Two feature request for skin tones
Hi CaptureOne Team,
I want to suggest two enhancements to skin-tone editing capabilities for Capture One, that might be quite useful to many other creative users. I am sharing the details below:
What problem do you see this solving?
To improve the editing of skintones in Capture One Pro, specifically for two subpopulations (1) Photographers who also shoot video, and (2) Asian users of Capture One
When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool?
These two enhancements will have a significant impact in making my workflow faster and higher quality.
Are you using any workarounds or other solutions to achieve your goals in Capture One?
Yes, manual skin tone editing in most cases, or color checker charts in some instances.
Are you happy to be contacted further about this suggestion or request?
YES!
BONUS:
Both feature requests should be pretty straightforward to implement, should you decide to go ahead with it!
FEATURE REQUEST 1: Add a skin-tone line to Capture One vectorscope, similar to video editors
Photographers increasingly shoot video alongside photos, so it is important to match skin-tones between both formats.
Video editors like Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolv provide a line indicating skin-tones. Can you please add a similar indicator line to Capture One skin-tone color-wheel? It will make it much easier to make targeted adjustments AND to match look of photos and videos from a session.
Here is a screenshot showing video editor vectorscope with skintone line indicated with red arrow.
FEATURE REQUEST 2: Add style brushes for "Yellow skin reduction" and "Gray skin reduction"
Capture One currently provides a style brush for "Red skin reduction" which works for white subjects. However, as a photographer in Asia, I come across many photography subjects with yellow skin undertone, and some darker-skinned people have a gray undertone (often called ashy). (Both of these undertones are widely acknowledged, and makeup stores sell color-correcting makeup for both undertone types).
You can explore following two links to see examples of both skin undertones:
Ashy skin example: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/ashy-face-skin
Yellow skintone caused by high UV exposure increasing pheomelanin in skin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanin#Pheomelanin
Fixing these hues with "Yellow skin reduction" and "Ashy skin reduction" smart brushes would be very useful for global photography.
Thanks!
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I'm not sure if bundling requests is the easiest way to put them forward, because developers might decide to apply one but not the other - what the status could be then? "Implemented" or "Not currently planned"?
Apart from that, you have my vote.
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Marcin Mrzygłocki Sorry for bundling both suggestions in one request and thank you for the vote. This is my first time submitting a C1 request, and I will keep your pointer in mind for future submissions.
SFA I was not aware of the digital sensor lineage of red-skin correction, so I unknowingly assumed it to be a cosmetic feature. Thanks for sharing this.
I manually correct yellow or gray skin tones, and find the vectorscope skin line immensely useful when doing so in video editors. Perhaps a Smart Style tool that grabs selected (or AI selected) face hues and nudges them towards vectorscope skin-line might be a more generalized tool to speed up workflows. Would such a smart style be useful in your opinion?
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Skintone line
Why don't you just figure out where your best suited skintone line is and save it as a presets for the Skin Tone Color Editor?
The point and the slice gives you the same information you request as a line, doesn't it?
The real benefit of a vectorscope is that it shows you your image data as points or clusters of points eg. as in darktable:
The above shows you the points from a complete image, but you can also draw a rectangle (a special color picker mode in darktable) in your image which not only shows you color values min, max and average, but also shows you the points from that rectangle in the vectorscope (and histogram).
Hence you can pick an area from a face, then see where the colors lie in the vectorscope and shift the hue towards where you think it belongs. A skintone line is not available though in darktable either.
The usefulness of such a skintone line is not a common agreement in the video world, at least what I have read, but I cannot really judge this statement.
Anyways, without the image data, the reference line is not very useful I think.
SFA, maybe you remember a couple of days ago I pasted the above vectorscope in another thread, and since then I think about a feature request which uses the Advanced Color Editor as the tool to depict the image points, essentially merging the functionalities of the Color Editor with those from a vectorscope.
You could not only see your image data but directly manipulate them here.
[Image: Combined Color Editor and vectorscope]
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Hi SFA,
The checkbox "View Selected colour range" shows you the source colors and reflects the adjustments in the Color Editor within in the image. Very useful indeed, I don't want to miss that.
What it not does, it does not give you any reference. The only reference you have is the neutral border color in the viewer (very useful too) and the other colors in other areas in your image. But these are all relative references to either neutral or colors, and the assessment can only be done in your brain, with all the shortcomings of color perception like adaption, eye and brain strain etc.
A vectorscope shows you the image colors always in the same location of the color wheel, so identical colors in all your images at the 5 o'clock position are always at that 5 o'clock. 'Underground lightning' (the requester here) asks for a reference line for skin tones. Your brain can easily recognize if the color clouds are at the same spatial reference position where you want them to be, or the skin near your reference line. That is the idea.
Assume a landscape photographer who always (or for the images from that day and location) wants to have his sunlit foliage depicted by very similar green-yellows. Or a portrait photographer who wants Lucy's skin always in the same hue range. Etc. Which tool in C1 can give you that?
Another use case is if you want to edit your image towards a color harmony, e.g. analoguous, complementary, triad etc.
https://www.institute-of-photography.com/colour-harmony-in-photography/
http://www.naturephotographers.net/articles1112/ab1112-1.html
https://iso.500px.com/take-photos-with-color-wheel/In darktable you can overlay a color harmony scheme to help with that (the white segments)
If I would like to use the analogous complementary color sheme for this image I could try to move the greens and magentas into or towards the respective segments.
A vectorscope in darktable can show the whole images pixels, or you can draw a rectangle to select areas.
Color casts
Here I selected an area (from a different image) which is supposed to be white. Do I have a color cast? Or is it actually a red-pinkish white and therefore correct, or to my liking?:
I selected a big region of the midday blue sky. Is this the midday blue I want or do I need to adjust my WB, or at least the sky.
For your video digitization project I don't know if a vectorscope helps you, I think it depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to set a WB once and then let the film do what it did at that time, documenting the film properties and being authentic about the lighting conditions, and film degradation over time, then it is maybe of limited help. If you want to check and eventually slightly correct colors then it will probably help, that's what it is made for.
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BeO wrote
Which tool in C1 can give you that?
Granted, you can pick a pixel in the Advance Color Editor with the picker and it shows you that one pixel in the color wheel, but this is junior stuff compared to a vectorscope, for the use cases in mind.
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I see, you have quite a few other challenges for your winter project...:-)
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To bring this on topic again, the old negative probably shows a human subject with skin, right? :-)
Your phone needs to capture raw, I think, because a negative to positive conversion from a jpg is probably going to look awful. If she is up for a joke, make a small print from the negative as-is :-)
Btw, I assume you have other negatives too and your scanner is likely not going to work anymore, so consider upvoting https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360009560077-Adding-Analog-Negative-FILM-Conversion-Features :-)
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I'm definitely interested in the vector scope feature and I think BeO nailed it.
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