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How to get uniform skin tones

Without this, the normal flow would be to correct to an overall skin-tone, using a combination of White Balance, Levels/Curves and Color Balance. The challenge a photographer faces after this general color correction step, is how to quickly but precisely correct local skin tones, where the skin has another tint. This could be caused by issues like lighting fall-off, off-tint foundation applied by a make-up artist, pigmentation difference etc.

To correct this using Photoshop the photographer would create a Selective Color (or Hue Saturation) adjustment layer with a mask covering the off-tint skin tone and correct the color. Then for each area where the tone is off, this flow will be repeated. As you can imagine, this flow is very time-consuming, requires detailed masking, and is very repetitive.

So how can Capture One help you? In the Color Editor Tool there is a tab called “Skin tone”. This tool is available from both the “Color” Tab and the “Local Adjustments” tab. If you are using it from the “Color” tab, the tool will act on the entire picture, the so-called Background layer.

The Skin Tone Tool being applied as a background layer on an X-rite ColorChecker SG

If used from the Local Adjustments tab, you have to draw a mask on the area where you want the tool to have effect. I find using the tool with Local Adjustments gives me the most control, but using it on the Background layer can speed-up up the workflow a bit, but at the cost of effect precision. The risk here is that red and yellow colors can be unintentionally affected by the Skin Tone Tool.

Let’s see how all this act on a real-life image. On the image below the skin-tones are pleasing in the face and on her shoulders, but her legs and the fingers on her left hand have a noticeable magenta tint and do not match the upper body perfectly.

Legs and hand need skin tone tweaking to match the upper part of the body, which already has a pleasing skin tone

Preparing for using the Skin Tone Tool

To correct this tint, I start by creating a layer, and then masking the skin. When drawing the masks, there are a few pitfalls to avoid:

Avoid being very precise around green/blue/cyan/deep magenta hues, as these normally won’t be affected when dealing with skin tones.
Avoid masking into the hair. Especially blonde hair is quickly affected.
Avoid masking into the lips, unless the “naked” foundation look is needed. Bright red lips will suffer greatly.
Avoid masking into greens or light brown eyes. They can be affected by the tool.

On this particular image I have to be careful not to include the golden parts in my mask, as a golden color is close to a warm skin tone.

Masking in the layer containing the skin tone layer, avoiding hair and golden areas

Once I am done masking, I select a skin tone using the Color Picker from the Skin Tone Tool. The color I pick will be the tone that Capture One Pro 7 applies to the leg and hand we have masked in.

Hue and saturation range

Next step is to widen the color range in 2 dimensions. First, press the “Span full saturation range” icon in the tool, then broaden the affected hue by dragging the endpoints in the color circle in each direction. If the image is highly saturated, it can be advantageous to also drag the “Smoothness” slider to the maximum value. This makes for a smoother hue falloff.

Widening the hue and saturation and increasing
the smoothness of the fall-off

Using the uniformity slider

Now move the “Uniformity” slider to its maximum value of 1.0. This is where the magic happens. The skin tone I previously selected is now applied to the area I have masked, if the colors are within the defined range. Sometimes setting the Uniformity value to 1.0 can prove to be a little too much. On those rare occasions turn down the value, or, better, erase the mask with a low opacity Eraser Brush until reaching the desired amount of uniformity in the image. The rouge make-up on a model’s cheeks is a good example of when it would be a good idea to lower the opacity locally by using the Eraser brush.

The Uniformity slider set to Max

Tweaking the skin tone

Once we are happy with the color range and the uniformity, we can start tweaking our skin tone. It can be difficult at first to hit the right skin tone with the picker, but this is easily modified with the slider controls. A rough hue and saturation selection can be obtained by moving the color selection point in the color wheel. Fine-tuning this selection is then done by adjusting the Hue Rotation, Saturation and Lightness sliders. As I am using the Uniformity feature, making these adjustments will affect the entire selected color range.

Getting a uniform look across multiple pictures

Most times I have to deliver a series of pictures, which have to have the same overall look. Here the Skin Tone Tool is very useful as the settings can be copy/pasted to the remaining pictures. A workflow tip is not to have any mask drawn when the settings are copied. As a mask is very specific to a certain picture, it would have to be manually erased in order for a new mask to be drawn on a second image.

Here is the final result as a comparison, showing the legs with and without the skin tone correction:

With and without the skin-tone correction using the Skin Tone tool in Capture One Pro 7

More than just skin

Even though named “Skin Tone”, this tool can be used for a lot more than just skin. It can also be used on other colors.

The Skintone Tool can correct much more than just skin tones. Here the color of the water have been uniformed to allow for further corrections using the Advanced Color Editor.

In this picture I have combined the use of the Advanced Color Editor Tool and the Skin Tone Tool, to make the water a blue tone instead of the typical Danish green water color. In a layer I have used the Skin Tone Tool to make yellow, green and blue/cyan tones look more similar. In the Advanced Color Editor I have then adjusted to the hue to make the water look bluer. A layer mask sees to that the sky is not affected by the adjustments on the water.

Best regards,

Christian Grüner

Confessions of a software developer

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

Hi there,

My name is Theis, I’m a software developer and this is my story…….

It started out as just another day at the office. Starting work at 7 in the morning, I was planning to leave somewhat early.

Everything was going according to plan, but then someone dropped the usual 3 p.m. question “Wouldn’t it be cool, if we could give the user a shortcut to………”

And yes, that would be cool, so thus started another long night in the office full of lukewarm coke and cold pizza. In this tip I will share some of the nifty shortcuts that came out of that long and lonely night.

3 p.m. feeling good and quite clever

1) Quick Loupe

One of these shortcuts is related to the loupe, which is a great tool for quick sharpness checks. To show the Loupe quickly press and hold down Ctrl+Space (Alt+Space on Mac). This makes the loupe show up without changing your current cursor tool.

The Loupe also works on thumbnails. Just hover the cursor over a thumbnail and you can easily do a quick focus check.

2) View the same crop on multiple Variants simultaneously

If you select more than one Variant and set the viewer in “multi view” mode, you can easily compare two or more variants.

For detail work it is necessary to compare the exact same crop at the exact same zoom level. Fortunately that is easily achieved. Just hold down the Shift key while zooming and panning and Capture One Pro 7 will apply the exact same zoom and pan to all views.

Comparison of two Variants

10 p.m. starting to feel the pressure

3) Handling an existing crop

There are many cases where Capture One Pro 7 will apply a crop automatically to an image. If an image is rotated, keystone or lens corrected it will get an automatic crop in order to achieve a rectangular output image.

But what happens then when you try to set a new crop manually after Capture One Pro 7 has created an automatic crop? Capture One Pro 7 will think that you want to move the crop, it automatically created. To create a new crop, hold down shift while dragging the new crop and it will replace the existing crop.

If you want to change the aspect ratio of an existing crop, choose the desired aspect ratio by clicking-and-holding on the Crop Cursor Tool in the toolbar.

With the desired aspect ratio chosen, double-click the crop in the viewer and the crop will be corrected to the aspect ratio you chose.

To get back to the default crop you can click outside of the crop to reset it.

2 a.m. really wanting to call it a night

4) Skip the trash folder

If you press ctrl+delete, Capture One Pro 7 will put your image in the trash folder. This is nice since you can easily get your images back from the trash folder. However if you are sure you will never need the image again you can press alt+delete (ctrl+command+backspace on the mac) and then Capture One Pro 7 will delete your image permanently instead of putting it in the trash. In the case where the trash folder is on different drive than the image file, this will also be a lot faster than moving the file to the trash folder.

5) Organize your styles and presets in folders

When saving a style you are presented with a standard save file dialog box.

What is not clear from the dialog box is that you can actually put the style in a subfolder and then the subfolder will be shown in the styles selector.

This trick also works with Presets and “Print Templates”.

4 a.m. somewhere at Phase One

This is what I came up with that particular night. I’ll report back to you soon with more shortcuts that will hopefully speed up your workflow.

All the best,

Theis Hansen

How to fix Purple Fringing

Purple fringing occurs because the lens doesn’t behave the same way on all the different wavelengths of the incoming light. This is of course something that the lens designer tries to compensate for, but lenses are almost never perfect.

Purple fringing is often related to how much the lens shows chromatic aberration and it is more likely to see purple fringing when using a lens wide open compared to using it stopped down.

The Lens Tool in Capture One Pro 7 offers a method to remove purple fringing from your images.

Purple fringing Purple fringing fixed in Capture One Pro 7

The image to the left shows purple fringing along the spoke that reflects the sun. To the right you see the image after having applied “Purple fringing” correction in the Lens Tool in Capture One Pro 7.

Purple fringing correction is an optional correction feature in the Lens Tool. To enable purple fringing correction you simply set the checkmark for “Purple fringing”.

When using the purple fringing correction, Capture One Pro 7 uses an intelligent algorithm that takes the behavior of light in a lens into account. The algorithm can estimate the original color underneath the fringing and it is not just a simple desaturation of the purple color.

In the image below you can see how the purple fringing correction algorithm in Capture One Pro 7 can bring back the blue of the sea along the spoke. I have also made a simple correction by doing a simple desaturation of the color of the fringing to show you the difference:

Original Simple desaturation Capture One Lens Tool

In the image in the middle the purple fringing is removed, but an unnatural gray edge occurs instead. In the image to the right you can see that the fringing has been removed and replaced with the color of the blue sea.

Wide-angle zooms are often prone to fringing. In the examples below I have a strong contrast against the bright sky.

Original showing purple fringing Fringing removed in Capture One Pro 7

This is a zoom into the top left corner of the image. The purple fringing is seen on the dark side of the edge between the bright sky and the shadow side of the wooden construction.

Another example:

Original with strong purple fringing Fringing removed in Capture One Pro 7

The “Purple Fringing” algorithm in the Lens Tool does a very good job of removing the purple fringing in most images. But as the algorithm has to deal with colors and contrast in an image, it may not always remove all the fringing as it can be very difficult to distinguish between fringing colors and real colors in the scene.

In such cases you will have to desaturate the purple fringing color using the Advanced Color Editor in a local adjustment layer.

All the best,

Niels

The secret, yet powerful color editing tool

The green in fluorescent light, the red of the sunset at the beach, or the colored light at your big birthday party last year can spoil the fun when the images are ready.

Back to Levels & Curve

In this third blog post on Levels & Curves I am going to make advanced color adjustments with both the Levels and Curve Tools by using one or more of the Red, Green, or Blue color channels. I call this kind of use for channel mode.

Note that this feature is only available in Capture One Pro and DB 7, and not in Express 7.

When you are serious about using channel mode, I have a power user tip first: create a workspace with four Levels Tools shown, one for each color channel.

Level your power

Let’s start with Levels in channel mode. You will discover that it is an extremely powerful color editing tool. It allows you to add or remove color. All the markers of the tool are at your disposal.

In the screenshot below I made comments on how to add a color. By using the opposite marker you remove color.

If you want to read more about how Curves and Levels Tools work and the distinction between input and output Levels, click here.

The markers at the left (top & bottom) affect the dark tones in your image, the ones at the right affect the highlights and the marker in the middle affects the mid tones. This way you can easily adjust a color based on its brightness!

Sunset Boulevard

For demonstration I use a sunset image with the obvious reddish/purple cast and low contrast. Thanks to a low camera position I get the maximum reflection of the sky in the water and in the wet sand.

I like the sky but the foreground is too colored (purple). I also need to improve the tonal scale with black and white point. I need to take the purple color out but in the dark tones only. That is exactly what I am going to do with the Levels Tool’s Red and Blue channels.

I raise the dark tone marker at the bottom left to remove the color in both the Red and Blue channel. This removes the purple cast in the shadow.

This is basically the same as setting a black point in the RGB mode of your Levels Tool as I discussed in an earlier blog post. You remove the gray cast to make it black.

Next, I like to weaken the overall red cast with the mid tone marker (move it to the right) of the Red channel. This is the result:

Now I have the right color at the right places in my image and I have emphasized the romantic mood.

Ease your Levels, enter the Curve

Right, you thought we were done now? Not completely. The Levels red mid tone slider did a nice job, but if you read my previous post on Curves you know that the Curve Tool can do a better job. The warm tones of the sunset can create more of an impact if there are parts that do NOT have that color to increase color contrast.

Also, the general contrast needs a boost too. I use the Curve Tool for both, one curve in the general RGB tab, one curve in the Red tab. Note that I first placed the mid tone marker of the Red channel in the neutral position because the Curve is taking care of that now.

This is the end result I like most:

And here are my Curve settings:

Tips

Two final tips to wrap up this blog post: tool reset and workspace.

1) Reset all Levels or Curve Tool modes
You know the tool reset: the curved arrow icon at the top. It will reset only the adjustments on the selected tab (channel or RGB mode). To reset ALL adjustments of the tool (all tabs: RGB, R, G, and B) at once use Cmd+click (Mac) or Ctrl+click (Windows) with the reset icon.

2) Workspace
To work with all channels in Levels and Curve, you might want to see them all at the same time. Create multiple Levels or Curve Tools as floating tools or create a tool tab for them. Set each to each channel. Save your workspace for future use.

I hope you enjoyed it and will get more out of your images with the Capture One Pro 7 tools Levels and Curve!

Best regards,

Paul Steunebrink