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Create Masks for Local Adjustments using Brushes & Gradients

Lesson 39 from: Get The Most Out of Your Photos with Capture One Pro 10

David Grover

Create Masks for Local Adjustments using Brushes & Gradients

Lesson 39 from: Get The Most Out of Your Photos with Capture One Pro 10

David Grover

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Lesson Info

39. Create Masks for Local Adjustments using Brushes & Gradients

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Introduction

08:11
2

What's Possible with Capture One: Quick Edit

06:50
3

Capture One Versions: Installation Basics

02:19
4

Interface Introduction and Customization

27:16
5

The Power of Keyboard Shortcuts

09:27
6

Image Management Basics

10:38
7

Organization Best Practices

09:53
8

Building your First Catalog

19:47
9

Image File Management Automation

06:42
10

Advanced Catalog Organization

17:41
11

How to Add Meta Data

12:42
12

Searching and Filtering Techniques

11:31
13

Further Catalog Strategies

07:09
14

Basic Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques

15:31
15

Advanced Selecting, Rating and Culling Techniques

20:54
16

Basic Composing Techniques: Cropping, Rotation, Straightening

09:29
17

How to Correct for Perspective

12:35
18

Basic Tool Behavior

11:04
19

Tool Basics Part 1

22:44
20

Tool Basics Part 2

06:34
21

Converting to Black and White and Adding Grain

10:13
22

How to Apply Image Adjustments Globally

08:02
23

Sharpening and Noise Reduction

09:58
24

How to Create and Save Styles and Presets

07:40
25

Why Should You Shoot Tethered?

02:26
26

How to Set-Up Your Tethered Hardware

02:15
27

How To Set Up A Tethered Photoshoot Project

11:07
28

Basic Session Workflow Organizing And Making Selects

21:45
29

Basic Session Workflow Exporting

05:44
30

Advanced Session Workflow

15:00
31

Creating Selections With Smart Albums

06:20
32

Advanced Exporting

09:03
33

Saving Session Templates

03:14
34

Collaborating On Set With Capture Pilot

17:45
35

Using The Color Editor Basic Color Adjustment

15:26
36

Skin Tone Adjustments

09:30
37

Color Grading Using The Color Balance Tool

12:54
38

Image Processing Demo Perfecting Color

08:11
39

Create Masks for Local Adjustments using Brushes & Gradients

12:31
40

Advanced Local Adjustments using Masks

17:15
41

Dodging and Burning in Capture One

11:30
42

Creating Local Adjustments with the Color Editor

07:15
43

How to Use Local Adjustment Masks for Color Editing

03:43
44

How to Remove Objects in your Image

09:07
45

Image Processing Demo: Local Adjustments

05:57
46

Exporting with File>Export

08:07
47

Export Strategies and Proofing Previews with Process Recipes

11:49
48

How to Export for Social Media

05:11
49

More Clever Tricks with Capture One Pro 10

05:57
50

Final Q&A

13:11

Lesson Info

Create Masks for Local Adjustments using Brushes & Gradients

For local adjustments there is a specific tool tab. That's the one which looks like a small paintbrush. If you're in the default workspace, it'll show you the local adjustments tools. So, this is where you have your different layers, essentially, so all the various different layers which we can apply adjustments to. And underneath that is all the tools that work with local adjustments. Now, the general rule is pretty much everything will work with a local adjustment. And there's a couple of exceptions, like the color balance tool, for example, because that's designed, you know, for color grading, it's not like a local adjustment in that respect. The color editor, white balance exposure, high dynamic range, curve, sharpening, clarity, noise reduction, moire, and purple fringing. All possible to apply as local adjustments. So, I'll show you the basics of what's possible. So how to create those masks and all the various different tools that you can use to build them. So in the local adjus...

tments tool itself, you'll see down the bottom here some kind of obvious stuff like plus or minus to make a new layer, or remove an existing layer. There's the brush tools here itself, which also opens up to give you other possibilities like erasing masks and applying a gradient mask. Now generally, all these, again, are much easier to access with keyboard shortcuts. So you can see on the right hand side we've got B for brush, E for erase, G for gradient, and M to show and hide the mask. So just simple toggles to turn the mask on and off. Those cursor tools for picking up brush and gradient and so on, they're also available up on the main cursor tools bar, as well. So you've got exactly the same options there. Generally, though, if you're using the keyboard shortcuts you'll probably never have to access that point. Also, to the left of that you've got the brush settings pallette, which allows you to manipulate different parameters of the brush, which we'll talk about in a second. That's also accessible by right or control clicking any point with the brush and then it will bring those up like so. So, how does drawing a mask work and what actual effect does it have on the image? So if we right click again and we can see all our various different brush settings. So, the first two, if I zoom in, are probably fairly obvious, how big is the brush and how soft or hard is the brush. So, if we give a brush about this size and just do maximum hardness, and then I'm gonna draw a line along here. Press M, remember, to show and hide the masks. So that's at maximum hardness. If we right click again and go all the way back down, and then you can see we have this roll off, or softening, to the edge of the mask. And basically what the point of having those two circles is, the center circle is where the mask is at its maximum, and then the edge of the outer circle is where it's bled off to zero, if you like. So, a really soft brush will have lots of space between those two circles because it's a nice soft roll off. A harder brush will have none, whatsoever. So that's why you see two different circles. And then the third one is opacity. Let's just drop that down to 50 percent and then draw once more and you can see that looks fainter. So 50 percent of the brush. Basically what that means, so 50 percent in this example, is that we get half, whatever adjustment we make will be half the effect. So if we hide those masks for a second, and just grab exposure, for example, and just pull exposure down, you can see how the hard brush looks, the soft brush, and then at 50 percent opacity it's less of a change. And then the last piece of the puzzle is also flow. Flow is basically, it's a movement based setting. Flow at 100 means if I make one pass with the brush, then we lay down to our maximum opacity. So if you think of brushing as almost like painting with a paintbrush, one pass of my brush we will get to the maximum opacity at this point which is 50 percent. If we turn down the flow, it basically means we're going to be building up the mask slowly. As we move the brush back and forth, as such, we gradually build up that mask. It's very much a movement based motion. The lower the flow, the longer it will take, the more brush strokes it will take to build up to whatever opacity level you have. With a very low flow, if we drop that right down, and I brush here, brush back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, gradually it will build up to whatever we've set to opacity. The last checkbox you see here, or the first checkbox, sorry, airbrush mode. So this is a time based adjustment. If I click and hold, then that's like spraying an aerosol can, if you like. If we click and hold, depending again on the flow, is how fast that will build up. If we turn flow up to maximum and I click and hold then that builds up much quicker than if we had flow at a much lower value. Again, the point where it will stop building up is whatever you have set on opacity. If we went up to 100 opacity and then we built up and it would get to 100 points where this one only got to 50 points. Pen pressure, this is if you're using a Wacom tablet, and to be honest, if you're seriously going to get into doing local adjustments, which I hope you do, then it is 100 times easier using a graphics tablet. I started using graphics tablets a long, long time ago because I had this great job where I just made cutting paths all day, cutting out objects eight hours a day, and using a mouse for eight hours a day gets pretty intensive, so for comfort I switched to just holding a pen. For drawing soft of nice smooth shapes and so on, it's much easier to work with a pen and a tablet as opposed to a mouse. Some people do masking with a mouse and that's fine, but I personally find it way faster to work with a tablet. We can activate pen pressure, and what that allows us to do, let's just clear all these scribbles off, and just bring up the flow a bit. So what pen pressure does, is it'll change the mask based on how hard we're touching. So if I touch lightly it'll be smaller, if I press harder it will be bigger, and so on. It's not something that I use a great deal, because I find it quite quickly just to right click and tweak the size. But if you're a little bit more skilled with pressure on the tablet, and of course in our system preferences we can always change how our tip feels as well so that we can make it more sensitive. Smaller, press harder we get bigger. But as I've said, it's not something I personally use, but it's good to know it's there. Auto mask, we come back to, that just allows you to sort of cut round edges, but generally, again, it's not something I use a great deal. Something to be aware of with masking, if your masks are too good and have too hard edges and are really precise, then it looks quite obvious on the image itself. If you do everything a bit more subtle and a bit softer then there'd be no hint that there's ever been sort of some masking going on. The last one, link brush and eraser, link brush and eraser settings, simply means that the adjustments, or settings you have here for the brush, will be exactly the same if I switch to eraser by pressing E on the keyboard. You see it's now a minus in the middle. So B for brush it's plus, E it's minus. That means it'll just share exactly the same settings. That's good if you're creating a mask. Let's turn off pen pressure. If you're creating a mask and you make a mistake, you can just press E and then erase and it'll be exactly the same as it was before. So you have all those different tools which can be used to create masks in sort of a variety of different ways. As well as that, let's just delete those scribbles again, we also have a gradient mask, or G on the keyboard. A gradient mask is simply pretty much the same as putting a gradient filter in front of the lens. You can make very hard gradients, you can make very soft gradients, and that's great for equalizing exposure, and actually all kinds of other things, which I hope you'll see as well. To make a gradient, you just take your gradient brush and you draw the sort of direction that you want to have the gradient in. If you hold your shift key down, it will lock it to a straight line. So it will be perfectly vertical, horizontal, or at a 45 degree angle. The longer you draw the gradient, the smoother it will be. If I turn on the mask so you can see that's like a nice long gradient from top to bottom. If we do a little short pull like that, then we get a much harder gradient. So you can really control the roll off. It's great, you know, in cases like this if we wanted to balance out just half of the image. Once you've drawn the gradient, if you want to finesse it, you can do so. It's good for balancing exposure and all sorts of other uses. Now just because you've drawn it with the gradient mask, it's still perfectly editable. If I took the erase brush, I can still erase parts of the gradient out if I wish to. It's no different to any other mask, it's just a different way of drawing it. Let's delete those scribbles again. The last thing to know, or a basic thing to know, about mask drawing is that... Actually let's just put that gradient mask back on there, so G for gradient. Let's just say brighten that and make a change like so. By default, you'll see here that I'm working on layer one, so that's the gradient and I can turn that on and off, of course, to see the effect that it's having. If you want to rename it, then of course you can do so, and it does make sense to do it because otherwise, you end up with layer one, two, three, four, five, and you've actually got no idea what those various different layers are doing. First good advice, name the layer, and secondly, you can turn it on and off like so. Also what's good to know, is that you'll see if you're on the default workspace in the local adjustments tool tab, all the tools that work are loaded by default and additionally, they have this little brush icon next to it. You see that small brush icon like so. Basically what that means is that this tool will adjust the selected layer. So you see I've got "sky" selected, so if I pull the exposure around it will adjust the sky. Now if I go to my exposure tool tab and grab exposure, this is actually working off the whole image. By default the tools will only work on the background unless you specifically have this little icon here which means adjust selected layer. And that's an option in the, adjust selected layer here, that's an option in the sub-menu of the tool itself. That will happen by default so you can pretty much rest assured when you're in the local adjustments tool tab and you pull some adjustments it will be on your selected layer. If you go to any other tool tab and pull an adjustment, it will be on the background, so the entire image.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials

Capture One Discount Code
Wacom Discount Code
Tether Tools Discount Code

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workspace Layout Visual
Windows Keyboard Shortcuts
Mac Keyboard Shortcuts
Session Users Glossary of Terms
Catalog Users Glossary of Terms

Ratings and Reviews

Stef
 

This is a good overview of Capture One 10. The course is well structured and presented logically and progressively with clear and concise examples. The software is intricate and the amount of details presented will benefit from a second or third viewing, along with sufficient practice. David is an excellent teacher, slow enough to follow, fast enough to keep the listener's interest. I would agree with a previous reviewer that the shooting session was uninspired but the tethered demo was thoroughly useful nevertheless for someone to become an assistant, for instance. If you have ever used LR in this role, you will appreciate the power and stability of C1 for tethering. With regards to the comment about this class being non-creative; before you can run you have to walk and this course is all about understanding how to operate the software not about what you eventually want to do with it. Capture One is well designed, speedy and its homogeneous interface makes it easy to get to a result once you have a good knowledge of its layout and principles, compared for example with LR which is all over the place with modes, inconsistent and slow operations. Likewise, the C1 color editor is miles ahead of LR color functions, in simplicity and overall efficiency. This class is about mechanics for a reason; creativity is a parallel stream. It would have been beneficial to have a module highlighting major differences with LR for people migrating to Capture One as the word on the street is that C1 is hard. I would suggest to listen in to convince yourself of the contrary. All in all, I recommend this class; it is time well invested if you want to become more comfortable with Capture One and discover its potential.

user-b05602
 

The course is excellent and David does a nice job. However, I'm an advanced armature, not a professional. I had my own personal color darkroom, then Photoshop/Bridge, and NIK which I still use occasionally. My intention is to rely on Capture One which I purchased about 90 days ago. I would have appreciated a SIMPLE, here is how you load (Import) an image, "save" or "save as" and how to simply export an image (Variant). Yes those items are covered but, David has a tendency to casually and very quickly jump from Tool Tabs or Cursor Tools or the Tool Bar and then magically it's done and he has moved on. How did he do it. Based on David's training, I love the results I get with Capture One Pro. Yes, I know this is not Photoshop - it's much better. I never used Lightroom. I added variant to my vocabulary and I understand all the tools. I still struggle with the simple import, save, save as, and export of a image I worked on and cropped, then trying to consistently open that image as I see it in Capture One Pro. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and I don't know why. I will continue to re-review the course materials and I will figure it out. I know there is something simple I missed as David navigated the various tools and pull downs. I recommend this class but it does little for the armature. Capture One Pro is second nature to him and he knows all the ins and outs. I would help me a lot if he just add a 5 minute intro, importing an image from a folder, just crop it, then export the variant and open it in Photoshop.

Maria Baptiste
 

I recently purchased Capture One because I needed a RAW converter that was more dependable and also more reliable when it came to shooting tethered. I also noticed that many of the photogs I follow really enjoy using Capture One and rave about its efficiency. After looking at a few YouTube videos I decided that I needed something more thorough and of course CreativeLive delivered. This is an excellent course and David Grover is a superb instructor. His in depth and thorough knowledge of the software is obvious but his manner of speaking and the simplicity with which he provides directions makes it easy to learn Capture One and lets you appreciate a sophisticated and expertly engineered software. If you're working with Capture One 11, layers is a little different than in version 10 but otherwise everything David discusses is the same. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and will continue to refer back to sections as needed. Thank you Creative Live and David Grover!!

Student Work

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