Capture One 21 Livestream: Quick Live | Improve your Mask Creation

good afternoon folks thanks for joining at this short quick live session uh today we're going to look at a few different ways of mask creation and what we're going to do is problem solve on this particular shot and look at trying to achieve the same thing but doing probably five or six different ways of creating the mask so you can see the difference see the benefits see what works best and so on so that is the plan for today so welcome to those of you on facebook and youtube so let's get started first of all this is a shop from whoops let's not do that first of all this is a shot from uh robin cena uh based out of the uk so thanks uh robin for this uh photograph before we do anything else we are going to make a brand new empty variant so we can see the picture as it came out of the camera and the reason why i've picked this one a couple of a couple of reasons uh is that i'm just gonna turn myself up a bit a couple of reasons is that we've got a great sky there but we've got this guy here whose head is just peeking into the clouds so if we wanted to do something like um so you're saying sound is poor hang on a second oh i know why hang on guys [Music] how about that that should be better so [Laughter] i'll tell you why because it was this guy that was plugged in not this guy so hence hence the low volume because i was recording some tutorials earlier using a different microphone so now it should be okay so sorry about that probably too loud now i would think so let's turn that down a bit all right okay so let's start again apologies for that um so as i said this shot here robin cena thanks for applying uh thanks for supplying the photo the second reason that we're going to use this photo is that let's say we want to do something to the sky so if i just pull the exposure down you can see that we've got lots of good detail there to make it look a bit more dramatic and uh look a bit more interesting the interesting thing here is this guy's head is just popping into the background so if we're going to do any selective darkening of the sky we want to make sure that it's not affecting here so there's a bunch of different ways that we can do this using all kinds of different techniques so we're going to run through those and see which one is the best and then it's a good little exercise just to see the different ways to create masks now we could probably spend about two hours doing this but i picked out this image just because i thought it made sense okay so first of all let's just bring up this not that terribly well prepared today let's just bring up the little mouse highlighter all right so the first thing we're going to do is just throw in some basic edits before we do anything else so the shot looks pretty good um exposure wise it's looking pretty bang on out of camera let's just do a quick auto levels we're adding a bit more clarity let's open up shadows and drop the blacks down a bit as well so it's a bit punchier and i'm just going to desaturate ever so slightly basic adjustments now just grabbing the exposure and looking at the sky we can see we've got lots of nice detail in there as i said earlier so we want to separate that out so what different techniques could we do that well let's just try something really basic and try to do it with a brush so if i grab my brush over here we're going to right click and check for the settings full opacity and flow no other fancy stuff we're just going to try and do it by hand so if we start to mask m on your keyboard to mask and then i'm going to do my best to just draw and quickly around it because the idea is that we want to achieve what we want to do also nice and fast as well without having to fiddle around for ages doing little tiny things so can we get away with a pretty ropey rough mask like that first tip if you right click on your layer you'll find a whole bunch of different options that we can go into one of them is fill mask so if we hit fill it's going to fill in the middle just to save you having to draw like a maniac in the middle so there's our pretty ropey rough mask how's that going to look if we want to then do something more interesting with the sky can we get away with it so i'm going to pull down the brightness we're going to add a bit more clarity you can already see what's going wrong and we're going to pull the highlights down a bit as well so once the clouds look great obviously this isn't super nice along the hillside here so what we could do is grab our eraser make that a little bit on the smaller side and then try and nibble away at these different areas but before long we're probably going to end up in a situation like this and it doesn't look great so for these complicated things this doesn't make sense so let's just remind ourselves what this is we're going to call that brush only and then turn that off and then we'll try a different technique so what about a gradient mask so a gradient mask is obviously going to be able to do what we want to achieve but how's it going to look on the shot does it present any problems so let's make another layer we're going to call this one grad david you're well ahead of us david says after filling the mask i always refine the mask so let's have a look at that later on as well let's try a gradient mask so i'm going to grab the grad get a slightly different looking cursor as you can see where i start drawing the mask will be at strongest and where i finish that's where the mark is at its weakest second tip if you hold down shift on your keyboard that's going to make my mask nice and straight it's going to lock it horizontally so there we have a basic gradient mask if i press m on the keyboard you can see how the mask looks like so now these three lines this equates to a hundred percent opacity 50 in the middle zero by the time you've got to the third line if you would prefer that not to be symmetrical i.e the same kind of falloff on either side of that central line then you can hold down alt or option on your keyboard and then we can pull this up a little bit as well so that will make our fall-off a bit more dramatic so it's probably in the right place for the sky if we finish it too early we're probably not going to get enough but let's just go somewhere around here so what did we do on brush only we pulled down our brightness a bit we pulled down the highlights and we added a bit more clarity it's not having much effect here so let's just drop that down a bit like so not bad lot better attempt than just brush only only slight issue which we might have on this kind of shot is that our grad is obviously just peeking down into this area and if we were critical about this spot we might not want you know any darkening on this particular area but in terms of natural realism that actually looks pretty good so don't forget at any point you can always adjust the grad to look exactly how you want so we can make the falloff harder we can make it you know softer and so on so you might think okay in this situation i could just edit the mask a little bit so if i grab my erase brush and then try to let's just make my razor a bit softer and larger and just try to perhaps erase out this gentleman here a little bit what happens so i get this warning that comes up this operation requires the mask to be rasterized so i can't edit the edit the parametric mask any longer what on earth does that mean well as we've seen if we started drawing with our grad mask we can always go ahead and edit it change it you know modify it however we want but if i try to erase a little bit of it then i get the warning so what rasterize does i can click it here if i wish is lock the mask as it is as if i'd drawn it by hand we can also access the rasterize option by right clicking on your layer as well so we could try that so if i say rasterize mask my mask now looks like this and then if i want to i can erase little bits of it so with my settings like so i can do so so i could think well let's just erase this little bit of this gentleman and this lady here which is not bad that actually also works quite well so if we turn grad on and off you can see what's going on but probably if we examined a little bit closer and we look at the mask we can see now we've got a bit of a halo around his head so what i could do of course is make my brush a bit smaller take a bit more care and so forth if we just undo that for a second let's step back another better tactic always when you're working with manual brushes is to take your flow down to something much lower and what does flow do that simply reduces the effect of the brush per brush stroke so with my razor brush on a low flow it means as i erase on the back of the gentleman here it's erasing it gradually so every brush stroke is eight percent of that mask so it generally tends to give you a better and more natural result so that's another technique you can try as well but again it's still not uh super accurate so if we look at our one minute let's look at our display grayscale mask and grayscale masks are a really useful feature for good mask creation because it hides the image so let's display our grayscale mask and then you can see exactly what the mask is doing underneath so this means you can really see what's going on now you can see the blob here that i brushed on this guy it's not really the best mask in the world visually does it look okay really not too bad so method two okay certainly much better than brush only how long did it take us to do it so also think of that consideration as well something which i don't use a lot let's make another layer and we're going to call this auto mask that was a very low helicopter going overhead you probably heard that auto mask not something that i use a lot the reason being is that personally i don't feel the need to always be super accurate with masks and it doesn't tend to be the fastest result but it's good to know that it's there and that it does have its uses occasionally so let's pick up our brush once again and we're going to right click and sorry helps if i press the right button and turn on auto mask like so now if i make my brush a little bit bigger you'll notice that we've got a third circle in the center this is the sample zone so this means let's just uh turn on my mask for a second oh i'm just going to clear that if you make a mistake this is another handy right click thing in the menu right click to clear mask if you've made a big pig's ear of it and you want to start again then you can clear mask as well so let's go just back onto the shot make that a bit smaller we've got full opacity and flow the central circle is our sample line when the second circle touches an area of differing you know pixel density and so on then it will find the edge when i let go so now as soon as i let go of the mouse then it's going to find that line like so you can see it's pretty quick so what i can do now is whiz along this horizon line and get ourselves a pretty neat mask like so now i don't need the auto mask so let's just turn that off and then we can do the same as before we can go around the edges and we can right click and we can say fill mask and away we go now so far out of all our techniques that's probably definitely has given us the most accurate result is it the best result so let's turn our mask off and let's do what we were going to do again let's pull our highlights down what do we do we added a bit of clarity we added some contrast and we pulled the brightness down a bit as well now i don't know about you that doesn't look super accurate to me certainly if we zoom in and we look a bit closer we've got a funny few little bit of upsets along here so it's not necessarily the best result that we can have whoops i just managed to move the mask sorry oh i was zoomed out a little bit i missed a bit hang on let's go back in and fill that bit in because i was slightly zoomed out so we don't mess that up let's just fill that little bit in as well always check your zoomed out when you're filling in your mask so we've got that result which is not necessarily you know the best that we can achieve is there a way to fix that so if we zoom in and perhaps look at our grayscale mask as a little clue to see what's going on pretty nice job around the man's cap there it's not too bad slightly duff result going over the head there but it's a very you know binary mask like in real life if we were looking at this scene would we expect such a hard cutoff between the sky and the horizon line probably not so that's why it looks a little bit weird especially if we you know if i pull the brightness down you can really start to see like everything falls apart it doesn't look very realistic but can we improve the mask without having to redraw it yes we can actually so if we right click on our auto mask and then we can choose something called refine mask which david was talking about earlier so if we click on refine mask we get a simple dialog that pops up and what this does is allow us with an increasing radius for the edge of the mast to spread out on either side of it and blend better into the surrounding areas so as we increase the radius takes a little while to calculate you'll actually see that improves quite a bit somewhat as well so if we have a pretty high radius so it's nice and soft fall off and have a little scan along the horizon that's actually made a big positive impact if we look at our grayscale mask remember you can find it here then you'll see exactly what's happening like so so the mask has bled kind of nicely into its surroundings and depending on the size of the radius will increase that spread to a large amount as we saw here to a lesser extent so that combo of doing the auto mask and the refine mask has helped it a lot again is it the most realistic not necessarily our friend here sorry i won't um attempt to pronounce your name but why not use luminosity range mask you are way ahead of us which is going to be our next challenge but not the last challenge of course so luminosity range masking kind of combines the benefit of the auto mask in this case and the refine mask all in one step now for us to use the luma range tool then we actually have to give capture one a mask to work with so we can't just make a new layer let's do it and call that luma or luminosity range to be correct and click on luma i don't have a mask to work with so i need to have something so what we can do is either draw a quick mask on there and then loom that mask or sometimes the easiest thing is just to right click and say fill mask so now we've got a mask over the whole photo and also another great tip for working with luminosity maskers is to use the grayscale mask as we saw before because it's a lot easier to visualize what's going on so if we say display grayscale mask excuse me the photo disappears and now we just see what excuse me now we just see white why is that well white represents fully masked black represents no mask so it hides the photo and just literally shows us what the mask looks like so if we click on luma range we get a second dialogue which pops up like so where we can adjust the range of luminosity so if we pull this guy in we want to say we want to cut out the darker areas so as we gradually pull this across we're going to lose the foreground we're going to start to lose the hills in the background until we're left with some of the sky now i want to include all of the skies so i'm going to pull the range out in this direction as well and then we've got a little bit of fiddling to do to just get a nice selection like so so this almost gives us the result if we've done an auto mask but to be honest it's probably a lot faster so if you were doing this without listening to me rabbit on about the steps you would have filled your mask in one step you would have brought up the luma range and you would be at this point much faster than using the auto mask in this situation now like the auto mask if we just apply that for a second and we zoom in to 100 um we've got not a bad edge but it's probably not the best edge going on again if we were to start adjusting our sky we're probably going to have that very binary looking uh fall off so uh let's have a little look back into the loom range tool because like the the grad tool we can always go back into loom range and tweak it as we wish now by default radius is set to zero so sensitivity is going to have no effect whatsoever because with a zero radius it doesn't matter where we pull this slider nothing is going to happen so to get this slider working for us we need to bump up our radius now this slider here is a bit more sophisticated than the simple uh refine mask because it can do two things if we go all the way to zero it's gonna feather the edge so you can see it got much softer if we go all the way to the right it's going to refine it obviously in the middle it's doing a bit of a combination of the two so if we feather and say apply and zoom out you can see what that horizon looks like is that going to give us a good result well let's go ahead and look so you can see what the mask looks like if we do our similar thing let's pull the brightness down let's pull down the highlights let's have a bit of clarity oh dear that looks very very unreleased realistic believe me you'll probably find lots of photos on the internet that actually look like this it's just not a good selection and not very believable so let's go back into luma range and we'll leave the photo up so we can see the effect let's pull sensitivity right across the other direction that's not bad so it's now done the exact opposite and refined it but it's still a little bit weird looking here as well so if we increase the radius that's going to bleed better and look more realistic like so with a very low radius doesn't look good at all so you can see what's going on quite nicely as we bump up the radius and gives us you know pretty good effect if we turn this on and off it's got a good effect in the background but it's not affecting our character in the foreground that's when you know editing loses all its illusion because if if what i'm doing in the background here then starts affecting the foreground you know you instantly flatten the image to be honest if i was editing this for real this is way too much for this shot so i would pull that you know opacity down and get something a bit more realistic like that if you like which i think you know looks good nice and natural and so on next one this is kind of i feel uh the best combo of what we've seen so far right now if we look at our mask we've got this kind of thing which my feeling is it you know it's got too much of a hard cut off you know realistically if we were looking at this shot it wouldn't really behave in this way so like photos you see which are edited with too much use of the high dynamic range tool you know there's so much detail in the shadows there's so much detail in the highlights it just doesn't really look uh ridic you know natural anymore so if we you know pull down all the highlights opened up all the shadows and the blacks you know you just end up with a slightly strange result like that which really doesn't look good so you know we've got to be careful we've gotta have our nice natural editing going on which certainly isn't that so what about a good combo of some of the techniques that we've seen first of all so let's make another layer and we're going to combine two of these together so we're still going to use our grad filter and we're going to loom it as well now you can put luminosity masks on or luminosity restrictions on top of any mask you create so it could be a linear gradient like we're going to do it could be a radial gradient it could be a mask that you simply just drawn with a brush um so don't forget looma range works across a lot of different things so we're going to grab our grad once more we're going to draw down i'm going to hold down shift so it stays straight i'm going to hold my option key down to make the fall off a bit stronger so we're going to end up with a mask that looks like this if we do our display grayscale mask or option m then it looks like this okay what we would expect so now we're going to make our sky look a bit more interesting so we're going to pull our highlights down uh we're going to add some more clarity like we said we pull the brightness down a bit so now our clouds are looking more interesting but it's got that you know fall off going into this guy's head and so on so we lose that 3d aspect to some extent so looking at our grayscale mask like so we see this now there's nothing to stop us putting the luminosity range slap bang on top of that as well so we get that nice grad fall off and we're gonna avoid some of our foreground elements so let's hit loom range once more we want to squeeze up the shadows you'll see what happens as we gradually pull this up and then we're going to get to a point like this and we want to open up the brighter parts as well so that's probably roughly where we want to go but look at this cool thing so we've still got our gradient mask on if i play with this you can see exactly what's going on so there's a lot of calculations going on the fly at the moment so now you can see exactly how the grad mask is interacting with the loom range so it means most of our adjustment is going to be up here but it's going to fall off a little bit gradually as as well now we've still got this slightly binary edge between foreground uh and background which might not matter in this case but just to be on the safe side we bump up our radius again and we have you know a bit of refinement going on in the mask too and you can see as we pull up the radius see watch it spread out around our gentleman here if we pull the radius back it's not going to have so much of effect so let's compromise around here a bit remember we can always come back in and adjust this if we need to so let's say apply let's turn off the mask so we can see what's going on so there's our mask like so and then now we can always go in and we can play around with it there so we can see what what it looks like i'd probably go for probably something like that and then pull down the opacity slightly so now if we look at our grayscale mask that's what we've ended up with so we're avoiding our dude here we've got nice fall off it's probably nice and natural looking but we can always go in and and play around with the result to our heart's content as well so quite a few different ways of trying to achieve the same thing if we just whizz back through these brush only doesn't work so well as um david said after drawing a mast like this it can be a good idea to go in and say refine mask and quite often that will actually work really well like if i wanted to separate i don't know like uh animal out from a background i've done it before with a bird perched on you know a twig and a very blurry out of focus background roughly selecting it with a mask and then refining it actually works really well but in this situation you would spend way too long trying to do something like this uh if we go to our grad that actually worked pretty nicely except for the reasons we spoke about maybe not super realistic auto mask also looked good but it was a bit too defined between sky and background luminosity range things are starting to get a little bit better and then really the ultimate of everything was the gradient plus a luminosity range gives us the most nice natural result thank god good job it did otherwise that would have destroyed all the potential arguments um doesn't mean to say that any of these other techniques wouldn't have worked in other situations so it's often the best tool for the job let's do one more which is using a style brush i didn't try this out earlier so let's see how this goes so with a style brush uh let's open up the style brushes and let's have a look at light and contrast so if we go for highlights recover and we put a little bit of highlight recovery up here now this has a nice low flow so it means i can place it exactly where i want to have it and just blast it over these pieces now because it's recovering highlights if i go over the gentleman here it doesn't matter so much because he's not a highlight so the brush isn't going to affect that we have a look at what the mask looks like in a second so that's not actually too bad if we add contrast plus as well and just do a little bit of contrast here and there too we could also do some burning darken so i'm going to make this brush a bit smaller again we've got a nice low flow so we can build it up gradually so i could burn a bit more into the clouds as well if i wanted to maybe a bit darker in the top corner and in this corner i'm just going to pull that back a little bit so it's more realistic i'll contrast plus actually prefer it without well let's just pull that back a bit as well highlights recover that did the most of it and there we go so that's using three style brushes to do a similar thing what did we do on this one that was oh we didn't actually use that layer because a style brush does it automatically so three style brushes also to do a similar thing that was also pretty fast too the accuracy freaking me still prefers the grad plus the loomer but often for a quick fix style brushes work quite nicely as well okay um let's just have a quick look at any other questions that diego and julia haven't answered in the background ed says that's a great tip i forgot about i think that was luma masks on top of uh grads i believe but yeah it's often something i forget about as well so even let's make another layer if we do a radial mask not that i would on this shot so that's what our mask looks like let's look at our grayscale mask and then if we did luma range on top of that you know we can also whoops we can also stick luma ranges on top of that too so the sky is the limit another option let's just clear this mask if we grab our normal brush and we just masked along here let's bring up the flow if we just did a rough mask along the sky like so and then stuck a loom range on top of that we could almost achieve a similar thing like so so we didn't necessarily have to fill the mask we could have just drawn a rough mask and then loomed that as well but to be honest it's so quick to fill the mask i often feel that's you know a faster way to do it as well okay uh can you lou use a luma range on top of the style brush yeah of course because really all the style brush is doing uh no idea what this one's gonna look like so that's our this is our um burn darkened brush so there's not a great deal of mask going on but yes we could stick a luma range on top of that as as well so yeah anything's possible remember just the style brush is another i guess path to create a mask just in a in a more accelerated easy way but yes you can stick a loom range on top of that as well so yeah sky is the limit okay so thanks for joining me today everybody uh sorry for the slightly dud microphone start at the beginning i do apologize for that that's because i have an audio interface with one xlr input and uh two microphones as you can see so i just forgot to switch them over so i do apologize about that but fortunately doesn't happen very often uh so go ahead try out all the different things you can with masking as i said we could talk on this subject for a couple of hours that's just one example uh but quite interesting to see the different image result between all those various different techniques thanks for joining me again today uh don't forget if you haven't subscribed on youtube do that it just means that before we go live you get a notification and also 30 minutes before so that way you're not going to miss out on any of our content so see you all again soon uh have a great tuesday good luck to uh any german friends out there playing our english friends in about half an hour so good luck and see you all soon take care everybody thanks and bye now you

Channel: Capture One Pro

Views: 8,512

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: 5GyeT-PAD-g

Length: 45min 15sec (2715 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021