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Take full control of the content in your images

A new and powerful feature in Capture One Pro 8 is the Repair Layers.

The Repair Layers are designed to make it easy to remove unwanted objects in an image like for instance power cables or people walking into the frame.

Clone or Heal?

In a Repair Layer you can either Clone data from one part of the image to another part of the image or you can use the more advanced Heal layer to easily blend data from one part of an image into another part of the image.

When I was shooting the image above the light was just perfect and the clouds were nice positioned on both sides of the old lighthouse. The only problem was the many tourists walking in my frame.

Not the perfect shot

Knowing that Capture One Pro 8 has the Repair Layer feature and that it would be a simple task to remove the unwanted people in the frame, I decided to take the picture rather than hoping that the people would go away before the light and the sky had changed.

The image to the left is straight out of the camera. The image to the right is after removing the unwanted people in the scene and adding some basic corrections in the Exposure tool tab.

In the Local Adjustments Tool, which you find in the Local Adjustments tool tab, you now have the option to create two new kind of layers: Clone Layer and Heal Layer.

Create a Repair Layer:

In the Local Adjustments Tool simply press the “+” button to add a new layer. By default it gives you an Adjustments Layer, but by holding down the mouse on the “Adjustment” button in the Layer you will have the option to change the layer into a Clone or a Heal Layer.

You can also directly add a specific kind of Layer by holding down the “+” button in the Local Adjustments Tool. This will give you a drop down to select among the different kind of layers.

Set source and destination for you Repair Layer:

In a Repair Layer you need to select the source point from where to copy pixels and a destination point to where you want to paste the pixels. When this is established, you can brush in the needed area, which need to be fixed. For all the brush strokes you do in a single Repair Layer, it will keep the relative distance between the source and the destination point at all time. The success of a repair is very much depending on how clever you select the source and destination points.

I will start by removing the long shadow in the sand dune, so I add a new Heal Layer. I zoom into the image and adjust my brush size so it is about the size of the thickness of the shadow. For a Heal Layer I normally use a hardness around 50. If I use a Clone Layer, I often uses a hardness between 0 and 40.

The idea is now to set the source and destination points in such a way that as many of the structures in the source point fall naturally into the destination areas. To set the source point hold down the “Alt” key while clicking with the brush. Then click with the brush to set the destination point.

The white circle indicates the source point for the Repair layer and the orange circle shows the destination area.

I can always re-adjust the source and destination points by simply dragging the circles. Now with the source and destination points established, I can simply brush over the shadows in the sand dune. While brushing, the algorithm uses the simpler and faster Clone method, but when you let go of the brush, it optimizes the cloned data to blend it into the color and lightness of the background. After you have brushed your Repair Layer you still have the option to change you layer from a Clone to Heal layer or vise versa. This means that if you are in doubt about which method to use you can just start with one type of Repair Layer and then later change to the other kind of Repair Layer to see if it works better.

With two long brush strokes I remove the shadows in the sand dune. Here I used the option to show the mask strokes. The Heal Layer does a fantastic job in making the repaired area blend smoothly into the background layer so it is almost impossible to see what is the original image and what is repaired.

Now I would like to remove the remaining part of the two people climbing the dune.

In the first image I set the source and destination points. I do it so the source and destination points are parallel to the ridge of the dune. This will ensure that the ridge will be perfectly repaired. In the second image you can see my brush strokes and in the image to the right you can see the final result of moving the two people and their shadows.

Using similar ideas for setting the source and destination points in combination with an appropriate selection of brush size, I could easily remove the unwanted people in the image by applying only four Repair Layers.

I deliberately left one person in the image just add dimensions to the image.

Full freedom for editing an image with Repair layers

The Repair Layers in Capture One Pro 8 work on the raw images. This gives you full freedom to work with the image and to do whatever adjustments you would like to do with the image both before and after you have done a Repair Layer.

All the best,

Niels

Meet the Team Behind Capture One Pro 8

The secret sauce to Capture One Pro 8 is without a doubt a unique team of skilled and passionate people.

In this video and the next you get to meet the brainy PhD’s and passionate photographers all sharing the same love and passion for photography.

Find out who these people are, why they live and breathe for Capture One and why they think version 8 is the only choice for photographers who are serious about their images.

Feel the passion!

All the best,

Niels

Clarity with Punch

The High Dynamic Range Tool in Capture One Pro 7 is a very powerful tool when dealing with the large dynamic range you often find in landscape images.

With this tool you can bring back details in both shadows and highlights. When doing extensive correction in both highlights and shadows it is often a very good idea to use the Clarity Tool to bring back more contrast to the image in order to give it a more natural look.

Before After

The image on the left-hand side is straight out of the camera. The image has been exposed to preserve the highlights with only a bit of clipping, leaving the shadows very dark. The image on the right-hand side is after the High dynamic Range Tool and the Clarity Tool have been applied in Capture One Pro 7.

The Clarity Tool in Capture One Pro 7 has three different methods for applying clarity to an image:

Punch:

The default method that besides applying local contrast also applies a bit of local saturation. This usually works very well on for instance landscape images.

Neutral:

Adds the local contrast the same way as “Punch” but without changing the saturation. When really strong clarity corrections are applied then this method often gives more pleasing results.

Classic:

This method was introduced in Capture One 6. It applies the local contrast without changing the saturation, but it does it in different way than the Punch and Neutral.

The image above where I added quite a bit of Clarity is a very good example to show the benefit of having alternative methods for clarity. In this example with lots of mostly gray clouds it is easy to see how the different method works.

Punch Neutral Classic

When comparing the Punch and Neutral method it is easy to see that the sunstroke as well as the yellowish sky over the horizon picks up more color when using Punch. The sunstrokes appear equally strong.

Comparing the Neutral and Classic method you will notice that Classic preserves the highlights better and it gives you much more details in the forest. On the other hand the sunstroke isn’t as strong as when using Neutral. You will also notice that Classic has a tendency to show a halo over the strong contrast edge of the forest.

So which method to use is very much an individual choice and is also very much dependent on the motive.

If you prefer Punch or Neutral, but are afraid to lose highlights details, I have a few tricks to overcome that:

1) In the Levels Tool bring down the target levels from 255 to for instance 245. This will leave a little headroom for the Clarity Tool.

2) Use a Local Adjustments Layer to add negative clarity over the highlights details with a smooth brush. This will reduce the clipping effect from the Clarity Tool.

Clarity Neutral Clarity Neutral including the little trick

Applying the trick with the Levels Tool and a negative clarity brush over the highlights in an Local Adjustments Layer brings back all the needed highlight details even when such Clarity corrections are applied as in this example.

All the best,

Niels

Time-saving shortcuts: The sequel

Moving sliders faster when using the keyboard

If you click in the textboxes next to the sliders you can adjust the value of the slider very precisely by using the up and down arrows on the keyboard. However if you want to make a big change you can hold down Shift while pressing the arrow keys and it will take a step that is 10 times larger.

Quickly copying only some adjustments from one image to others

The regular copy apply buttons in the toolbar copies all adjustments from one image to others. If you only want to apply a few of the adjustments, you can go to the adjustments clipboard tool and untick the adjustments you don’t want before pressing the apply button.

This is tedious however if you are only interested in having the adjustments from one tool transferred to all the other images. That is why we made the Local copy apply button. It is the small double arrow in the title bar of the tools that support it. Most of the tools in Capture One Pro 7 has a “local copy apply button”. This makes it easy to apply the adjustments from just one tool to many images.

Clicking the local copy apply button you are shown the part of the clipboard that contains the settings relevant for the tool. Then you can choose to either copy those settings to the clipboard or you can apply them directly without really using the clipboard.

To be able to work really fast we have made it so that if you hold down Alt while clicking the local copy apply button, it corresponds to clicking copy in the box. Holding down the Shift key corresponds to clicking apply in the box.

People are sometimes confused with how to use the apply button – the idea is that you select multiple images and then you can quickly give all the images e.g. the same Black and White Tool setting look as the primary variant by holding down the Alt key and clicking the local copy apply button.

If you like this way of working you should also try adding the “Copy and Apply Adjustments” button to the main window toolbar. Just right-click the toolbar and select customize.

Find the item called “Copy and Apply Adjustments” and drag it to the toolbar.

This button works exactly like the local one in the tools – however it copies settings across all tools just like the regular copy apply buttons f you press the “Copy and Apply Adjustments” button you are shown a dialog box containing the clipboard.

Color readouts shortcuts

The “add color readout” cursor tool allows you to get small signs with readouts of the color value in different points of the image. You simply left-click to add them to the screen. If you want to remove one of the readouts you can simply hold down the Alt key, while clicking on it and it will disappear. If you have made multiple readouts and want to remove all of the at once you hold down the Shift and Alt keys at the same time, while clicking on one of them.

Temporary reset

If you want to see how the image would look without the adjustments from one of the tools, you could simply press the local reset button on that tool and afterwards press undo. However there is a more elegant way to do it. Hold down the Alt key while clicking on the reset button in the tool and the tool adjustments will be reset as long as you click. When you release the Alt key and the left mouse button the adjustments will return.

Snapping masks

If you hold down Shift while drawing a Gradient Mask, you can get the mask to snap to 45 degree angles. This is nice if you want your mask to be very accurate.

Process history

When a Variant is processed/exported to e.g. .jpg, Capture One Pro 7 saves the path to the output file. If you want to see that list, then select an image that has been processed previously (all processed images will have a small gear icon overlaid on their thumbnail).

Then click the “adjustments->process history” menu item to see a list of the processed files. You can click on them to have them opened in the default image viewer on your system.

Best regards,

Theis Hansen