Capture One Pro Tips - Flow vs Opacity & Brush Control

[Music] in this video we're going to cover the use of opacity and flow sliders in your brush setting to control the rate at which you lay down a mask on the adjustment layer in capture one we're also going to cover this little airbrush option here as well because that has an impact on these two functions but it's opacity and flow that are terms that are often confusing because they're used interchangeably to describe quite often the same thing so in this session we're not going to cover why you're drawing masks or how to get the best result out of an image we're just going to cover what these two functions do and the impact they have on your image so first thing is let's just look at a mask so here is an image with a mask loaded on let's just darken our exposure on the adjustment layer so that adjustment layer you can see it's not having any effect in the middle and it's having a lot of effect on the top and bottom and the reason is because we've painted a mask so to see the mask that we've painted let's press the m button on the keyboard m for mask and we can see it the default in capture one is to display the mask in a translucent red so the deeper the red the more mask has been painted for instance down here the lighter the red the less mask has been painted so we have a fall off here in our masks which means that that exposure at the darkest parts of the mask is having its full effect but as it tapers off it's a more nuanced effect and it softly feathers out into having no effect here in the in the water now there is a challenge with seeing the mask in red and here's a perfect example so if we look in the sky up here i don't know whether i've painted a huge amount of masking up here or whether there's just red in the sky so press the m button on the keyboard again let's turn the mask off and actually it turns out it's because there's some red in the sky so press m again to turn the mask on that masking tool is really handy when we're trying to mask around objects or look at shadows and highlights and so on but it doesn't help us see the actual mask that we've drawn in a huge amount of detail but there is a tooling capture one that lots of people don't use that we really should which does exactly that so if i click on this little eye icon in the layers palette i've got the option here obviously always display mask and it gives me the keyboard shortcut m and i've got the option here never display mask which is also the keyboard shortcut m so in other words on or off press m turns it on press m turns it off we've got this nice function here which says only display the mask when you're drawing one that can be really good so it turns it off the second you let go of the brush but this is the really valuable one display grayscale mask and the shortcut for that on the keyboard is option and m on a mac or alt and m on a windows machine so let's just click this and again i can press m on the keyboard to turn the mask off and we go back to standard turn it off completely or i press option m and i go to my grayscale mask when i go to the gray scale mask it's going to warm me up here there's a little warning from capture one saying just bear in mind you're looking at a mask you're not looking at the picture so for example even though these areas are white black and gray if i change my exposure it's going to have no effect whatsoever on what i'm seeing so be very careful these are the adjustments to the image here it's not the adjustment to the mask all the adjustments to the mask are made in this dialogue which is our either our brush or our grayscale or our radial sorry our graduated filter or gradient mask filter or our radial gradient filter so in here we can see that actually that image had quite a complex mask set up on it it actually had some of the cloud wisps and everything isolated and it wasn't just a flat 100 mask and that's why we need opacity and flow so to show this let's go and create a brand new empty exposure layer sorry empty adjustment layer and with our adjustment layer obviously the mask shows as black where there's nothing that's going to be applied so it doesn't matter if i change exposure or contrast or whatever the areas of black in a mask in the grayscale version of the mask have no effect whatsoever through two let's put this to a hundred and hundred if i paint this area here that would have maximum effect on my picture so let's press m to get rid of the grayscale mask let's just have a look at what that would do let's turn our exposure down and we can see there we go so the area that i masked has now got a darker exposure and the area that i didn't mask is completely left alone so option and m or alt and m to go back to our mask and i'm just going to clear that and we're going to first dive into what opacity does so a lot of people um will look at the definitions of these and it confuses it it confuses me so we refer to this as the density of the brush and and so on and flow is the rate at which it changes as photographers it's actually in my head a little bit simpler to think of this just like you were doing a long exposure at night so opacity refers to effectively how bright the light that you're painting is so if i set my opacity down to 10 or around there at 100 flow it doesn't matter how many times i go over this area that was how bright the light was that's how much mask i'm painting on if i set this to let's say 50 and paint we now have a brighter brush so we're painting more masks more opacity into the mask and that's going to have obviously more of an effect but just like with photography when we paint with light it's the same as when we're painting with a mask with that same opacity if i paint over these two areas it's additive so i've just painted now another 50 percent over the background which is now relatively dark it's 50 i've painted it over this area which already had some opacity painted on it so that's had some effect on top of that and you can see that here with where the areas overlap and this area that already had 50 we've painted another 50 on top of it so it's additive so these opacities effectively i can add and add an ad and i can use that to feather some of our masking so we can use that to create some little effects and so on as we're starting to stripe around clouds and and so on but opacity effectively tells us at 100 flow where to stop and what i mean by that is flow is basically the amount of times we're going over the same area in one stroke so let me just clear this mask let's get rid of this distraction let's do it so we had a 50 opacity at 100 flow and we know that if we paint once as long as i keep the mouse button down it's going to paint 100 of that 50 brightness onto my mask and no matter how many times i go over it it's not going to have any effect whatsoever it's going to stop at 50 percent here's another one 50 percent the additive function says if i now let go with the mouse and click again i'm adding another 50 on top of this okay but flow is different flow if i set my opacity to 100 and our flow to 50 if i go over one area just once it paints 50 but actually in this case it's not necessarily possible to go over it once because as you can see each pixel has had some time spent on it as i drew that line but if i go over it again it's added to so we're up to 100 pretty quickly that makes sense we've just added 50 percent of flow and another 50 to 100 opacity but i don't have to let go with the mouse on flow each time i can just sit and keep it going and it will keep adding as long as i keep brushing over the same area here's where the two inter-operate if i set my opacity to 50 and my flow to 50 the first brush is going to give me effectively 25 right 50 of 50. the second brush is going to get me to 50 or 200 percent of 50. and then the more i paint it doesn't make a difference because the flow is going to keep adding it's going to keep adding another 50 more 50 more 50 more 50 more so why isn't it getting brighter and the reason it's not getting brighter is because it's 50 of that 50 opacity so it's never going to go beyond that level of opacity on this stroke if i let go and click again we can add another 50 opacity in 50 increments so the flow is effectively the increment that we add up to this limit of opacity and this is why the two actually work very well together so if for example let's just uh clear down our mask if we had an example of 20 flow of 100 opacity you can imagine that as i draw across that's a 20 line if i draw a cross and back that's a 40 line across back and again that's 60 across back again and again that's 80 and i cross back again again and again and we're at 100 so each time i went over the same area i was adding 20 more of 100 opacity let's clear that mask and switch these two around so let's set our opacity to 20. something weird happen with the keyboard there and flow to 100 so draw one line twenty percent draw another line go back on it well that doesn't make a difference it's still twenty percent oh it's still twenty percent it's getting a bit bigger but the brightness isn't changing and the reason is because it's limited to 20 on each application it was already 100 flow it had already painted 100 of 20 to get this to higher i'd need to let go of the mouse and click again and that now drops another 100 of 20. let go number one let go another layer number two let go another layer number three let go so we can do that four times so let go let go let go let go so we get to 80 and then roughly 80 and the maths don't actually work out quite that way but each time with each stroke we're letting go with the mouse and we're just adding each time 100 of the opacity that we've told capture one to apply so that's the how they work differently effectively flow as long as i keep my mouse down on the same area and go over it and over and over in one stroke i'm adding and adding and adding more of whatever opacity i've dialed in whereas opacity it's going to keep adding and adding and adding until we get to white effectively at whatever rate i've told it to do that with inflow now airbrush let's just cover that one as a quick one so let's just turn our airbrush off and i'm going to make our brush a little big and i'm going to set our opacity to around 30 and flow to 100. so let's click here for let's click once with our airbrush turned off okay now i'm going to click twice with our airbrush turned off you see we've got lighter click three times with our airbrush turned off and we've got lighter still but on this one i'm going to hold the mouse button down you see it's the same as the first one so it's just painted 100 of 30 opacity with one click let me turn the airbrush on the same thing i'm going to click once and let go looks pretty similar right now i'm going to click and i'm going to hold the mouse down and let go just like with a spray can just like with an actual airbrush that artists would use because i'm holding that brush or holding that spray can on one spot with the mouse button down it's going to keep adding and adding and adding more and more flow but not more opacity it's going to stop at the opacity level that i've set but it's adding and adding and adding to this even though it's quite a soft brush it's just going to keep spreading and spreading and spreading until it hits the outer limits as you can see that outer circle of our brush let's do the same with flow so opacity 100 flow down to 30 turn our airbrush off i'm going to click once and we get 30 of 100 opacity let's click twice and we get our yeah pretty much 60 off 100 opacity let's do three times and we get very similar results so this is opacity this is flow down here with the airbrush off but if i click and hold down we get exactly the same as above let's turn the airbrush on click once same as above click and hold now look at that difference and let's think about what it's done in the background so this one as i clicked and hold or clicked and held it added more and more flow effectively is adding and adding and adding but only up to 30 opacity with this one as i click and hold with the airbrush option on it's adding and keeping on adding more and more and more flow the longer i leave my airbrush or my pointer on the same pixels so as i leave it on is it's adding 30 adding another 30 and more and more more and more up until 100 opacity and to prove how these two interoperate let's set our opacity to 50 and do exactly the same so we've got flow at 30 but opacity of 50. let's do that same dot i'm going to click and hold and it doesn't matter how long i hold this mouse button for that dot is never going to go above 50 opacity because that's its limit that's its cap so flow controls how long effectively i have to be or how many times i have to be over the same pixel to keep adding but it'll only add up to that amount of opacity that i dial in and that's why typically a lot of people will have opacity set to 100 and flow set quite low with airbrush on especially if you're using a tablet that can help and as i start to brush i can be very very very nuanced and calm in terms of adding variations and feathering onto the mask so opacity is effectively how much light we want to achieve or how much mask we want to add or how much paint we're putting or how much color we're putting on the brush flow is about how many times or how quickly and how many times we're going over the same spot to add more and more and more of that amount of light or that amount of color or that amount of paint on the paintbrush depending on how you want to see it so flow and opacity two very different things they behave in very different ways the airbrush also adds another little change to the way they behave but there are two modes that i see most often people using one is to have a very low flow brush around 15 with airbrush turned on at 100 opacity typically using a very low hardness the other and this actually the one that i typically use is a very low opacity at 20 flow set to 100 simply because it means that i can control things one mouse click at a time it doesn't matter how many times i go over the same spot effectively because each stroke is only going to be 20 opacity i can be really really deliberate in where i'm adding extra light into this mask whereas with flow set at 20 and opacity set at 100 depending on how quick i am with my mouse is going to have a very big effect on how much mask i'm laying down and how soft it is so it's personal preference the effect of course if i turn the m or press the m button off well we can see our mask in red now but if i turn the mask off we can see the effect that that has had so that's the effect of the mask on the picture and only the areas which are light are going to be affected by that exposure change and the lighter those areas are let's go back to our grayscale mask the more affected they'll be so hope that will make sense um if not send comments down and whatever into the video and we can always try and answer them but flow and opacity are two very different things they do very different or they they have very different ways of applying change to an image but you can achieve very similar effects based on using one versus the other using the two together is really powerful and just remember that flow is the amount of that opacity that you've dialed in that you're painting onto the mask you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 6,235

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, Flow, Opacity, Tool, Brush, Control, Masking, Airbrush, Settings, 20, 20.1, Workflow, Setting, Dialog, Box, Menu, Sliders, Slider, Correct, Feather, Stroke, Blend, Smooth, Hard, Edge, Soft, Tablet, Wacom, Pen Pressure

Id: 2y8ch58n-YY

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020