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Removing Color Moiré with Capture One 6

Capture One Pro 6 includes a powerful tool for fixing color moiré. It can be used both globally on an image and in a local adjustments layer.

Many cameras will, once in a while, show color moiré if high frequency patterns are part of the image.

Most DSLR and Micro Four Thirds cameras use antialiasing filters to avoid or minimize the appearance of moiré. However, many new cameras use lower strength antialiasing filters, or have no antialiasing filter at all in order to prioritize sharpness.

When using these cameras with the kit lens, typically you would hardly ever experience problems with moiré because these lenses are not sharp enough to provoke moiré on high frequency patterns.

But, if you use high quality primes to achieve really sharp images, you also run the risk of getting moiré.

The image on the left is shot with a mirrorless camera using a sharp prime lens. The high frequency pattern on the balcony fence shows strong color moiré. The image on the right is after fixing the color moiré in Capture One Pro 6.

When you suspect a moiré problem in one of your images, you need to zoom to 100% in Capture One’s viewer to verify that there is a real moiré problem – sometimes it is only the low-resolution preview that shows moiré.

Once you have located a real color moiré problem, like in the example below, select the Detail Tool Tab where the Moiré Tool is located.

Color moiré can be removed globally from an image but when you remove color moiré, you risk color bleeding in other parts of the image that you may not pay attention to. Therefore, it is better to apply the color moiré correction in a Local Adjustments Layer.

Step by step guide to remove color moiré:

1. Add a new Local Adjustments Layer

2. Inverse the mask. This is only an intermediate state. By inverting the mask, we work on the whole image which is necessary when setting up the parameters for the Moiré Tool.

3. Set the pattern size to maximum to make sure that the color moiré filter covers a whole period of false colors.

4. Now drag the amount slider until the color moiré disappears. You should use as low a value as possible to remove the moiré.

5. Reduce the pattern size to the minimum size that still fully removes the moiré. Now we have found the minimum values required to remove the moiré. This is important, as it will minimize the risk of unwanted color bleeding.

6. We only want to use the values locally, so invert the mask again.

7. Select a suitable bush size and brush away the color moiré.

Photography Through the Lens Cap

A Phase One IQ back on a medium format camera has an extremely large dynamic range allowing you to open up really deep shadows while still retaining the highlight details.

This extraordinary dynamic range makes for really extraordinary photos!

No matter how skilled we are, we all make mistakes and so did I the other day. I was shooting with my favorite lens which is marked with the “focusing sweet spot” and I forgot to remove the lens cap. I noticed it after the first shot, and removed the cap. When I got home, I imported all the images, including the shot with the lens cap still on, to Capture One.

Out of pure curiosity, I tried to see if anything was actually captured in the image with the lens cap. To my big surprise, the extreme IQ180 back had actually captured some information. Naturally, the colors did not look anything like the normal visual spectrum but I still managed to get a quite interesting image with colors that remind me of IR photography. Some heavy noise reductions were needed but then I got this image:

The left image is the original capture shoot with the lens cap still on. To the right is the same image after opening up the shadows in Capture One Pro 6.

Open Up the Deep Shadows with Capture One’s Levels Tool

Capture One comes with several tools for dealing with high dynamic range images, such as the High Dynamic Range tool, the Local Adjustments Layers tool and traditional tools like the Levels and Curves tool.

Despite having these different tools, opening up shadow details while retaining highlights and mid tones can sometimes be quite a challenge when you go for an overall natural and pleasing look.

For some images, the “Mid tone” slider in the Levels tool is the right tool to use.

The “Mid tone” slider works mainly on the mid tones for minor changes, but it increasingly prioritizes the darker tones in larger adjustments.

The left image is without any adjustments. The image is exposed to ensure that the clouds do not clip. As a result, the castle ruin, cliffs and the coast are underexposed and almost without details. The image to the right has been adjusted in Capture One. The “Mid tone” slider in the Levels tool has been used to open up the deepest shadows, and this has been combined with some highlight recovery and color edits on the blue sky.

In a previous blog post, I showed a trick about how the LCC tool can be used to deal with images with a large dynamic range. This LCC trick will often lead to fantastic results, but sometimes it causes a problematic halo effect around hard contrast edge as is the case with this picture.

On the image to the left, it is easy to see the halo effect on the castle ruin. The LCC has been used to open op the shadows, but because the images contains such a high contrast between the edges of the hill, the ruin and the bright sky, a strong halo appears. Therefore, another method to correct this image is required.

By using the “Mid tone” slider in the Levels Tool, I primarily brighten up the darkest part of the image. Naturally, using the “Mid tone” slider also brightens the mid tones and highlights. To counter this, I also apply some highlight recovery with the Highlight slider in the High Dynamic Range tool and some negative exposure compensation. The result is much better details in the shadows without the halo effect.

If I need still more details in the shadows, I try to use the curve tool too. The curve preset “Shadows -Brighter” is a good starting point as it is specially designed to open the deepest shadows in an image.

Finally, I add some saturation and set the highlight slider in the Levels tool to ensure that the final image utilizes the full data range.

At the Outskirts of Monte Fitz Roy, Argentina

Above El Chaltern and well before Monte Fitz Roy, deep in Patagonia, there’s a wonderful national park with some very photogenic walking tracks. Even better, you can hire some of the young mountaineers in the area who will carry your gear from camp to camp, just for a bit of training (and a small amount of cash).

We’d spent a couple of nights at a camp above El Chaltern, waiting and watching the weather as it crossed the ranges in the distance, and now we were walking ten kilometres across to the base of Cerro Torre and a second camp. This stream was at one of our rest stops, but a rest from walking inevitably saw us wandering around with our cameras, looking for things to photograph.

I loved this oddly shaped rock, seemingly a towering mountain on a micro scale, surrounded by a flooding stream. Well, perhaps my imagination was getting away with me, but I thought it looked interesting enough to pull out my camera.

There are two techniques used for capturing this image.

The first is the use of a tilt-shift lens, a Canon TS-E 24mm on an EOS 1Ds Mark II. Canon has since upgraded both. Generally speaking, a tilt-shift lens is used to reduce distortion. When photographing buildings, rather than pointing your lens up to include the top of the building (and creating unwanted converging vertical lines), you shift the lens upwards while keeping the camera back parallel to the building. The result is a technically correct perspective.

However, if you shift the lens and tilt the camera the opposite way, you can distort the edges of the image, effectively stretching the scene. This works well with the distant mountains, stretching them so they look a little higher than they actually appeared through a wide-angle lens.

The photo below shows the straight photo without the lens shift. Note the height of the mountains in the background.

Compare this with the following image that includes a lens shift, and a re-framing of the image as well. The two compositions are very similar, but not identical, but the main difference is that the mountains loom larger and appear more impressive. I like this!

The second technique is the use of a neutral density filter. The ND filter allowed me to lengthen my shutter speed. This exposure is 60 seconds at f8 (it’s a 10x ND filter), during which time the water is recorded as a silvery smear and the clouds have also been beautifully blurred.

Compare the result with the same angle taken at a more conventional 1/250 second (see the previous photo). The clouds are more distinct and the water has much sharper reflections. In comparison, I like the ND filter effect because it takes the photographs one step away from reality.

In the days of film, we had to deal with reciprocity failure and colour shifts because the different layers in the film had different responses to light. I think some digital sensors are similarly affected with colour shifts at very long exposures and this shows up as a colour cast. This is the original exposure from the Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II before editing in Capture One.

The magenta colour cast can be quite enchanting, but not for every photograph you take. Fortunately, it’s an easy matter to correct the colour balance – simply use the White Balance Picker in Capture One and the image’s natural colours immediately appear.

To process this image, I also had to make some strong adjustments to the Brightness and Saturation. I also added in three Local Adjustments, lightening up the middle ground and adding a little sharpening to the rock.