Layer Masks Explained - Capture One Pro Tutorial

Hey Youtube, what's up? This is Ben from the Be A Photographer channel and in this video we're gonna be going over the powerful Layer Masks tool in Capture one Pro 20. Which allows you to specifically adjust certain areas of a photo. So you can apply adjustments like exposure white balance levels and curves to particular areas in your image. Let me show you exactly what layer masks do and to do that I'm gonna disable each layer here in this image and we're gonna walk through it from the beginning. So I started with this image right here straight out of the camera and did some basic background adjustments using the exposure and a high dynamic range tab. Then I brighten Julia's eyes with a layer here. I brightened her dress with its own layer. Then I reduced the highlights on her face and then I adjusted the colors in the background. In any of these layers you can see the area in red and that is the selected or masked area. For instance here I have the background selected. Here I have her face. Here I have her dress etc. So the layer with the background mask you guessed it if I slide exposure to the left it's gonna make only the background darker because that's the area that I selected using the brush tool. If I were to go to the right and make the exposure brighter it's again only gonna affect the background area and not gonna affect Julia's skin her dress her face her hands none of that at all. So I can control the colors and the curves in the background. For instance if I wanted to add an S curve we can drag the curves down here and the shadows bring up the highlights and now you can see with just that one layer we've made the background really pop and added some color to it very quickly. Let me show you how to actually create a layer mask. Let's reset this image here and I'll simply do a couple of background adjustments let's say for instance we want to make Julia's eyes pop what we're gonna do is zoom in hit the plus icon here on the left and rename this layer from layer 1 to eyes. Hit enter and it's renamed. Now what you do is you either hit the B key for brush on your keyboard or I hit this little draw mask brush icon here and now you have a brush selected. 2 things you need to do before doing that. 1) press the M key on your keyboard so that way when you draw a mask it shows you in red where that mask is and 2) right click and select the size of your mask *brush* so you can see as we go from the left that's smaller and we go to the right that gets larger. So I want a really small size here to brush on her eyes so here you can see we are now brushing on her eyes and if you're not seeing the brushing happen in red that means you have to press the M key for masks on your keyboard. So you could be brushing in a lot of places and not even know it and you have to press "M" to see where that is. If you brushed in the wrong area simply hit the "E" key or this eraser icon here and again you can change the size of the eraser by right clicking and doing your eraser settings and we can change the area that we drew on or erased just by doing that. So here we have a mask that's selected on the eyes and now we can adjust exactly that area. So if we grab the exposure drag to the right it's gonna make our eyes brighter if you wanted them darker we could just drag to the left. So I'm gonna make this just a little bit brighter we'll go now into clarity and add a little bit of clarity here and now you can see just with that one layer here's the eyes before let me press M and here's the eyes after. So you can see we made the eyes pop by simply adding a layer mask. Now let me show you a handy trick if you want to select a very particular subject that doesn't have a lot of contrast. Let's select Julia's dress. The eyes were really easy because they're small and a brush can just mask the whole eye but if we create a new layer and call this one dress we can see that it's not going to be the easiest thing I mean even if we did a large brush it's kind of hard to get it specific and we're gonna have a difficult time you know dealing with the hair and this gap in the arms and all that. So what we can do is simply make an outline on the edge of her dress and then make it fill now it might be a little bit hard to detect the edges here of course we can zoom in but it's still not that easy. My trick for you is go to the background layer bring the brightness up way too high make it just look absolutely horrible and then you're gonna go back on the dress layer and we're simply going to click and drag on the outside edges of the dress. *silent pause* Now you can see that we have most of the dress covered and there's a big gap in this area here and on the right side. Well the great thing is you can right click on the layer mask hit fill mask and there you go. This entire area is selected. Again if we want to erase this area of the background between her arm and the dress we just hit the e key make our brush size a little bit smaller and we can simply erase the mask from here a quick shortcut for you if you tap the left bracket key that's the one on your keyboard right next to the P key you can make the brush smaller and if you want to make the brush bigger you can tap the right bracket key and that'll make it bigger and we don't need to get into these fine details here so if we zoom out we now have control of just the dress. So if I press M to turn off the layer mask we can turn down our background again let's go to our background layer here and now if we go on to the dress settings we can control the contrast of the dress so I can make it much darker or if I want to I could add less contrast to the dress and now I have full control over the dress. If we want to make it brighter just in the shadows again we can bring it up with the curves or make it darker and add a simple s-curve here bring up the midpoints and the nice part is you can change how strong that layer mask effect is so we can drop the opacity to zero and slide to the right to make it stronger. So now you can see we simply adjusted the dress with a layer mask and that curve and the exposure contrast adjustment is done only on the dress. What if you wanted a layer mask to affect the entire image? Or most the image and then you can just erase from it well in that case you can do a layer mask for the entire image like I did here for the color grade and what's great is this then gives you the ability to control the opacity of your adjustments like a color grade by having the entire layer done. So to do this instead of tapping on the plus icon all you're gonna do is hold on it and you will see new filled layer so now any adjustments we make on that filled layer are done on the entire image you can see if I press M on the keyboard the entire area is selected. So let's say we just want to do a quick exposure change and color grade we could do it on this layer let's say we're just gonna add a little bit of green in the mid-tones there we go and that's way too intense but I do like that style. I just don't want it to be as strong you can simply slide the opacity down and now you can see when we turn that layer on and off we have the entire image controlled let's say for whatever reason we didn't want that to affect the Apple logo we want this to kind of stay pure black and not be affected by the grade that we have on that layer so all I'm gonna do is hit M for masks hit "E" for erase and then I'm gonna turn on auto mask here change my size to be a little bit smaller and now you can see we can simply go through and select if we bring our flow up to 100% we can simply select the Apple logo area and it's doing a pretty good job there we go so now we have our image with the color grade done on everything except for the Apple logo and that was super quick and easy just by doing create new fill layer and next time I'm gonna show you how to do radial masks and gradient masks so that way you can do perfect circles and adjust your skies and make them look beautiful I hope you subscribe thanks for watching PEACE

Channel: Be a Photographer

Views: 13,459

Keywords: Layer Masks, Layers, capture 1, capture one, capture one pro, capture one pro 20, capture one pro tutorial, capture one vs lightroom, digital photography, exposure slider, froknowsphoto, how to edit photos, image retouching, intro to photography, lightroom, lightroom alternative, photo editing basics, photo editing guide, photo editing software, photography, photography for beginners, photoshop

Id: qxZ4lAJJG9E

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020