Adjustment Brush - AutoMask Accuracy - Suggestions
Does anyone have any suggestions to help increase the accuracy of the Adjustment Brush AutoMask.
As much as it pains me to say this lightrooms adjustment brush auto mask feature seems to be lightyears ahead of CAPTURE ONE.
The brush seems to work well on areas of high contrast but on areas of lower contrast if fails miserably. Such as in areas of evenly lit light skin against the white backdrop.
I am trying to separate a subject from a light backdrop so that I can lighten the backdrop more and hopefully not have to do much (if any) work in photoshop.
As much as it pains me to say this lightrooms adjustment brush auto mask feature seems to be lightyears ahead of CAPTURE ONE.
The brush seems to work well on areas of high contrast but on areas of lower contrast if fails miserably. Such as in areas of evenly lit light skin against the white backdrop.
I am trying to separate a subject from a light backdrop so that I can lighten the backdrop more and hopefully not have to do much (if any) work in photoshop.
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Paint a mask for the background. Paint the mask roughly along the face and hair but color in all of the background with the mask. Use Advance Color Editor and pick the background color within the mask you have painted. There is a slider in Advance Color Editor to adjust brightness.
This color mask created within a painted mask works well sometimes. It is better than the auto mask or painted mask for some things. I have used this technique to lighten hair and darken up a wrought iron gate in front of an alter. I never would have been able to paint the gate by hand and, as you say, auto-mask only takes you so far. The alter behind the gate stands out nicely now.
Unfortunately, there is only so much you can do with the color mask (hue, saturation, smoothness, brightness) and it would be good of C1 to expand the options available. The current options make sense for the use of Color Editor in a global way. When using Color Editor to refine a mask, they lack a bit :^)0 -
Could you elaborate more on your techniques? I don't follow the steps in your post. Many thanks. 0 -
I use the Advance Color Editor. This is a C1 Pro thing, I believe.
On the color tab, with White Balance and etc., open the Advance Color Editor (ACE). Use the dropper on the right of the tool palette to select a color in your image. At the bottom of the palette, there is a check box. Checking this will show the colors of your image in your selected range and colors outside the range will be gray tone. There is a reason I mention this and it will be clear in a bit. Uncheck the box so the gray tone is removed and all your colors return. Remove the selection you made from the list in the ACE. There is a button with a '-' in the lower right.
We are working with a lady that has black hair and she is against a white background. We want to select the white background and brighten it.
I make a new layer on the Local Adjustments tab and call it 'background'. I paint a 100% opacity mask over the white area. I draw around the transition between the background and her hair. If I capture some hair (a curl or a wisp), I don't really care. I just paint roughly around the transition. I do want to be certain I capture all the white background between the wisps and curls of hair. With my layer 'background' still selected, I open up the Color Editor on the Local Adjustments tab. I click the Advanced Color Editor and use the dropper to select the white background.
Now, the white is selected only in the area defined by my mask. Shiny, white teeth will not be affected because they are outside the mask I drew. If I was careless and drew some mask over the teeth, then I need to go refine that...
Now, the reason for the second paragraph about using the checkbox to highlight selected color. When using ACE globally, as we did above, on the background layer, the checkbox is effective and not-selected colors are replaced by gray tone. On layers, the check box is ineffective and not-selected colors do not gray out. Initially, I thought the color selection tool did not work on the layer. The color selection tool does work but the checkbox is broken. Bug. Forget the checkbox. Unless it works for you and is broken only on my machine...
So, we have selected the white color of the background. We can adjust Saturation, Hue, and Brightness. As far as I know, Smoothness only affects the transition between your selection and the colors surrounding it; it doesn't really perform a visual effect. For this example, we increase brightness to be sure we have a bright, white background. End.
Now, a couple troubles I could see will revolve around highlights in the hair. They will also be in the 'white' range of colors. They will be brightened along with the background. Because the mask has been drawn over them... I may not care because there is no way I can hand-draw a mask on hair and I must brighten the background. No other choice. If we darken the white background, the highlights will darken. If we aren't trying to adjust the background very much, we will probably be okay. If needed, we can refine the mask we drew along the hair/background transition. Also, if the background is gray, it will be very hard to pick that out from the hair. There may be some magic I do not possess but it will be hard for me to refine dark background v. dark hair. etc. Still, this can all be useful if the difference in color between what you want to affect and what you do not want to affect is enough.
The only adjustment options are Hue, Saturation, and Brightness. I don't think Phase One intends this tool to be used this way. Not really... It would be nice if more adjustment tools could be used in the area selected by the mask and then further refined by using the ACE.
Because the checkbox to turn on gray scale for colors not selected is partially broken on my machine and has no effect on Adjustment Layers, I will sometimes 'test' a selection by going to the ACE on the Color tab. As in paragraph two, I will make my selection, access the portions of the image affected, and, if the colors can be successfully separated, go on about my business on the Local Adjustment tab.
For my example of the sloth: Sloths don't really have wispy hair. The one I photographed had blond hair. The background was green leaves or clipped bits of sky through the leaves (the picture was taken looking up).
Since there was no wispy hair, I drew a mask by hand over some of the sloth. The idea was to lighten him a bit. Although there was no wispy hair, I feathered the mask at the edges of the body so the transition along the body/leaf line would not be stark. Although there is no wispy hair, there are hair clumps/spikes and I didn't want to hand draw all that... So, a feathered transition. Compared to the unaltered image, it looks pretty good. I think.
Then, I used the ACE. I drew in a 100% mask and didn't worry much if I 'went over the line' and drew the mask on a leaf. I just wanted to be sure I got all the hair spikes. I selected blond sloth color with the color picker and increased brightness. The green leaves were not affected. Because this sloth didn't have a lot of muck growing in his fur, it was different enough from the leaves that all was well. Plus, the part of his body more shaded by the leaves had a green tint to it (light reflecting from the leaves) but that was okay as well. Still different enough.
Comparing my image altered with the hand drawn mask and the image altered using ACE, I find the ACE-altered image better. Although the transition/feathers I drew by hand were not obvious when looking at the image by itself, the feathering had affected some shadows and etc. Just a little. The hair spikes weren't properly brightened and didn't match the rest of the animal... ACE selected all the animal and the shadows and spikes were brightened along with the rest of the animal. It looks more natural. My method resulted in unintended dodge/burn effect that changed the shadows and the feel of the animal. Reviewing the images together, the ACE-altered one wins.
On my sloth, I increased exposure about 0.33 stop. I don't know what this translates to with the Brightness slider on ACE. I used a Color Marker to check luminance on my hand-drawn sloth and then switched to my ACE variant and increased Brightness in the ACE tool on my sloth adjustment layer until I had matched the luminance. I made one color selection with ACE. If the fur was mottled enough (light blond and dark blond), I may have needed to make two selections and brighten both evenly or fool with the bounding marks on the color wheel in the ACE. If I selected only light blond and not the dark, the animal would look like it had frosted ends.
Of course, if I didn't want to brighten the back/hind portion of the animal, I could erase some mask with a partially transparent brush. I used this technique to save time when desaturating a yellow ear tag on a sheep. Draw a quick mask, select yellow, no ear wool affected, great. This all works better with more even colors like ear tags, of course.
It would be nice if the color selection ability of Capture One could be used to completely refine the edge of a mask. Draw mask, click to exclude. Perhaps this is what Auto-Edge does, Perhaps Auto-Edge works only with luminance... Who knows. I do know ACE is better able to pick out hair spikes on a sloth than Auto-Edge...
Long post. Hope this helps.0
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