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Get more creative freedom with variable opacity

In the past I have written a great deal about Local Adjustments on this blog, and for good reason!

I believe Local Adjustments are a powerful way to explore creativity in Capture One Pro 7, but more importantly it can save you time by avoiding this step in Photoshop.

Equally a layered file size in Photoshop can run into many gigabytes, whereas in Capture One Pro 7 we have the beauty of working on the RAW file that will not balloon in size as we add layers.

Add a new dimension to your creativity

In this blog post I will talk about varying the Opacity in your local adjustments, which can add a whole new dimension to your creative application and also make the job of applying a local adjustment much easier!

It is especially useful to use a lower opacity when erasing parts of a mask, which is a really nice way of shaping the result of the adjustments on a mask.

First of all, to vary the opacity of your mask, adjust the slider in the cursor settings dialog box, which can be found in the Local Adjustments Tool, circled in orange. You can also access it whilst right-clicking on the image with any of the mask tools selected.

I am going to work on this image, which is definitely going to benefit from a number of local adjustments to even out exposure and get some more detail and drama back in the sky. Here it is with no adjustments.

To begin with, I will use a Gradient Mask so I can lower the exposure in the sky. The Gradient Mask Tool is selected with this icon in the Local Adjustments Tool.

Then click and drag on the image to define the start and end of the mask. Where you start drawing the mask will be at its strongest, where you finish the mask will be at zero.

So I will end up with a mask looking something like this (Press ‘m’ on the keyboard to show your mask).

The mask is shown in red. Now I can lower the exposure and boost the clarity to get some more drama back in the sky.

Much better! But now the issue I have is that the tops of the trees are too dark on the top right of the image. If I try to erase with a 100% opacity eraser, then it looks very ugly and obvious, like this:

No amount of careful and precise brushing can really improve on this and it becomes frustrating going back and forth trying to repair it! So the solution is to drop the opacity of the Eraser Brush right down and gradually work away at the area to bring it back to the desired exposure.

I have chosen the Eraser by simply hitting ‘e’ on the keyboard and then right-clicking on the image and lowering the opacity to 15%.

Now I can use the brush in multiple strokes to gradually erase the mask in steps. I feel this is much more of a gentle process like dodging and burning in the darkroom was… but with a bit more predictability!

I can also open up any other areas of the clouds if I feel like it. If I go to far, I simply choose the Draw Mask at an equally low opacity and add a little more back in. With a few minutes work I am happy with the result, and it is much more natural. I also lightened the trees on the left too.

Now, I think I should fix the crop to something I like and think about next steps, for example reducing the exposure on the water highlights a little. Here is the final crop:

Now, what about if you would like to mask a whole area to begin with at a lower opacity? Let’s take the area of the water in the foreground, which is a little too bright and distracting. I will take quite a small brush, again at a lower opacity and simply outline the area, and then use the ‘Fill Mask’ option in the drop down menu in the Local Adjustments Tool.

I will then get the area masked all over at the lower opacity. If you try and fill it in by simply brushing with the mouse or tablet pen, you will not get a perfectly even mask to start with. By lowering the exposure and adjusting the mask as necessary I can get the effect I want and maintain the natural look as before.

Finally, I will boost the exposure on the house a little by adding a further layer. I will draw a very rough mask again at a lower opacity and adjust as needed by using the erase and draw mask brushes back and forth.

Also, by using this method, especially in conjunction with an exposure adjustment means you are adding an additional way to vary this adjustment. So, the more you brush over the same area again and again (in this case) will increase exposure and gradually decrease exposure if using the erase brush. With the house, I have intentionally brightened the left side of the building a little more compared to the right, just by brushing over a few more times.

Secondly, this method of using a mask gives you ‘more bites of the cherry’ to get the look you need.

To finalize the image, I will add a bit more Neutral clarity to the Background layer and increase contrast slightly.

I think this may work nicely as a Black and White so I will use one of my presets as another example on a cloned variant.

In summary, by lowering the opacity we can have much more control over our local adjustments and deliver a more natural result. By working on the RAW file we maintain as much quality as possible and avoid the need to work on a large Photoshop file.

But the most important point is that it is a lot of fun!

Here is the original image with the final result:

Best regards,

David Grover

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