can open up any other shadows wherever else we want to so that's a far more accurate way to gradually build up your adjustments without it looking fake and so on all right simple example there let's have a quick look at your floods of questions uh let's see let's see i'm just gonna have a look in the webinar room which is extremely busy um let's see says window open uh diego's doing a fine job um for answering all the questions um i'll just pick out a general one chris says david you use a tablet for layers yes and you can see that if we just bring up the overhead cam do you need to use a tablet for layers no does it make it easier i personally think so yes mostly because we're actually drawing so that's rather handy placement of bear versus wacom so if we just clear that mask again like so and we're back here we've got a nice low flow we're pretty much drawing so i can do an action like that much more naturally than i could do with a mouse trying to do the same thing i find it difficult and uncomfortable with a mouse if you're used to drawing on paper painting with a pen or whatever then it's much much easier so i personally find it more comfortable and so on but it's not essential if you don't want to spend the money on a tablet and equally you don't have to buy pro versions or whatever the cheapest wacom works super nice as well but please don't feel you have to it's not necessary there's tons of people out there who do masking just with a mouse so yes um let's say okay let's i'm going to leave my colleagues to do their best on the questions as well that's a good question from vivian actually a timely one if you've done a few layers how would you bring them together don't confuse with how layers work in capture one with photoshop because we're working on the raw data we're never actually changing the pixels in the file it's just a set of instructions so we don't ever have to collapse the set of layers so we have a maximum of 16 layers which i didn't mention before so you can't go beyond 16 layers but generally that's enough but you don't have to collapse them or combine them when we export to tiff jpeg or whatever that's when we see our result but the raw file will always keep those stack of layers oh good comment from michael that came in show the flow with the grayscale mask you can see the change directly yeah so if we turn on our spoiler alert that was for later michael if we turn on our grayscale mask you can see exactly how the mask is much more subtle so the white areas are where the mask is at its maximum the gray areas just next to my finger here that's where it's less subtle so allowing the adjustment to be much more subtle okay so let's uh move on to another shot let's turn our mask off and let's think about a similar kind of thing but let's bring you know a few more adjustments together as well so on this shot let's talk about dodging and burning a similar thing so i'm going to reset my layers so we've got a shot here which works great bass exposure's nice don't want to brighten it don't want to darken it at all the subject uh the plate just next to me and the thingies someone who's more versed in indian culture than me will know much better what's going on here um but the fire's a little bit dark so i want to lift that up so similar you know quandary as before if i let's just reset the highlights if i pull up shadows or if i pull up the blacks blacks it just washes out and doesn't look good it's not a good adjustment for this shot shadows it has too much of a global effect but let's bring a few different adjustments together so workflows before make a new field adjustment layer again that can be a shortcut if you do something like that regularly just a keyboard shortcut we can set that up in edit keyboard shortcuts again i won't use them in the webinar because it's hard for you to follow okay we should also name our layers so we know what the heck's going on so i'm going to call that fire did i fill my layer yes m on the keyboard just to make sure and we're going to look at this area and think okay i want to pull up shadows i want to open up the blacks a bit let's just go to my luma curve and we just add a little bit of contrast too and as we've got some nice red flames let's up the saturation a bit as well so that's a good adjustment for this area so if we turn that off and on it's doing quite nicely but once again i want to clear my mask so it doesn't affect anything else grab my brush and then with a low flow once more nice and low we can just brush this in and then it will gradually appear and like sorry i forget your name regarding the grayscale mask yes you could have the grayscale mask active and watch that but i also prefer to watch the photo to see exactly what's going on so now we can open up this area if we turn that layer off and back on again then it's just pulled that little area up a bit or if we want to open up some detail back here then we could do the same as well so i can brush that anywhere i like to open up those adjustments similarly with dropping the highlights down if we go back to the background layer and pull down our highlights that works for those but it also darkens the plate if we pull down the whites it also has an effect on the plate so once again if we wanted to be really critical we would just do exactly the same workflow fill your layer adjust this area as we see fit and brush in that adjustment all right quick check on the questions um let's see and then painting on why not that's actually a good timely question which just threw in why not erase the mask from where we don't need it instead of clearing it and then painting on the reason why i do that to tendria was so we can stop at the point where we think it looks good we could also erase but if you imagine in this situation i'm only brushing in this little bit i'd have to erase all of that stuff which would take longer than short cutting clear mask brushing where i want to have it so i think that's faster personally but there's nothing to stop you like if you wanted the whole shot apart from a little bit then it would be faster to erase and with your erase brush you can still use a flow control and erase gradually so that works as well okey-dokey let's uh move on to another aspect so we've looked at using flow keep that in mind i personally have stopped using opacity i always keep opacity at 100 because flow gives me the control to bring in the adjustments where i need it to and then stop now a plo sorry opacity upload that's a blend of the two opacity means you can just cap your maximum opacity but again i don't think that's really necessary because like on the fire example here i can't think oh i want to cap that at 80 percent that's probably going to be about right there's no way i could pre-visualize that as an example what i can do is if i feel i went too far with my adjustments i can pull the opacity back down and then we can blend that exactly as we wish so for me the opacity is kind of null and void now but i know some people if you're using a mouse who struggle with flow if you have a low opacity then you can click drag click drag click drag which does a similar thing but for me flow works best all right so we've done bear let's talk about a radial mask sorry gradient mask so there's a couple of little hidden tip bits and features in there that you need to know about so simple shot here uh also from alaska hi to the person from alaska who said hello earlier sorry i missed that um typical shot here i'm just going to lift the overall exposure tad so we can see a bit more in the heels but what if we want to just concentrate in exposure with a nice graduation on the sky as an example we could draw it in manually but it's very hard to do that nice perfect feather as if you'd put you know a filter in front of the lens the gradient filter in front of the lens so we can mimic that digitally as well so if we grab our gradient filter brush down here draw a linear gradient mask on our tool tip shortcut key l and draw down then we're going to see three lines in the shot like so so what do those three lines mean if i press m so we can see our mask it will help to illustrate but very simply the top line is a hundred percent so that's maximum mask by the time we've got down to the center line we are at fifty percent by the time we've got to the third line we've faded off to zero so 150 zero so it's a complete you know linear falloff like so so if we keep it like this as my linear falloff for now press m to hide the mask now we can throw in a bit more contrast we could drop our brightness down we could add some clarity pull down the blacks and the shadows so we get some darker clouds and so on and that's only happening in that graduated area now the good news is this kind of mask it's a dynamic mask which we can easily go in and change it retrospectively so if i press m on my keyboard once more just to remind you that's how our mask looks there's nothing to stop me grabbing one of these lines and you'll see the image change behind it like so and change it now what if we don't want that perfect falloff from 150 to zero using shortcut key so optional this one down here if we hold down my option alt key and grab the bottom line we can then make it asymmetrical asymmetrical so no longer symmetrical so if we press m on the keyboard you can see that fall off is much sharper now so if we pull that down we can actually make it super sharp if you wish so i have a very fine cut off like so generally it helps if it's got a little bit of gradation on it it just makes the mask much more flexible equally in this situation it works best if our mask is horizontal but that's not always the case so if we hover over the center line you see the cursor changes to the little uh snail or rotation arrow and then we can actually tilt our mask whatever way we want if you hold down shift then it will lock it to horizontal or vertical so if you want to make sure it's absolutely perfect you can hold down shift and it will snap to those areas so there's our gradient mask and what if you're thinking you know what i just like to punch a little bit of a hole in it which is perfectly acceptable or if we wanted to knock a little hole out in the mountain here or on this side is it possible to do that so you think sure i can do that i'm going to just have a look at my mask grab my eraser and then i'm going to erase here oh i get uh an error message what does that mean it says do you want to rasterize the mask so this operation requires the mask to be rasterized so simply what that means if you remember this mask is dynamic so i can always go in and retrospectively change it so i can't brush a bit more onto it i can't erase some of it until i rasterize it so you can either start to try to erase and say rasterize or you can right click and say rasterize mask and what that will do is kind of rub a stamp it where it is right now as if i'd painstakingly drawn it by hand so if i say rasterize it's now perfectly possible to grab my erase brush and then knock a hole in that mask like so obviously with a lot more finesse and creative creativity than that but now it becomes edited editable can't speak today okay so gradient masks super handy very versatile another little word of warning if you've drawn a gradient mask and you think you know what i'd like to have one at the bottom as well we could easily think well let's darken the sky down let's lift up the shadows you can only have one gradient mask per layer so if i try and draw another one it's going to wipe out the existing one so if you do want to have two just make yourself another layer and draw yourself another gradient so now i can easily have those two gradients like so alrighty um quick little look at uh questions see in the chat you're helping each other out that's great makes my job uh much much easier good one from rob actually can you copy adjustments to a different layer so yes you can it's just or is that copy layers to a different adjustment can you copy adjustments to a different layer you can duplicate layers but you can also if we apply a layer you can apply adjustments from a style which might help you just thinking of your question so if you've loaded up a layer you can apply an adjustment from a style you can't copy one set of adjustments from one layer to another you can copy layers from one photo to another photo by using the copy and apply button up the top here you can also if we just make another layer you can also copy masks from one layer to another so if you want to duplicate the mask say if you've got one mask which is doing noise reduction and you want to keep that separate and you've got another mask that's going to do sharpening and you want to have different opacity values then to save you drawing it twice you can just copy that mask as an example so a good question all right so similar to gradient masks is radial mask so let's do a bit more of an extensive photo edit with this gentleman so we're throwing some basic adjustments we do a radial mask and we do a bit of skin tone adjustments as well on his face which also requires a mask before we do that actually a good question from david can you copy the gradient mask and then invert it yes so if you invert the gradient mask it's gonna flip it so if you wanna if you draw your gradient mask and think actually i know it's gonna be the other way around but it's easier to draw it in that direction and then flip it yes you can invert it just with a right click as well oh oops i meant copy the mask into a new layer and then invert the mask yes you could do that as well absolutely no problem at all so don't worry about your oops all right let's edit this gentleman so first of all this is as it came almost as it came out of camera a little bit dark so we need to brighten it or do something with it so uh i would pull exposure a bit but not too much because exposure is going to brighten his surfboard as well and i want to retain the highlight detail that we've got in there so i'm going to stop at that point move on to brightness which is just going to lift up the mid tones and not affect the highlight so much so now we've got a better base adjustment i'm also going to throw in a crop so we can get rid of the cabinets over on the right hand side this is a gfx 50 so we've got plenty of resolution to play with like so and let's throw in a bit of saturation actually we warm it up a tiny bit as well and we can have some clarity a nice mid-tone contrast so that's a pretty good base adjustment but the first thing i want to do with the radial mask is just a vignette essentially now why would we use a radial mask when we have a vignette tool good question david the vignette tool here works great but there's no way you can change it or finesse it so all it's doing is a kind of a brightness adjustment like so but you can't really control the shape of it you've got no control what it's actually doing in terms of adjustments but it can work very very nicely but if you want more control then it makes more sense to use the radial mask now the radio is similar to the gradient it's got its own cursor tool again shortcut t reminding you from the tool tip so it's got its own cursor tool and it's dynamic so we can go back and edit it if i pop the cursor on the center when i start to draw it will expand out from the center so where you start drawing should be roughly where you think you want the center of your vignette you can always move it but just for efficiency that works quite nicely so if i start drawing from the center you will see my radial mask burst out and i can reposition it just by dragging anywhere in the center these little handles allow me to squash it and change its shape like so i can spin it by hovering in the center line and then rotating and of course we can change the feathering by just moving it around like so so there's my radial now as soon as i come off the viewer it'll disappear so i can see what my mask is looking like i'm going to press m to hide the mask and now we can decide what we want to do so as i said with the vignette tool has limitations on what we can do but now we can do anything we could use exposure we could use brightness we could use the curves we could use a combination of a whole bunch of different tools so i generally don't use exposure for the vignette because down here we've got some shadows so if i pull exposure down then the shadows get too dark very quickly so what we are aiming to do is either use brightness just to pull the mid tones down a bit or exercise full control with the luma mask because that won't affect our color and then we can decide exactly what we want to darken so i want to pull down the brighter tones a bit also the mid tones a little but i don't want to block up my shadows so we just give that a little lift and give ourselves a nice subtle radial mask now if i want to move it no reason why i can't i can just move the radial around and then the adjustments will follow with it quite nicely same applies with the gradient mask if we wanted to knock a hole out of it or brush a bit in then we'd have to rasterize it first but you don't have to rasterize it if you're just going to leave it as its default radial mask by the way before anyone asks the question when you draw a radial it always starts with uh the mask on the outside if you want the mask in the middle then going back to david's question about inverting there's nothing to stop us inverting this as well so we can do an invert mask same david if you are on your gradient or if you right click at any point you'll see a little option here which is draw mask inside if you always prefer to have the mask in the center of the radial another thing you can do you can grab the outside one and snap it over the middle and then it will invert like so but let's keep our nice soft mask so there's our nice radial mask kids don't forget to name your whoops and don't forget to learn how to spell don't forget to name your miles so if we turn that off you can see what it's doing a nice subtle one again opacity is your friend if you think oh i've overdone that a bit much because we could even introduce another adjustment like just desaturate the outside slightly again we can go all the way from zero to hero on our maximum 100 or somewhere in between like so good question from claude actually can you expand the radial mask outside of the frame uh you can actually see this one is outside so if i just turn on my proof view for a second we can go way outside the edge like so so as long as you've got screen real estate then yes you can pull that outside as much as possible good question claude all right so i said i wanted to do a little bit of skin fixing as well just to even up the tones a bit so we can see we've got mismatch of tones bit more redness on the nose a little bit on the head and so on so once again combining layers with the color adjustment allows you to be much more subtle again i would do the same technique of filling the layer dialing in my adjustments and then deciding where i want to to put it so if we were to do that click and hold new field adjustment layer so that's over the whole shot like so go to my skin tone tab in the advanced color editor and i want to grab this picker and pick on a desirable skin tone so a target skin tone if you want to watch this tool in more depth go back one week either on youtube or on our learning hub and then watch the webinar about color because we cover this in a bit more detail as well so i want to pick my target skin tone so i'm going to go down here because it's a nice warmer richer tone and capture one gives me or shows me the skin tone i picked with that dot and also a range and that range is going to be the range of colors that are going to be compressed or i would say adjusted to that target so i want to catch as many of those bad colors as possible so let's expand this out and you'll see when i pull hue across all the colors are going to drop into line for my target color so if i pull hue across see how his nose changed and then saturation and lightness you'll see everything flatten off which we don't want to do because there's some nice modeling now right now you could ask well what's the point of doing this on a layer if it's a skin tone adjustment but this coily spring over here is too close to the skin tone to not be affected so if we turn this layer off then you can see it's also damaging that so if we zoom back into its skin right click and say clear mask grab my brush it's going to be huge so let's make it a bit smaller and now we can just brush in again with a low flow because we can finesse it so if we only want to have a little bit of skin tone adjustment we do a few brush strokes if we want to have more skin tone adjustment then we do more and so on a little bit on his chin down by the side of the face here and just across the neck should probably do it like so so now if we turn this layer off that's before and after like so so just to clean that up uh if we do our before and after it's going to be fairly dramatically different just because we had our exposure boost as well but if we look at our layers before and after option click before and after like so simple subtle but works quite nicely good question from um hari prasad any chance so many layers lagged the system potentially um very system dependent uh the reason why it's a maximum of 16 is for performance reasons so if we added more layers it's kind of a balance between keeping good performance and flexibility 16 is a pretty good number it's very rare to max out on that but yes you might see a slow down depending on the size of your megapixels as well like this shot here which i didn't edit so this is 100 megapixel and we've got three skin tone sorry three layers uh similar thing going on with the skin tone but you know my mac still pretty responsive and i'm you know live streaming to three destinations at the same time and so on so it shouldn't be too laggy if you have a decent machine all right um quick question look uh see you're answering each other as well in the webinar room that's great and diego's answering like a crazy man as well so i think you guys are pretty much well covered with various questions yeah cool all right if i see any more common ones i'll pick some up but i don't want to get off subject too much okay how are we doing for time 15 minutes great bit more than i thought we had so let's look at um healing clone first of all because that's a really important aspect of working with layers as well and healing and cloning is too very different things but also have very different uses so let's look at healing first of all so we're open this shot this is from phil penman now in new york let's reset the layers that we did earlier and we can also look at this one from john once again but let's go to seagulls first of all so healing and cloning works on a layer same rules apply you can still drop opacity you can still use flow and so on if we wish and we're going to use flow when we clone as well very simply put healing is good for getting rid of dust spots marks blemishes and pesky seagulls as an example so if we grab our healing mask q on your keyboard as a shortcut move over onto the photo that's too big so i'm going to drop down the size and then as we draw on the shot you'll see a mask and then straight away capture one will pick a source point and get rid of that object now there's no limit to the number of points that we want to have so if i want to get rid of pesky seagull number two i can do so doesn't have to be a uniform shape so if we get rid of this guy then capture one we'll pick that spot and so on now if you're not happy with the spot that capture one has picked there's nothing to stop you picking it up and moving somewhere else and then the heel will blend the luminosity in quite nicely these arrows will remain visible on the screen until you hover off the viewer so you can always have a quick check to see how it's looking and come back we can turn them off which we get to in a minute now the shortcut for changing brush size comes into its own when you have to do a lot of healing so this is um a chewing gum street so let's get rid of that layer let's get rid of that layer like so so now we've got all the chewing gum which we want to get rid of so that's a lot of healing to do when we grab our healing brush if no healing layer exists already in our layer stack as soon as we start to heal then capture one will make you a hill layer for you just to save you a step now we can go ahead let's just zoom in sorry now we can go ahead and just bust out the spots that we need to and this is where the handy shortcut really comes into its own because right clicking to change the size for bigger and smaller points is too slow so if i need to make my brush smaller i can just use that two-finger shortcut control option like so make it a bit smaller and then bust bust make it a bit bigger bust this one get rid of this one get rid of this one and so on so small objects large objects you can do all kinds of uh funky stuff uh with healing but using that shortcut will make the action much faster now when it comes to cloning so healing just to define the difference healing will will match the luminosity as you saw with the seagulls so it's not a like for like copy of pixels it will do a bit of luminosity blending at the area that you've removed so it looks nice and natural cloning is just a like for like pixel copy but not forgetting you can use flow and opacity or you can drag the opacity slider down as well to modify it but it is a like for like pixel copy with no luminosity blending so a couple of examples let's just go to this gentleman let's get rid of that layer one example where i find myself using it quite a lot is for adding a second catch light so we've just missed the catch light in his eye here so it looks a bit odd to only have one catch light so it's easy just to grab that and stick it on his eye here rather than having to go through a whole photoshop round trip process just for that one you know silly action so cloning is a light for light copy so we're going to grab our clone brush and this time actually i'll show you before so let's just zoom in a bit bigger so we're going to go to our source point but this time we have to tell capture one i want to copy from this point the heel is automatic whereas clone it's manual so once again option key down on your keyboard hold and then click on the spot that we want to copy from so if i tap here now i get that orange circle which i hope you can see and now i can go to where i think would be a good spot for a catch light and i've got my flow down a little bit lower so i can build up the brightness and then we can start brushing now the annoying thing is that arrow gets in the way and i can't see what i'm doing so what i would recommend when you're cloning so you can see what's going on right click and turn off display arrows you can also shortcut that if you wish so now i can go back and then just build up my catch light a little bit more get in that second bit and stop there and again if it's too bright we can pull opacity down to virtually nothing or pull it back probably around there is a good match like so so now we've added our catch light just by stealing it from the other eye which is a good improvement i think so that's one use i found for cloning it's quite handy sometimes it's just a case that cloning works better than healing depending what you're doing so if we wanted to get rid of this light let's try healing so i'm going to grab my heel brush let's make that a bit bigger and then just try to heal this point out see what capture one does not bad actually uh let's bring the arrows back so we can see where it picked it from there was a question from laura it was how do you eliminate just one healing spot so what you need to do laura is tap on it until it turns orange and then hit backspace on your keyboard and then it will eliminate it okay but do make sure that it's actually selected now another thing you can do when it's selected is that you can use your cursor keys up down left right just to nudge this little circle up and down so using your cursor keys if you need to just move that ever so slightly then it will just jog it by a little tiny amount because sometimes when you're moving it by a big amount then it's not quite so easy but using the cursor keys then it just moves it by a little teeny amount now what he'll has done here is not bad but it's not it's actually pretty good until i let go and then when the luminosity blending goes in it's looking at the clouds and it's making this bit too bright so sometimes clone just works better so if we grab clone now i need to set my source point to make that a bit bigger set my source point with an option click as before and i'm going to try and just brush in the same spot and i've got flow set to a little bit lower so that i can just decide when to stop so i don't go too far and if i need to erase because i've probably done that a bit too much bring my flow down and i can just erase a little bit again too much grab my brush and then just fill that in a bit more as well like so so sometimes clone just works a little bit better sometimes here works better just have a little experiment but i found cloning for eye catch lights is just a really good use case righty um how are we doing for time eight minutes left good we are racing through it it's because there's so many questions i'm just a bit overwhelmed about what to answer so let's uh let's have a look a little bit questions and see how we're doing um let's have a look quite a few questions about shortcuts i saw coming in martin was asking why not make the field layer default i think that's a good argument for a shortcut so let's just direct you to where shortcuts are and then that way we should be good okay so edit edit keyboard shortcuts they are somewhere in this list to save you the hassle of looking for them just type layer like so so we can see shortcuts for add new empty adjustment layer add new field layer so martin that would be a good use case for you so add a shortcut for new field layer and then to stop you having to navigate to the layers tool you can just punch your shortcut key also if you're into using something like um actually i'll just put it back in its box to tidy up its desk let's just pull out this guy for a second here's one i prepared earlier hang on this is just one of many different kinds of consoles you can buy for exercising shortcuts in capture one so i will do a live on this separately but this is from monogram you can see the nice pretty box creative console used to be called palette gear they've now changed but this has like a number of buttons and also dials and sliders that you can bind to capture one so then these three buttons here this would be great for add new layer add filled layer and so on add new heel layer or whatever or delete layer or go to background as one of the [Music] shortcuts that you can see on the screen so there's a few kits out here like this that work particularly nicely but this one happens to work very nicely with capture one as does the panels from tangent and a few others also there's nothing to stop you using something like you know a usb keypad if you want to add a few shortcuts this gadget under here which we can just about see this is what i use to you know switch scenes when we're live broadcasting but there's no reason why you can't add a bunch of shortcuts to that as well and then also you know new layer field layer pick my brush all that kind of stuff so if you really get into layers it does kind of make sense to work with those shortcuts as well because it's not the fastest to go ahead and do click new field adjustment layer much faster if you can use a shortcut as well okay so uh let me just check where we got to so we looked at our dodging and burning we looked at our gradation color grading we can look at we did skin tones we did a bit sharpening we did healing cloning uh dodging burning oh that was just this is a good example of two different ways you could approach something and again using gradients in a slightly less conventional way so if we grab our gradient tool we can drag our gradient tool from the right if we press m on our keyboard to see the mask we probably don't want it bleeding that far across so if i hold my option key i can just make it a slightly stronger fall off like so purely because this side is a bit bright and then i could bring my highlights down a touch and my brightness like so just to even it up equally what we can also do and this is a very good example because of this darker window in the back as well where we can tune the adjustment so that our brush becomes a little bit intelligent so once again if we add our new field adjustment layer so m on my keyboard that's everywhere looking at the shot if we pull down the brightness and we pull down the highlights but i would actually then open up the shadows or at least the blacks so we're not affecting this area at the back so when i brush i don't have to be super accurate so now if i right click and say clear mask grab my brush make this nice and big relatively low flow i'm not worried too much about kind of brushing into this area because my brush actually is programmed or tuned not to affect those areas so again this is another reason why you don't necessarily have to be too picky about your brush and i'm not even worrying too much about her dress because that's probably not being affected as well so now if we turn our adjustment layer on and off you can see where it's doing its business but it's not killing our shadows so fine tuning the brush to to work nicely in your image works well okay let's finish off by having a quick look at a luminosity mask because this is a pretty cool way that you can build masks and it also has a feature in there which allows you to shape the mask in a way which you can do with any mask but we just haven't had a chance to uh cover it yet okay so shot here very extreme ranges of light so we've got a nice bright beach and then the darker canopy underneath now the exposure of this and the contrast and everything is kind of spot on but what if i want to do a little bit more work on this area maybe i want to brighten it add some more contrast whatever so whatever i do of course i'm always going to affect the canopy as well especially with exposure if i pull the highlights down that's pretty targeted but once again if i wanted to throw in a bit of contrast or something then it would be very difficult to do it now this has a very defined edge so to try and manually mask around that would be very laborious unfortunately but the good news is is that we can ask capture one to make us a mask based on the luminance values of the shot now very important to appreciate this is that you have to give capture one something to work with so you can't just say hey capture one make me a mask which just does the highlights you actually have to present a mask to capture one and then say cut out the shadows cut out the highlights only show me the midtones or whatever so the easiest way to do that again is with our good old friend new field adjustment layer so if we press m on our keyboard we see that mask and then spoiler alert earlier where we talked about grayscale masks we're going to turn on our grayscale mask as well display let's try that again there is actually a little visual bug sometimes there we go so option m is your shortcut for the grayscale mask so why has the image disappeared because now we're not seeing the photo we're only seeing the mask represented white means that maximum masking black means no masking so now what we can do is press the loom range button and ask capture one to restrict that mask so it's already doing something but i want all the highlights and we want to cut out the shadows so that's the canopy over the top so the more of the shadows we cut out the more it goes to black until we get too far and then we start to lose some of the beach so i need to back that off a little bit as well and say okay so now we've got a mask which is just on the beach area so if we come out of that attempt to come out of that did say there was a little visual glitch there we go so now our mask is just on the beach like so so i can pretty much have a free hand to do anything uh we could drop our highlights or we could even we can make it higher key if we wanted to we could add a bit of contrast you get the idea we're now free to edit here now the only thing you have to be aware of when you're creating luminosity masks is that sometimes the edge can be a little bit on the binary side so if i zoom in even closer so you see it's a little bit crunchy so sometimes if you're making more extreme edits that doesn't look very pleasant fortunately luma range is dynamic so we can always go back in and tweak it by default this slider radius is at zero which means the sensitivity slider has no effect and what the sensitivity slider does is really fine tune how the edges look so if we bump up the radius to a certain amount then straight away you can see in an improvement on the edges so radius will decide to what extent capture one will analyze from the edge moving either side of the mask so if i back this off then you can see it shrink and if i make it bigger you can see it expand so we need to balance it to around here and sensitivity controls how the mask handles the edges so if we go to zero that's going to feather the mask so it's just going to soften it right off if we go to 100 that's going to refine the mask and snap to the edges so it depends what kind of mask you're looking to achieve do you want a fine mask or do you want a soft fluffy mask so i'm going to go somewhere around here and say apply and then that simply means that that the edge of that mask is just really a little bit nicer so it's just a more believable mask and it's got the finesse to fit around these fronds and so on otherwise we get some weird edge artifacts and of course you can always go back in and tweak it if you wish now any other mask you can also treat in the same way so if i just draw a mask for a second let's do it on a new layer so if i just draw a rough old mask here let's go full flow ruffle mask like so i can always go in and say feather and that will sorry if i go maximum that will just soften it off that's quite a good tool to use if you've drawn a mask and thought you know what i wish i'd done it softer rather than deleting it doing it all over again just apply a little bit of feathering what you can also do with the refine mask is if we zoom in a little bit if you've tried to edge around something i don't know if it will be successful on this let's try so if i draw crudely around this and then i right click and say refine mask what's going to happen if we bust that up so you see capture one will try and stick it to those edges what i would actually do is draw that even finer and then the mask will suck down to those edges so you can still use those tools with any other mask they're not exclusive uh to the luminosity mask but they can be very useful when creating the luma masks all right i think that takes us up pretty much to uh bang on actually not bang on slightly over an hour the only thing we didn't really get to talk about is color grading but that was spoken about in last week's session about color so do pick that up if you wish but i think we pretty much covered everything we could now there really is we could talk for another hour about layers if if we wanted to in the various different use cases of them but i hope what you've seen today is is just a little bit of inspiration on how you could go further especially with your own work as well let's just um look at a few more questions i think diego's being a champ and yulia as well uh rudolph was saying have we done a seminar on sharpening we haven't actually so it's probably long overdue that we should do that so that would actually be a good thing even if it's just covered in a quick half an hour session um den says brilliant that answers my question on bird outlining a mask there's actually den if you look back in the capture 120 quick live sessions on youtube there is an edit of a kingfisher where i do just that i do a rough mask around the kingfisher and then refine and then it just hugs those edges much much nicer so it's a good good way to do that let's see let's see um i think because of thanks to my awesome colleagues it's been pretty well answered um what is yan saying if you create a mask out of a color you can choose in the advanced color editor is there any way to edit that layer with the brush so any better eyesight and effect other colors than the colors you took for the mask yeah so what yan is talking about is that we can do we have a good subject probably not um but if i click on my advanced color editor let's go to my background layer let's just choose the flaming stuff and we say create mask layer from selection capture one is going to make a mask based on those colors so if i press m on my keyboard it's picked out everything in that color range so yeah and what you need to do is just grab your brush and then you can just add to that mask so if i wanted to include this bit there's nothing to stop me doing that as well so yeah it's totally possible if you want to know more about that trick that we just did which was create mask layer from selection that just takes the color range converts it to a mask super useful then watch last week's session as as well okay everybody um if you want to come back for more if you're thirsty for more um then the next session will be on trying to remember we've got a full-length webinar next thursday which is about tips and tricks for working on batches so that's anything from the import process to editing to exporting i can't remember off the top of my head if there's a live session on tuesday afternoon just on youtube there might be but if you go to youtube look at the live broadcast playlists on capture one's channel it's easy to find if you search for it then you'll also find the upcoming schedule for live broadcast as well they're always pinned there on that playlist so you can always press the special button subscribe to youtube click and then that way you'll get a notification so what will happen if you subscribe to youtube and you ask for notifications half an hour before we're due to go live you'll get a notification uh on your phone or if you're logged into youtube at the time and then when we actually go live which is roughly 10 minutes before the scheduled time or 5 to 10 minutes you'll get another notification as well so that way you won't miss out on anything thanks for your time today sorry we can answer every single question as it was rather busy but thank you for your patience and bearing with my colleagues diego and julia as well who had the fast fingers on social media and helped us out as well but i hope that was useful again if you want to watch it it'll just be on youtube immediately after after this is finished and you can just rewind if you've missed any pieces for those of you on youtube who came from the webinar sorry the webinar itself did get very busy crazy busy actually so we ran out of seats there so apologies for that but glad you found us on youtube as well take care everybody enjoy your weekend when it arrives and see you soon bye you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 18,762

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: 7xxste-BTjc

Length: 71min 4sec (4264 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021