Skin Smoothing in Capture One - How to smooth skin without plug-ins

hi everybody it's thomas here from thomas fitzgerald photography and today i have another capture one tip for you so um one of the things i've seen um a few places recently is people asking how to do skin softening in capture one um i saw it on a couple of forms and a reddit thread so it's actually fairly straightforward um so there isn't a specific skin softening tool in capture one um and i also saw some people referencing the texture slider in lightroom um and while we don't have the exact equivalent of that in capture one it's actually straightforward enough to do skin softening so do do let me start we want to start by just masking the face area so to do that uh switch to our brush tool and if you don't have any layers created already in your image you don't need to create a layer just by selecting the brush tool and starting a mask will create it so the next thing i want to do is i want to turn my mask on so that it's always visible so this will just make your life a lot easier when you're drawing your mask and to do that you just hit the m key okay and we can make our brush a bit bigger so if you're using capture 121 just know that they've changed some of the brush controls so you now have the same brush controls that you have in um photoshop for making your brush bigger and smaller so it's the angle bracket keys on your keyboard so what i want to do is just kind of draw the outline of the face okay just like so just very quickly okay and then i want to go over here and right click on the layer and go fill mask okay so the next thing we want to do is we just kind of want to erase the areas that we don't want to soften so hit the e on the keyboard and this will switch to the erase tool and again we can use our angle brackets to make our mask a bit bigger and we're just going to erase over the eyes just the eyebrows actually i want to make sure we have our opacity and our flower full so his eyebrows okay and our math now i'm just doing this roughly for demonstration purposes so that we're not sitting here watching me paint mask um but you can be a lot more careful about this okay so once you've done that i just turned hit m again uh to turn the mask off you don't have to do that it just it makes it a bit easier to visualize it um okay so to soften the face um i'm gonna zoom in first so you can see what's going on maybe i'll drop this back to say fifty percent now all you actually need to do is use negative clarity so we'll go to our clarity tail here and drag the clarity right down and what i suggest you do is set this to either neutral or classic okay and then you can also use a bit of negative structure as well okay so straight away that has had quite a significant softening effect so if we just turn our adjustment layer off and then back on again you can see it's softened our squin skin quite effectively now if you've got a lot of kind of small areas like this more of a negative structure might be necessary and you want to be careful though if you go too far you'll end up with a very fake skin effect um unless of course that's like skin effect is what you want so a couple of other things you can now once you have this kind of dialed into the ballpark you can control your overall opacity then with the opacity slider of the layer um and you may find it easier to kind of to control once you kind of set these to maximum and then just kind of use the overall opacity and the other thing you can do as well is if you're finding it uh it's kind of excessively softening things like the eyebrows and stuff and your mask isn't exactly right and rather than trying to kind of paint over everything exactly you can go in and use the loom range tool and then just bring in back in some of the black areas or the darker areas and just to bring a little bit of definition back okay so hit apply and you can see that's kind of brought in a little bit more definition there you might not be able to see this on the youtube after the compression and the only downside of them this is if you've got areas with a lot of shadow in it kind of like around here it might bring some of them back but overall i think that is a lot better so again here's our before and here's our after turn that up before and after so uh i'm kind of taking this to extremes here it really depends on the type of shoot that you're doing and what you want to achieve um personally i'd prefer a natural effect so something maybe a little bit more like that okay before and after and again it's it's subtle but it actually it's more effective in my opinion than kind of the fake skin effect that you see a lot of um so let me just give you one more example so let's go to this image so again i'm just going to zoom in and we can see so again with quite textured skin here so to soften this so we'll do our same trick again so we start by selecting our brush tool turning on the mask with the m key and just draw around this like so again i'm just doing this roughly here so right click and go fill mask head to our erase key and then just erase the eyes eyebrows and we can come back in later and paint areas back in if i've kind of kind of gone too far with the eraser okay and around the mouth okay okay so that's fine and then m again to hide the mask if you want to do that by the way the controls are actually here so it's this little button if you're not sure where the keys are uh i normally have a only display mask when drawing but when you're kind of doing this it's easier to visualize it if it's on so that's why i have it turned on with the m key and i can put that back to that okay so i'm going to zoom in again so we can see better and similar to what we did the last time we want clarity set it to neutral and drop our clarity down quite a bit and again with our negative structure so again it's softening the skin but it's not going too much we can turn our mask on and off to see before and after so up here around the eyebrow area uh we might actually want to keep some of the texture in here so again we can go back to our erase tool and in this case what i'm going to do is i'm going to lower the flow and opacity and i'm just kind of going to build it up slightly so we kind of want it nicely faded off we don't want it too strong so again we can just do this kind of care to more of a blend um if you're using the wacom tablet you'll get pressure sensitivity so and again just keep some of the texture so there's a nice like glitter um makeup going on here that we want to kind of preserve a bit of okay and then down here as well we see it's kind of glowing over this a bit much so if it gets nice small mask and this case we want our flow up full by the way if you want to have them bring this up it's just right clicking on it once you have the brush tool selected okay then freezing back out before and after and again if you think this is too too much you can just use the overall opacity slider to drop it down a bit okay that is pretty much it that is the basics of how you do skin softening um in capture one and both of these images were from unsplash and i will have uh links to the original photographers in the description below so i hope you found this useful if you do please like share and subscribe and we'll see in the next video okay see you next time [Music] you

Channel: thomas fitzgerald

Views: 3,923

Keywords: Capture One, Photography, Portrait, Editing, Photo Editing, Skin Softening, capture one pro, capture one skin tone, capture one skin, skin retouching, skin smoothing, capture one tutorial, capture one 21, capture one pro 21, capture one skin retouching, capture one 20 skin retouching, capture one pro skin retouching, skin softening, capture one skin softening

Id: 4tpDGsdZ0u4

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021