Capture One Pro Tips - Luma Ranges & Advanced Masking

[Music] this session is going to specifically cover the use of luma ranges for landscape photography of course you can use the luma range in other genres of photography but the reality is for me the luma range was a game changer when it got introduced into capture one because it meant that all the other methods that i'd previously used to mask an exposure difference in gap were effectively gone in the wind because this thing pretty much did 90 of cases out of the box so the luma range is a really powerful tool when it comes to a scene that is unbalanced and by unbalanced we mean we've got massively exposed highlights and massively underexposed shadows let me just correct the exposure back to what we shot so in here we can see we've got some shadow detail that we want to pull up in the foreground and we've got a sky that in some places is slightly overexposed but in the rest of it it's certainly bright and it's probably too bright to match what's down here now this scene is in zion national park it's at sunrise um this is what the phone my phone camera saw so this is an iphone image now what the iphone did at the time was it looked at the scene in front of it and said huh it's really dark in the foreground really bright in the sky i'm gonna automatically switch to hdr mode so hdr mode allows the camera to then take two exposures one for the highlights one for the shadows combine the two together and all of a sudden you get what it considers to be a perfectly exposed and composed image or composited image the problem with hdr images is they tend to look very cartoony and in this case you can see it specifically it just doesn't look real it's lost all the contrast and the reason it's lost the contrast is it's blended the shadows from the over exposed image with the highlights from the underexposed image so everything just sits in this middle part of the histogram here we're used to a lot more contrast in our images especially when it's something like a rock and a landscape against the sky so let's go back to our image here this is the one this is the raw file that came out of the phase one camera and in here we actually have a graduated filter in use in front of the lens you can see in this shot here so we actually had an nd8 or three stop filter just to get the water to blur here and we also had a gnd a graduated neutral density running across the top of the frame so it was darker at the top in the filter and then the filter slowly softened out to no effect under the bottom but even that wasn't enough and there's two issues with that filter especially a flat gradient the first is the gradient will fall off as it gets nearer and nearer to the bottom of the filter well that's fine but the brightest part of the image is actually here in the middle so even though we've darkened the top it's down here i also want to affect and that filter is not going to help me with it the second thing is where we said it was darker at the top yes it is and it's affected the sky and it's made the sky a little bit darker too but it's also made the shadows and the mountains darker and that's not what we want they were already dark we don't want them darker still so these flat graduated filters don't help us here you might find on the market a couple of random v-shape filters and we'll cover that in a second but a v-shaped filter is great as long as the shape of the v matches exactly the landscape that you're shooting if it doesn't we'll show you in a second but it's kind of pointless and it's going to cause you more trouble than good so let's just start before we go anywhere else in making sure that we can get about the detail we want so we capture one let's just pull up our exposure on the background and make sure that in our shadows we have all the detail we want and we do it's nice and sharp it's relatively noise free it's just a little bit underexposed and that's what we want to fix likewise in the sky if i pull the exposure down well those bits that look like they were overexposed actually they're pretty good we've got some lovely cloud texture and some color so that's pretty good so we have all the data that we want the camera has captured all the data we want we've just got to split out the bright areas from the dark and this is where aluma range comes in now before we go into the luma range itself let's just look at the other options the first option is old school let's just draw a mask so i'm going to turn our standard mask on i'm going to put a reasonable hardness on the brush and i'm going to draw in fact just to prove the point i'm going to draw roughly a v so let's imagine we've invested in one of these v-shaped filters with a nice soft edge now to turn our mask on you press the m button on your keyboard m for mask to turn it off you press the m button on your keyboard and for mask again now in this case i've drawn around where i want and i'm going to right click on the adjustment layer and say fill that mask and it's going to fill it with 100 now i'm going to use the gradient also the grayscale mask tool which is option and m and that shows me the actual mask i drew without the picture behind so let's press m again to go back to our normal mask and you could see if we were kind that's kind of like a v-shaped mask all good so with that mask let's just pull downwards pull up with our background some exposure and with our adjustment layer that we've just drawn let's pull that exposure down that's good so we've now got a sky that looks about right and we've got lots of detail here in the foreground but look at what else it's done anywhere that that mask overlapped in the same way that anywhere a filter would overlap we've also darkened the shadows as well as the highlights because the mask doesn't discriminate between the highlights and shadows it's just following your shape so what i'd then have to do effectively is go in with our eraser and we would maybe erase some of this stuff and maybe if i had about four days of my hands free time i might want to go into this mountain and erase every single little pixel one by one to make sure our mask matched the mountain tops that's not going to happen i don't think any sane person would want to do that but that used to be one of the only tools that we had available to us to fix this problem so a new version of that brush came along and it was actually very very good so it's called the auto mask so with our mask enabled when you click on auto mask you get an extra ring on the brush so just to explain the inner ring of the brush is going to be placed over the areas that i want to be masked the middle ring as in sorry the central ring so you've got three rings so ring number one the the inner one is the area that we want to cover the central ring or ring number two is going to be overlapping on the areas that i want the auto mask to discount in other words don't include in the mask and to do some calculations for me the outer ring you can almost ignore because the outer ring actually relates to the hardness of the mask also the brush if you have your brush set to 100 hardness you won't see an outer ring if you have it set to zero percent hardness you'll see quite a wide outer ring in this case the hardness doesn't really matter in auto masking so i can set it to whatever we want and we can kind of ignore the outer one so let's start drawing now up here on the sky i'm going to make sure our central ring is on the sky and i'm going to make sure that our middle ring or the ring number two is on the mountains with auto masking we've got to wait a little bit of time for capture one to keep up but what we're gonna do i'm just holding my mouse button down and just drawing the mask as i believe it needs to cut out up here and up here might have helped if i turn the mask on so there's our mask it's now going to calculate the auto mask that i drew and we're going to see in these little edges once it's done that calculation that it's done a pretty good job it's cut out around the mountains and that's pretty good i can again right click on this mask and say fill it and it's going to fill that scene with my auto mask so my auto mask let's look at the trees up here done a pretty good job in in broad terms it's cut out around the trees but still it's not quite right so we've got some trees that are included in the mask and they shouldn't be we've also got this area of ambiguity down here because it's not sure really whether or not it should be affected and we've got these areas here that bleed onto the cliffs so the amount of cleanup time again is pretty extensive but it's still going to give us a better effect so if i go back to our background we've still got our exposure up on this adjustment layer we can now pull our exposure down and it's going to do a pretty good job of balancing out that scene certainly better than with the brush but if we look closely you see all these artifacts here now of course we can refine the mask we can feather it so if we put some feathering on we can get rid of some of this let's just turn the display mask on so you can see so we can get rid of some of that by effectively adding unfortunately a bit of a halo around the edges so we can apply that we could also refine that mask let's display that as well and capture one's gonna do some really clever stuff to try and make the mask more realistic and actually it does a good job overall let's just have a look without the mask on so that's a pretty good job it's certainly better than where we started and it's done a good job balancing now we've got a couple of issues here we've got some mask stuff that shouldn't be masked so we then go in and erase this here so we've still got some tidying up to do but it's a lot less tidying up than we would have had before so that was effectively our next go-to of course we could add a new gradient mask and that's going to be exactly the same as what we would have had before as a lens filter so if i put that down there you'll see what i mean in a second so when i turn that exposure down absolutely it affects the sky but it affects it in the wrong way we've got the darkest part here lightest part there and we've darkened our foreground so that's not good either so this is where luma range comes in i could do a luma range very quickly by drawing or i could start with even a radial mask or a gradient mask if i wanted to let's start with a radial mask just for fun so i'm going to draw a radial mask i'm actually just going to invert that mask so my radial mask here i want to affect as much as i can of the valley so i'm almost using the corners of this round gradient as a way of trying to get a v shape or the bottom part of a v shape in our mask that's good now i want to just make sure our line is quite hard because i don't particularly want to take in extra bits of the scene that i didn't mean to i'm just going to make the mask a little bit wider as well so that looks pretty good so that's covering certainly the area we want with some overlap no problem so i'm going to turn our mask off now just like before if i had just reduced our exposure with that mask yes we correct the sky and in fact we can even be even more clever we can actually warm up the sky a little bit and boost a little bit of the tint and the kelvin just to bring it up more to summarize but again we've got these mountains included in the mask so i could rasterize that mask and i could use the eraser tool just to erase the mask around the mountains but i'm back to where i was before instead in capture one we now have luma range so i'm going to take the box to say display the mask and the luma range shows me on here the area which is included in the range that we're selecting and that includes a little fall off here so effectively we're ramping up so don't affect anything that's completely dark completely black and then when you get to about 20 on our histogram everything is included and everything is included all the way until you get to 235 on the histogram and then slowly ramp down to white now i want everything that's going to be bright so there's no point in ramping down so i'm going to pull this up and you see what happened to the cloud so everything that was over 211 here wasn't included in the mask i can do this thing called falloff which has a softening effect on the mask but actually there's no point i want anything that's bright 100 included in the mask so we just put this edge of it here with no fall off 100 of the mask to be applied for anything that's 255 and below and now we're going to use the lower range to determine where we want the mast to stop on the shadows so i know that we don't want to include all of the shadows because i know we want some of these mountains gone so i can pull our range and watch what happens to the mountains as i do it we actually watched the mask creep up the mountainside and up to there we could go a little bit further we can probably get away with that there and we're going to have a soft fall off so that fall off remember is how slowly effectively uh the mask disappears off based on the the value of the exposure so let's just pull that down to about there that looks pretty good so what our luma range has done is it's taken the original round mask the gradient of the radial mask that i drew and it's added a conditional logic on top of it that says yes it's very good that you've drawn this lovely radial mask but i only want to include anything which is 255 on our histogram down to 157 which is our range but then slowly fall off to the 120 mark on our histogram which is roughly the midpoint so that's then selected just this area here if i apply that we can see now that if i were well in fact we've already got it programmed in we've got our exposure in but by doing that exposure change the same exposure change if i look up here at the trees it's got it pretty right but we've got these artifacts up here as well just like we did with the auto mask but luma range has another trick up its sleeve instead of using the standard red mask i'm actually going to switch to our lovely grayscale mask so option and m and we can see why we might have those hard lines and artifacts around the trees is because the luma range mask has actually created quite a hard line around it all we've got the function in here to be able to fix that which is radius so as i pull radius up it's a bit like feathering and we're going to see these lines start to blur and we can also play with our sensitivity a little bit so as we blur those lines and apply let me turn off the grayscale mask we'll see that those artifacts have now disappeared so while there may be a few it's just processing there there may be a few still in there we might want to play with so we've always got the option on our luma range again to increase the radius the higher the radius the softer the transition between the area that is mass in the area that isn't masked and it also allows us to effectively pull down the darkness a little bit and that fall-off so if i apply that we've now got an area of bright sky that we can independently control against the rest of the image so if i go to our background layer and pull up our exposure here now equally we can still on the same adjustment layer we can equally play with our dynamic range tool so we can pull down our highlights we can pull down our whites and on the background we could still if we wanted to pull up our shadows a touch we could leave our blacks where they were because i want to keep some contrast in there i could put some overall clarity on the image and in fact we could even increase a little bit of saturation on the whole picture as well but that adjustment layer the difference it's making and the speed and accuracy that it's had over these edges of these mountains which you saw before really really difficult for capture one to work out are quite phenomenal now that's at 200 percent that's a 100 here the more and more tweaking you do with the luma range so if we play with this radius and play with the fall-off you can get to a much neater and cleaner result over these um these ridge lines remember as well you also have halo suppression in capture one so we can also fix some of the halos that are around the sharpening areas of the of the scene but it's the luma range that's so powerful when it comes to managing the difference in exposure between sky and ground when you weren't able to do it in the camera just like with any other mask and i just spotted a bit out here so if i turn our mask on in fact let's go back to grayscale you'll see we did pick up some of this mountain here and the reason is because this luma range of that mountain was included in this selection here the problem is if i try and discount some of this stuff we might be discounting some of the clouds so instead just like with any other mask i can rasterize it and i can erase so if i press e for the eraser button and click it's going to first warm me and say do you want to rasterize the mask the second i do i'm going to lose the ability to change my radial mask but i'm not going to lose the ability to change my luma range so be aware that the rasterization warning is only about calculated masks so in other words the gradient fill or the gradient mask and the radial mask it is not about the luma range you can apply luma ranges to any calculated mask and any drawn mask with no issue so i'm going to rasterize my circular or radial mask and now i can tidy up this area here now here's a cool bit i can even use the auto mask function on our eraser so i can with our eraser say let's overlap the sky i'm going to draw the mask over the mountain that i do want to erase let go and it's going to calculate the auto mask and for tidying up it's going to give me my sky back hopefully there we go and not the ground and the same on this area here so let's just overlap the sky and not the rock and we'll just cover all of that there let it calculate there we go so i'll turn my mask off we now have a mask that is completely lined up to the mountain scene is still customizable i can still go to my luma range and i can still make changes to that mask so if i wanted it from 147 to 197 to maybe exclude some of these clouds up here i could i can increase the mask the luma range on the mask if i wanted to but the luma range is completely separate from the mask that i've drawn so the mask that i've drawn i can erase specific things the luma range i can include or exclude certain ranges of brightness and well effectively highlights and shadows from the mask that i've drawn and with that mask applied that's a very very very quick way of getting a highly accurate mask all the way around a landscape scene where you couldn't possibly have used a glass filter to do it this is quite long ones we've gone in depth into all the other methods of doing it but hopefully the luma range makes sense if anyone's got any questions then feel free to put them in the comments otherwise check out some of the other videos and we'll cover some of the other luma range options for different genres over time [Music] you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 24,463

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, Luma, Luminosity, Luminousity, Tool, Range, Mask, Masks, Masking, Auto Mask, Brush, Advanced, Gradient, Graduated, Valley, Workflow, Radius, Sensitivity, Sliders, Invert, Menus, Settings, 20.1, 20, Version

Id: V4UpoLu5ZmU

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Mon May 18 2020