Capture One Pro Tips - Version 21.3 Upgrade Guide - In-Depth: Magic Brush, New Exporter +more | 14.3

[Music] in this session we'll cover the changes that were introduced into capture 121 as part of their 21.3 update now if you own a perpetual license of version 21 then this is a free update for you equally if you're on the subscription model then you can just go to captureone.com and download the latest version this version if you go to the about screen in capture one it's actually going to say it's version 14.3 that is the same as version 21.3 if it says that you're running the latest copy now in here are a couple of brand new features but you're also going to find a couple of things that have been changed under the hood we'll cover all of those in this session but we're going to start with the first feature which is magic brush now for a long time when we've come to masking areas such as this we've been able to refine how we mask things by choosing either a color range in our color editor so we could choose this blue here and then create a mask layer from that selection or we could take an existing mask and say actually out of that mask i only want to identify and and store in that mask certain ranges of brightness or luminosity luma range well in 21.3 they've introduced a new feature called magic brush and the magic brush is almost like a hybrid of those plus some extra bits and what it allows us to do is to select similar pixels whether that's based on brightness or color or whether they're neighboring pixels with some options to hopefully make creating masks around quite complex objects and subjects a lot easier now in order to accommodate for magic brush in this toolbox here unfortunately there's a few changes to the interface which you're gonna have to get used to so the first is that the layer add and remove function has moved from down here on the bottom left to up here just above the other tools the second is the mask visibility tool has moved up to the top here above the viewer rather than being on the layer itself so with those changes done it means that there's extra space for the magic brush and the magic brush itself you just click on here and you're going to get something that looks very similar to a normal brush setting but if i right click on the magic brush i'm going to get these different variables that i can set so the first is size and opacity obviously we're used to those so how big and how opaque the the mask that i'm drawing is going to be but the next is tolerance so tolerance dictates effectively how similar the neighboring pixel needs to be in order to be included in the the range that we're painting and the next one is the refine edge and we'll come on to that in a bit more detail later on but effectively now as part of magic brush with every brush stroke i've got the ability to have a different edge refinement based on what i'm actually painting and then on top of all of those we've got this sort of master variable here which is sample entire photo which we'll cover in a second so let's imagine we want to choose this sky well with our new magic brush function i'm going to choose a relatively low tolerance uh we're also going to choose i will leave the refine edge to its default 100 opacity is fine the size is more important for the size that i need to pick inside of so imagine if i was choosing inside these cables here i might want a smaller brush to be able to do that out here it doesn't really matter too much we can have a much bigger brush if we want so i'm going to leave this off so you can see the difference in a second and we're just going to paint across the sky now the first time you paint it's going to calculate the mask and that's creating a huge raw mask in memory to be able to do everything from now on in a much more speedy fashion now these are 150 megapixel files on smaller files that's a lot quicker but it's a first time process that has to happen whenever we start to use the magic brush now as you'll see in here it's only selected a certain proportion of the sky and that's based on two things here the first is our tolerance because we've limited it to only 31 and the second is we don't have sample entire photo enabled so in other words it's only going to go to its neighboring pixels as long as there's no break or something in the way from the next set of pixels for instance inside these cables here on the golden gate so if i wanted to get all of these in one go let's just undo all that mask work here and this time i'm going to choose sample entire photo i'm going to leave my tolerance where it is and the refine edge where it is i'm going to choose the same sky and this time with that tolerance yes it's stopped here because there's a difference between these pixels and up here it's quite a big difference in in brightness but it has masked inside our cables here and this softness around the cables is down to this refined edge that we've got in our mask settings here so if i wanted to include more of the stuff inside the cables well we'll just go back to our magic brush click into here and it's going to start doing that but you're also going to find that not only is it including the stuff inside the cables which matches the sky it's also picking up down here on the water because that's a very similar color as well and with our tolerance set to a relatively high amount it means that it's able to spill out over certain areas too so overall be careful with the subjects you're choosing this mask effectively works in exactly the same way as any other mask i can go into the eraser and i can remove the stuff that i don't want but it's an additive tool so magic brush at the moment can only add to an existing mask or its own mask it will not erase you don't have a minus magic brush function as it stands right now one thing to bear in mind if at the moment we're painting on an existing adjustment layer if i didn't have an adjustment layer and i chose my magic brush it will automatically create a brand new brush layer for me too so what if we wanted to be a little more accurate in terms of this mask well let's clear this mask down and i'm going to decide because i don't want to actually sample the entire photo we just want to sample the area in front of me and i'm going to choose to increase our tolerance a little bit and choose our golden gate bridge and you'll see that by using this additive brush we're adding and adding and adding to our mask each time to increase our selection if it goes wrong here well we can just undo that step so command z or or press the undo button and you're going to get to a pretty accurate mask pretty quickly through using the magic brush function so as long as i stay to the iron work um we're able to do that now one advantage here is unlike with a luma range or a color selection magic brush doesn't actually care what color you're choosing what it's looking for is similarity now it's using color and it's using luminosity to determine that but you can see here selections that i couldn't have made with a color selector if i turn my mask off you know we've got whites we've got reds we've got yellows we've got everything in here i couldn't do it without i couldn't do it with a luma range because my luminosity is very similar between these areas but magic brush is able to identify the areas that need to be selected because they're similar to the area that i've chosen so that's in terms of our overall photo or uh not allowing uh magic brush to spill out across the entire photo here what about the refine edge so let's have a look at this example down here one thing you've always been able to do with any mask of course is to use the refine mask function here on the layer so let's just draw with our magic brush now we're going to say not sample entire photo we're going to leave the tolerance well relatively high actually and put a reasonable size on i'm just going to draw across the sky you saw very quickly that auto mask function came up and what it's doing is it's just working out a mask map for this image so that everything i do from now on is a lot quicker now this was too much we can see because it's covered some of the uh the rock face as well so i'm going to undo that and i'm going to change my tolerance down and we're going to do the same drawing across there a much better mask and as i draw across these areas here and expand on that area i get a nice clean setup around these rocks these mountains and the trees and so on but let's have a look up here at these trees and we can see in here that the trees have got a little bit of a jagged edge now this was always what refine edge was for so i can go into here go to refine mask and i can soften the edge or using the radius from very binary to very soft and using similar edges or similar tones and so on either side of that mask area but with magic brush i don't have to do it at a global level i can actually do it at an individual stroke level so with that area up there masked and what we had was a relatively low refine edge of 16. let's have a look at maybe these parts in the foreground here let's just lift up our uh foreground so we can see it a bit clearer so with our magic brush i can choose this area here of grass on a rock and we're going to leave our tolerance quite low and we're going to leave our refine edge relatively low too and i'm just going to draw a nice little mask across there i'm going to turn on well in fact we've already got it but if i wanted to turn on the mask remember we've got to look up here now instead of down here to see it and we can see that that's got a relatively broad spread because of those two variables tolerance and refine edge have allowed the mast to spill out and cover a lot more area if i wanted a very very specific mask over this piece of grass on the rock well i'd use a slightly different setup so i'd pull my tolerance in maybe but if i bring my refine edge to be a lot lot sharper and draw you're going to see it's a lot more digital a lot more binary we don't have those sort of soft falloffs here we have a very binary on or off effect on this this mask itself and if i change my mask to show us the grayscale mask instead we can see that difference of an edge which has been refined and an edge which has been unrefined or very sharpened from the point that it was drawn so this new feature in in terms of magic brush has rather ironically a bit of a byproduct which can be very interesting for us historically the refined mask function was only at an entire layer level so we'd go to refine mask and we'd take the entire layer and we'd have a mask that was refined on its edges and feathered based on the entire layer property well instead now i can actually have let's go into our magic brush here on this tree and put a really soft edge on this tree and draw just across these colors here great now let's look at my grayscale mask and we can see we've got this really soft falloff on this part of the mask that i drew so in the same layer with that magic brush i've got some areas up here which are the default refine edge we've got an area here which is a bit softer an area here which is very binary a lot harder and an area here which is very very soft and all of them were done at an individual brush stroke level rather than being done as an overall layer so overall magic brush is going to help some people in terms of what they well they struggle with in terms of masking especially around some complex objects it does allow us to have some great variables in terms of one area of the mask being very sharp and very defined one area being softer one area being very soft and falling off there are some limitations so as i said already we can't erase very um very magically let's put it that way from the mask it's an additive tool we can only add to it using the magic brush if i erase we're back to the standard eraser which is just a very blunt tool just to erase any stuff that we don't want so the magic brush itself is additive it's intelligent in terms of it's able to know whether you want to sample the entire photograph or whether you want to change an individual area for instance in our golden gate shot here and it's got the ability on each brush stroke to have a different effect applied in terms of its edges and its tolerance so we've drawn our masks we've made some changes to our picture let's say we want to export it now traditionally we'd go up here on the top left and there used to be a cog wheel there for process recipes this is actually quite confusing to a lot of people because there were several ways of exporting an image you could right click and go to export and then you could choose some settings here you could click on the export button up here or you could click on the process recipe up here which was effectively our soft proofing function at all times within capture one all of that lot all of those functions have now been combined into one area which is the new export tool so whether you go here to your export function or click up here you're going to get to the same place which is the new export images tool now in here those of you that are used to seeing export recipes or process recipes you're going to find this very very very similar so the process recipes themselves they haven't moved the defaults are in there if you've deleted any by accident you can hold down on the plus button and you can put in the the built-in recipes back to where they were before but the process recipes used to confuse a lot of people because yes it was really useful for soft proofing for example i could see exactly what was going to come out if i went to a grayscale output based on the icc profile but it also confused people in terms of these locations the subfolders the what to do with existing files because we weren't able to necessarily add or overwrite so that's all been refined into one big dialog box now with the process recipes and the export functions very similar to our import function in terms of its its viewer layout but in a much more simplified way so we still have process recipes i can choose these and it's going to automatically fill in the options and variables that i chose for my format the size how the image is going to be named but the location and naming have now been massively simplified from where they used to be with all of the tokens and and per um image naming and so on every single location now is linked to the recipe itself and the naming structure has got a lot more simple so let me show you when you first go into the export viewer you're going to find that this folder here is empty and it says choose that's because we haven't set a default folder and this is now the root folder for all exports based on not choosing anything different so if i choose this as my export folder this now because i've set it as my primary folder is going to apply to every recipe that didn't have a folder set if i decide to change my mind in terms of where that default is going to be well i can click on this little one with a cog wheel and it'll ask me do i want to change the default output folder but i don't have to stick with the default folder for each of these recipes i can say same as original file or choose folder so i could choose in this case maybe an asia folder and that's going to apply to only this recipe so if i don't change anything and i leave it as the default after i've said it that default is going to apply to every single recipe as the root folder for any export if i do set it as a root folder for a recipe it's going to save it for that process recipe and i've also got the option of having a subfolder in there so quite often we'd always have them into a default output folder but then maybe a subfolder per recipe so we'll call this one jpeg 2048 and this one could be whereas it is adobe tiff so if i chose both of these recipes and say i want to export this image as both an adobe rgb tiff and a 2000 pixel wide jpeg it will put the tiff into the tiff folder or the subfolder and the jpeg into this jpeg 2048 folder both within the default folder if i wanted them in their own folder specifically for this area or this recipe itself you just choose choose folder or you can choose same as original file here's a fun one the existing files i know a lot of people have been frustrated by this this is now allowing us to either add a suffix so if i have a file that's the same name it's going to append a number onto the end of it or overwrite or skip it so in other words if i want to re-export only new files we can choose to skip the ones i already have out of a batch and it'll only add on the new ones that didn't exist in that folder so those are some really handy um changes to how it treats existing files because i know that was really painful before for those of you looking for the original options in all of your other settings they're down here if you click on show all options you're going to find that all the adjustments in there for crop and sharpening also your watermark settings any metadata and so on that's all in there and it's down again per recipe so you can choose at a recipe level how you want to display the watermark what crops you want and so on but by default that's hidden now so we keep this nice and clean and all we're asking you to choose is your default folder for output and choose a subfolder if you want to stick with the defaults that come out of capture one create a new recipe it's exactly the same as before if you hold down on this plus button you get the choice of the defaults that came with capture one if you short click on that plus button we can create a new recipe and put in all my settings here but if you're creating a new recipe don't forget to go to show all options so that you can choose if you have any crop or sharpening or watermark and so on too it's not missing it's just hidden by default down there so overall that's a pretty nice improvement in terms of the interface in terms of how we can export files out of capture one there's also a slightly easier way if you've already chosen so let's go back into my export dialogue and say i want to export this one as a jpeg and a tiff and my new recipe and i've done that already on this picture i can go to another picture and if i click and hold i can choose this export with previous settings and it will use whatever settings i used before and produce it again of course you've got a shortcut of command d or control d so that's the new exporter when you first go into capture one as the new 21.3 version of capture one you may find a little warning that pops up and that's just to tell you that by the way the cog no longer exists in the top tabs and now to do your exports it's just all moved to this new export dialog box up here so with the overwrite files and the suffix files that makes for exporting a lot easier because no longer do we have to worry about putting them into a as i used to a dummy folder and then move them across and control the overwriting from there but what about actually catalog management and that's also now been improved in terms of where we can find our files all of a sudden now you're going to see these bigger numbers and the reason is because finally we now have subfolder counts for images so if i go into for instance this europe folder here that doesn't reference the fact there are 529 images in this root folder which is how capture one used to behave it now references the fact that if i add up all of these subfolders that all comes to 529 so we've now got nested image counts for all those subfolders if you don't like it if you prefer the existing way of working you can hide the number of images and subfolders and it will tell me in this one we have none this one 47 this one 14 and so on but for most people i think they're going to find it more valuable to say show images and subfolders and that's going to allow us to see at a rolled up level how many images we have in every folder underneath that root also for catalog users with sessions this was obviously a lot easier because it was constantly synchronizing but for catalog users if you added a new folder or a subfolder or even some images into one of your existing folders it could be really painful to try and synchronize it and incorporate it you'd almost have to go into each individual level now i don't so if i added let's say a new folder in here under north america which i did earlier if i right click here and go to synchronize capture one is going to do a quick scan from the main folder and it's going to say do you want to synchronize including subfolders or just the main folder in this case i want to include subfolders i can choose to exclude anything new so only scan in the existing imported folders but in this case i want it to go outside of that and it'll actually give me a preview and say well i've actually found already seven new images in those subfolders already and we've got the option of showing the importer so i can do that same uh process when i import um at this point here but if i click sync you're going to find all of a sudden capture one does a little bit of a recheck and it finds here a new set of images in this brand new folder here we'll find my count goes up because we've got another seven images in here and that's a much cleaner way of keeping catalog data synchronized between um the finder folders or the the windows explorer folders and your catalog within capture one because quite often they'd become a little bit out of sync so synchronize does exactly what it says but the beauty of it is you can now do it at a higher level and use that nested folder option to include new images in extra subfolders that capture one finds and as you saw it's pretty quick at doing it too so those are pretty much the three biggest changes that you're going to see in in 21.3 for most users we've got our magic brush which has resulted in a few things moving around but more importantly a much much easier way of creating very complex masks additive masks not just based on color range or luma range but a bit more intelligence in terms of neighboring pixels and what's very similar on top of that we've got the brand new exporter so the exporter has been simplified it's all in one place now so your process recipes and your actual export function are all in the same window and we've still kept all of the existing um flexibility that you have before but it's just in a much neater space on your screen and we've now got the if you're using catalogs the ability to have a folder hierarchy that's nested in terms of its image count and the ability to synchronize multiple subfolders at the same time which saves a lot of time you're also going to find in capture 121 there are some extra functions for fuji users so if you ever shoot tethered for fuji users you're now able to trigger a shot while you're in live view so that was previously a bit of an issue and for certain leica owners so if you own certain leica cameras and lenses you're now able to nudge the focus um when you're in live view 2. that's that's really handy feature i've used it quite a bit um with with other cameras but to bring that to a new set of cameras is quite cool too if you go hunting you may also find this down here the capture one live beta this isn't yet there it's sort of laying the groundworks and this is a way of in the future being able to link out to other people to be able to view capture one data don't worry about it too much right now but as it stands that's laying the foundations for hopefully a really cool service to come and that's it that's your 21.3 or 14.3 update hopefully there are features in there that some of you will get some big advantages from certainly when you're drawing masks magic brush can be a help don't try and use it in certain ways i'll give you an example so in this image here if i use magic brush here to let's just choose a reasonable tolerance to choose the rock it's going to do a pretty good job an additive obviously i can add to that mask and add some more and add some more then we get a nice reasonable mask out of this with a few clicks which couldn't necessarily have been achieved purely with a luma range or a color selection but that's for the rock if i try and choose our sky out here let's even reduce our tolerance here um and choose along here well magic brush is going to say well all this stuff is really really similar so i'm going to try and include it all so be careful um remember that you're asking magic brush to choose items which are very similar if you've got a blue sky and a blue c as far as magic brush is concerned they may be too similar and you're going to end up with a mask that maybe could have been easier to do this doesn't negate the use of for instance a gradient here and of course with that gradient i could choose a luma range and exclude all of the rock stuff here too so the magic brush itself doesn't necessarily negate existing brush mechanisms or masking mechanisms but in certain situations especially with that ability to have unique brush settings on each stroke well we can actually get to some really complex masks really really quickly as a result of that new tool any questions or if there's anything that we haven't covered in this setup um then please just put them in the comments we'll try and answer as many as we can but hopefully for those of you that choose to upgrade or want to uh move on to 21.3 there are at least some good additions in there that improve everyone's workflow you

Channel: Paul Reiffer

Views: 14,946

Keywords: Capture One, Post-Processing, Post Processing, Image Editing, Tutorial, Tools, Photo Editing, RAW, Processing, Software, Guide, Pro, Phase One, Paul Reiffer, Photography, Tips, In Depth, Landscape, Settings, Tool, Image Adjustment, Workflow, Fix, ICC, 21, Version, v21, Update, Upgrade, Features, New, Brush, Summary, Functions, Layer, Review, Quick, Viewer, Custom, Style, Capture One Pro, CaptureOne, Magic Brush, Magic, Masks, Exporter, Export, Universal, Catalog, Subfolder, 21.3, In-Depth, 14.3, Subscription, License, Synchronize

Id: 69sjBPx1PmY

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021