Capture One Pro Tips - Easy Dust Spot Finder & Removal Tools

[Music] in this guide I'm going to show you a really handy way of finding and removing dust spots from your final images in capture one now as photographers we have to accept the dust spots or a fact of life we don't live and work in a vacuum and unfortunately the air around us is full of particles wherever we are it could be the red dust from the the rock down here it could be lint from clothing it could even be the cleaning fibers from the cloth that I use to clean my camera if I'm changing my lens out in the field I'm opening the chamber of the camera up and I'm exposing the sensor to the risk of attracting dust same with the back element of the lens saying of the front end of the lens and even the filters that we put in front of our camera in order to control exposure they can all attract and store dust now what tends to happen is despite how careful we are we can try cleaning these cameras every two seconds in between every single shot the chances are when you get home let's just zoom in here at some point you're gonna see the odd dust spot or squiggle or something like that on the lens now it could be on the sensor it could be on the lens itself they typically show themselves and you zoom in quite high here so you can see they show themselves as like a little bullet holes and they sit in the mid-tones of your picture the reason they tend to sit in the mid-tones is because they're not completely blocking the light they're so small the light can actually quite often get around them but especially at really small apertures if it's on the lens then you're gonna see a blockage of that light we're gonna appear as a little dark spot on the picture so that's for a typical spot just a particle this here could be I don't know a piece of lint could even be an eyelash or something like that up here this is probably a thread from a piece of cloth could even have been the cleaning cloth that we then used afterwards to clean the filter that this was taken with but in all those cases capture one has a tool built-in to fix these scenarios which is the dust spot removal tool so along the tool bar up here we've got our little Healing Brush tool click and hold and we've got the remove spot option I can also press o on my keyboard that'll get me to the same place and I'm presented with a crosshair in a circle which is giving me the idea of how big the dust bot is so I can either right-click and change the radius with the mouse or I can use the square brackets left and right on the keyboard to make this spot a little bit smaller or bigger you need this circle to be slightly bigger than the spot you're trying to get rid of and if I click on the dust spot and click on that dust spot we can see capture 1 does a pretty good job of removing those spots those dust spots you can either get back to them by going back to the dust spot tool you'll see the little circles or if you go to the details tab on your tool palette on the left and scroll down you'll see there's a spot removal palette and under here you've got the number of spot removal areas you've created it maxes out towards a hundred both so just be aware of that you'll get a limit of how many dust spots you can get rid of but there are other tools that we can use as well to get rid of those spots when we found them so let's just delete these two and start from scratch and that's the key thing when you found them because on the one hand removing the dust spots can be arduous we don't like doing it it's like tidying and cleaning and wiping services and so on it's a chore but we have to do it to make sure our picture looks right but it's finding them that can often be the problem and the spot don't always just sit in the highlights they don't also sit in the shadows it's just less obvious because unfortunately as I say they sit in the mid-tones and they darken so they're not quite as pronounced as they are in the sky but there are ways of finding them and I'm going to show you a really cool method of doing it now that will hopefully help you find them easier but also be able to heal them a lot faster so to do this we're going to create two layers and we're not going to rely on any of capture ones automation to do it we're gonna do it manually so I'm gonna first create a layer which is gonna be a heal layer that he'll there I'm gonna call dust removal you can call it whatever you like but this is gonna be our layer that effectively removes all the dust when we're going through it and this is the layer that's gonna stay with the image for the whole time that we're producing it then we're gonna create another layer and this is going to be a disposable layer and we need to click on the plus and hold because we want to create a new filled adjustment layer and it's important that it's filled the reason it's filled and we turn our mask on is because I need this layer to affect everything across the whole image not just one part of it so 100% filled layer which is what that filled layer does we turn the mask off and now we're going to name this and we can call it a variety of things but bear in mind this is a layer that we're not going to keep with the image once we're done so some people call it a dust finder some people call it a dust spot finder some people call it a dust spot scanner some people I've seen it call it yuck delete and you'll see why in a second but whatever you want to call it you need to make sure that you remember this is the one that you're going to remove when you're finished so I'm going to call it doe spot scanner for now with this layer just for the sake of giving you a bit of an element of surprise I'm going to zoom in to where I believe our dust spots are and you can see on the screen there are a few spots around it's not too bad but there are quite a few in there that we need to fix I'm gonna set the layer opacity to zero you don't have to do this but for the purposes of demonstrating I'm going to do this so that we get more of an effect when I turn it on and then I'm gonna do these very very simple things on our exposure tab so let's go to exposure and on our exposure panel here I'm gonna leave ironically exposure alone I'm gonna turn contrast 100 percent up so in other words 250 on the scale I'm gonna turn brightness a little bit down somewhere between 10 and 20 minus and I'm gonna turn saturation a little bit down anywhere between minus 50 and minus 60 moving onto a high dynamic range area I'm going to put the highlights completely recovered so minus 100 and our shadows completely recovered to increased so plus 100 so highlights down shadows up and then we're going to go to clarity and I'm gonna put our clarity somewhere between 50 and 70 so 60s fine and I'm gonna move structure to exactly the same place now while I was doing that because I set my opacity to zero you're not gonna see any change now I'm going to put the opacity up to a hundred so you can see what that layer is actually done to the image and there's are dust spots all 327 million of them as I said I think I said earlier but basically this was actually shot with a filter that have a lot of dust on it we discovered that after the first shot cleaned it and then corrected it from then on but this particular shot was full of all over the scene now that layer as you can see if I turn it off now you'll be able to see the dust spots a little bit easier and part of that is because your mind has now been trained to see where they were but turning it on they are so much more obvious so it's a lot easier and a lot quicker to go around with that dust buck tool and click and delete now let's just go into details to why we've done each of those slider changes remember I said that the spots sit in the middle they're a mid-tone problem so what we want to do effectively is isolate the mid-tones and push everything else out so we want to push anything that's slightly above a mid-tone to be blown out towards the highlight area and anything that is slightly below the mid-tone to be pushed into the shadows now that means that our gray areas are dust spots the real bits that we're trying to focus on are SAP they're quite obvious quite blatant in front of us because everything else has been pushed away so they're doing that we're picking up the contrast on our histogram and we're stretching it so we're pushing the contrast way out that takes everything just to the right let's just move this here so just to the right of the mid-tone it pushes it up just to the left of the mid-tone pushes it down and what that's doing is is pushing everything right and left except for those grays and that's where I dust Baucis at brightness is actually more to do if how long you want to look at the screen so if I reset the brightness by doing that contrast change it can create a very very very high contrast image which is actually quite difficult to look at for a long period of time so by pulling the brightness down it makes it not only easier on our eyes but also slightly easier to see these spots themselves we're not doing it with exposure and the reason we're not doing it with exposure is because I don't want to push any shadows off the edge remember that is our spot can equally sit in the shadows as it can in the highlights so if I'm used the exposure slider and we've covered this in another session on brightness and exposure that slider is going to move the whole histogram left or right meaning that any shadows that were near to the zero value are going to be off and underexposed so we don't do with exposure we do it with brightness which effectively squeezes our histogram down towards the lower level it makes it easier to see it makes it clearer on the dust box but it hasn't lost any data saturations of personal things some people prefer to do it with saturation left exactly where it was some people prefer to with no saturation and focus on black and white but for me somewhere between the sort of 50 to 70 mark is about right high-dynamic-range well let's just reset these sliders a second and remember what we're trying to achieve with these spots so a hard I Namek range tool has an effect of flattening an image and when it comes to these mid-tones of these spots that can be really useful now in a traditional picture we wouldn't want to push these too far because it makes the image look cartoony putting the highlights down and the shadows up flattens the image but the result in this case is it makes those spots more obvious look at the difference before and after it goes from being a lot clearer to really clear and then the final little bits of the recipe which is the clarity and structure now remember clarity is a mid-tone adjustment and these he's the spot sit in the middle there in the mid tones so clarity is going to help us define those mid-tones which is what we want we want to define the dustbowl and let me just zoom really really closely in so I'm going to undo both of these so look at the difference that clarity makes first off the clarity in itself just makes that dust spot pop a little bit so if we go back to our 60 or 65 so without and with now what it's also doing is bringing up noise the result of bringing up the noise is actually we brought up some texture around the dust pot which actually just makes it easier visually to see structure is another one now this one really makes it pop so if I move our structure up to 60 you can now see this halo around the Dust Bowl effectively we're highlighting where that spot is so with those two spiders it's just about making it more and more and more obvious now you remember I mentioned that this layer we're going to delete the dust ball scanner is going to be deleted there's a reason because this makes the image look hideous it is the worst thing you could possibly do to the image but it makes the dust box obvious if I even zoom down here so we've actually got dust spots as one here there's one here in the river that we wouldn't have noticed before because they're all sat in the mid-tones and the lower mid-tones we've now got the ability to see them easily let's just zoom up here into our dust ball area now here's the key thing we do not fix the dust spots on the scanner layer or the finder layer or the yuck delete layer so this adjustment layer is only temporary to show whether dust bots are if I start fixing it on this layer when I delete this layer that's gone but more importantly I'm trying to fix something that doesn't make any sense because I don't know so for example let's just fix it on this layer let's just zoom into here remember all those adjustments I made are designed to make the image look hideous so if I do this here it's not going to actually fix it it's gonna make it look weird it's gonna make it look wrong so that's no good to us what we need to do is to fix these on our dust removal layer which is a healing layer underneath there's a reason as well that was a healing layer so number one of course I can use our dust bot tool on that layer to remove dust spots that are easier to see now as a result of our little tool but what I can also do is use our healing mask now our healing mask doesn't have a limit in terms of the number of points that I can have whereas the spot removal does so I can just click here and it's gonna heal click here click here I can even go over my spot removal areas that didn't do it particularly well here here and here but more importantly with the healing tool I can go for irregular shapes so if I go back to my healing brush so I can press Q on the keyboard to do it or I can go up to the top and choose my healing mask or I can click on it here in the palette but it's choosing the right origin I can move it manually or manually if I want to if I don't believe it's got it right but in this case it did and I can click and delete all these dust spots pretty instantly you can see it's pretty reactive it's doing a really good job and even up to here so even complex bits like this piece of hair or fluff or whatever let's go back to our healing tool I'm just going to draw over there and that's now gone now when I remove the dust spot scanner layer that looks perfectly clean and that's the difference so we're using the dust spot scanner layer to see the dust spots we fix the dust box on our dust removal layer and you can do that with the dust bot tool so the okey the keyboard or remove spot or you can fix it with the healing mask tool in certain circumstances you might want to use the cloning mask but normally it's gonna be the healing or the remove spot tool that you use once you've made all those changes and you've got rid of all the spots and don't worry I'm not gonna make you watch me do all of these on this session once you've done that we're gonna delete or disable the dust spot scanner layer there's nothing that says you have to actually delete that there but you certainly want to make sure it's not visible ready for print so let's apply the exact same scenario to a image with a lot less dust spots in so also bear in mind this image here has had already quite a few tweaks made to it so we've got some different layers and different masks and so on on the hex girls on the sky doesn't matter we can still create our dust tools on top of these layers so I'm gonna create a new heal there and I'm gonna call that heal their dust removal and I'm gonna create a new filled adjustment layer and we're gonna call that one just for fun delete because I'll never forget when someone did that Foley now our adjustment layer here we're going to make those changes exactly like we did before so exposure we leave where it is contrast we put up to maximum 50 brightness I'm going to pull down a touch not too much in this case we've got some dark areas here saturation I'm going to pull down a bit so I can focus on the detail highlight I'm going to pull down to completely recovered shadow up completely restored look at the difference that's made to how much we can see now go to clarity put them at between 50 and 60 and let's look at the sky so already let's go without now you can probably see them be easier now that I've shown you where they were but there's one here and one here let's turn that they're on there they are nice and obvious I go back to my dust removal filled layer which has no changes made to it at all and this is a heal there so I can go straight to my healing brush and I can draw draw think oh no there's a couple more draw draw and capture one is gonna do a fantastic job of just removing I was another couple they're removing these little spots some of them we wouldn't have even noticed and what happens when I nine times out of ten you don't notice it until you print it big and then when you look at the big print which is cost quite a lot to produce you go back to the drawing board so with those changes made just a few healing brush elements so let's just go on there so you can see where they all are that's on my dust removal layer I can turn off or I can delete my dust yuck delete layer or my dust finder or my dust pot finder or whatever I want to call it and the dust pots are gone they're easy to see with this if I turn off that removal there because if I want to see where the dust spots were I can just disable the removal there there are my dust spots back again so I've got two separate layers one fixes the dust spot one finds them [Music] you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 12,388

Keywords: Capture One, Capture One Pro, How To Guide, Post-Processing, Post Processing, Image Editing, Tutorial, Tools, Photo Editing, RAW, Processing, Software, How To, Learn, Guide, Pro, Phase One, Paul Reiffer, Photography, Quick, Lessons, Tips, Tricks, In Depth, Detailed, Landscape, Brightness, Exposure, Settings, Highlights, Shadows, Tool, Image Adjustment, Comparison, Which One, Exposure Warning, Preferences, 20, Detail, Reduce, Dust Spot, Dust, Spot, Removal, Finder, Scanner, Repair, Healing, Sensor, Lens, 20.1, Workflow

Id: _hldbG6h2Rs

Length: 16min 31sec (991 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020