4 Ways to Use the Skin Tone Tool in Capture One Pro

i wanted to dig into the skin tone tool it is the tool in capture one that made me switch from lightroom to capture one the the key to the skin tone tool is to understand that doesn't just work on skin tones it works on a lot of different subjects in capture one so i'm going to talk about that i'm going to show you a few different ways that you can use the skin tone tool and then i'm also going to talk about a way in which i think capture one could actually improve their color editor tool within the software so let's dig in right here i have a selection of images that i've assembled for this tutorial this image right here is the first image i took tethered into capture one and when i snapped this photo i was sold the the image quality in capture one is phenomenal the way i like to think of the skin tone tool is it's more of a uniformity tool what we're going to do is we're going to pick the skin color to match to when we click i'm going to click right here and that's going to in the tool bring up this triangle now it is selecting a range of colors close to that i want to expand this all the way out that's my personal preference you see this little dot here in the middle of the tool that dot is the color that i have selected if i were to drag this it's going to shift that selection color which you can see happening down here in the color selection i'm going to re-click that just so i can get set back to the original spot and drag this out now if i change the hue you can see the colors in the skin change as i shift the hue a little bit and same with the saturation we can desaturate that color or over saturate that color to exaggerate it and see what's going on this is great when you're working in the tool and lightness is going to shift the lightness of that color selection right you're changing the hue the saturation and the lightness what uniformity is going to do is it's going to take all the colors within this triangle and as i increase the uniformity it's going to push all of these colors including these yellows and these reds and these slight purplishes the fuchsias we're going to push it closer to this and the more i move it up the stronger it does that and you can see what's happening in the image all of that red has disappeared if i take a before and after we can see the change that happens there so we will dial that down we could shift the saturation and it's going to match the saturation we could shift the lightness and everything that is within this color selection is going to push towards the lightness of that color that we have selected i'm going to reset everything what i tend to do is i tend to pick my color come over here pick the color and then i'm going to expand my selection then i'll use this more menu i'm going to create a masked layer from the selection so it's going to take all the colors that are selected here and it's going to create a masked layer up here now i'm going to change this to skin tone go back to the background i want to reset that so we don't have that skin tone happening that adjustment happening on the background layer we only want it to happen on the skin tone layer so if we look at the mask we can see the mask is everywhere where that color selection was but that's not actually doing anything it's just created a mask so now we're going to pick the skin color correction tool again and i'm going to select that image i'm going to drag the hue uniformity up so that i can get rid of some of these reds here and push them more towards a unified color i think that looks good for now we can see as we come over the ear that red disappears the nose that red disappears and up here on the forehead those reds become very muted the skin tone becomes much more uniform what also happened is the lips have also moved towards uniformity we can see the natural lip color we could see this uniform lip color but we have put this on a layer so we can make an adjustment to this layer mask so we're going to turn the mask on by pressing m and then i'm going to grab the eraser tool i could click here or i could just press e on my keyboard come in and i can erase the lips so the lips i'm gonna do a crude erase here and so now that mask is no longer affecting the lips so as i make adjustments here the lips are not being affected what i'm going to do is i'm going to increase the saturation to over exaggerate all of this the reason i'm doing that is to show you that because we have it on a layer we can turn that off we can turn it back on we could set the luma range if we display the mask we can see it's it's acting on this background layer here and so what we can do is we can disable the the black parts of the image from being affected hit apply so now this has a luma range applied to it but now we can also use the opacity slider and bring the opacity down this is zero so that's exactly where it was when we began and then we can slowly increase that to a point where we like what we see now remember i've exaggerated this so i'm going to bring i'm going to reset the saturation and i'm going to bring the hue up to a place where i think it looks okay maybe just a little bit too much and then i can dial back on the opacity slider so that's how you would normally use the skin tool that's what it was created to do and that's how it affects skin and why you would use it on skin i'm going to come back out to these images so let's take a look at this image of maggie maggie's a good friend of mine and a model and you can see the background here is very dark on this side very light on this side there's also some patchiness in the paint job on this wall also because i was throwing light uh from camera left towards the wall here um there's a lot more light on this wall and you can see some of the spill over here on the left as well so what we're going to do is grab the skin tone tool and i'm going to pick a color i'm going to pick something over here because i like that tone of blue now i'm going to view the selected color range you can see maggie turns to black and white because she is not within this selected color range so all of this blue is within that selected color range so if i go to uniformity and i drag the hue up to a hundred percent the colors are getting pushed closer to that central color point saturation same thing and lightness is going to be the most important part here the darker parts of the image are going to get pushed towards the lightness point of the selected color so we can quickly take a look at the before and after there's before here's the after instantly makes the image a lot better just from using that skin tone tool on the background of the image so that's how you can use the skin tone tool on a background layer and you could do the same process here this is a photo i took of kevin mcdonald from kids in the hall so what i'm going to start by doing is i'm going to create a new filled adjustment layer that allows me to work on the background call this blue paper turn the mask on i've got a full mask on the layer going to select that tool select the color drag my sliders up all the way to 100 percent now because i've got this on a layer i can easily turn that layer off i can see it's affecting the shirt which i'm completely fine with because that brings the shirt more in line with the background as well and it makes it more uniform if i wanted to include this hoodie as well i could just drag this slider out to include those colors and that hoodie starts to get pushed towards that blue so you want to be careful with this tool because if i were to bring this out to include the hoodie then what i could also start doing is bringing this too far and then it starts to affect his his whole face and all of his skin it's a pretty powerful tool and you want to work in subtlety let's now look at another image here's another image of maggie what we're going to look at here specifically is this section of the the ground where the vegetation is brown what i'm going to do this time is i'm going to create a new layer and i'm going to call it ground grab the brush right click to bring up my adjustment brush settings increase the size to make my life easier make this happen a little faster i'm going to turn the mask on so that you can see me drawing and i did that just by pressing m on my keyboard for mask and now i'm just going to grab this green section just so we can see what is happening there so right now i have an adjustment layer called ground and it has this mask applied to it no changes of settings applied to that so far i'm going to grab the color picker i'm going to select this green and you can see it shows up in our color range i'm going to extend my color range all the way out i've selected view selected color range we can see there's some color in this outfit as well but it's not going to be affected because the mask is not applied to that area we are only focusing on the this dirt patch and so we can see some of it it doesn't seem to be selected so i'm going to extend my selection until now we can see it's being affected by the selection i can turn this off for now i'm going to zoom in here so we can see this effect so what we're going to do is i'm going to drag the hue up and increase that that looks good there saturation doesn't have a lot of effect lightness is going to make this flat so i don't want to do that now the thing to remember is that it's not just this brown patch that's being affected everything within this mask all these other greens that are in here as well that have been selected are also getting pushed closer to that initial selection so what we can do is we can narrow our selection by dragging the smoothness down and then i can also drag my color selection closer to just that initial color we selected right there in the middle so i'm going to zoom in again if i click on the before and after there's the before and there's the after i want to look at one final image here so let's take a look at this image of this leaf i'm going to create a new layer by clicking on the drop down and i want a new filled adjustment layer so that the mask covers the entire image pick my color selection tool i want to bring it to green and then i can drag the uniformity up but that's not affecting this red color and i want to make this entire leaf green so if i come back to the color selection and i drag this out to include the red you can see it happening in real time it's starting to include those colors and the image turns green if i were to make adjustments to the saturation really makes that pop because i have done this on an adjustment layer if i drag the opacity slider down i can see that's my before this is my after my one gripe with capture one's color editor is that the uniformity sliders aren't available in the advanced color editor they're only available in the skin tool yet and it seems like it would be such a simple change for them to make so i want to just compare here let's put these beside each other and take a look here's the advanced color editor here's the skin tone and when you look at these you can see that they have smoothness they both have the hue saturation and lightness they have the hsl sliders if you just take these uniformity sliders and put them over on top of the advanced color editor and make the color editor look like this and function in the exact same way that the skin tone tool does and then being able to do this with multiple colors on the same layer in the same image really add a lot of power to capture one if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you're a professional photographer and you use capture one or if you just like to see some more capture one tutorials hit the subscribe button and turn on the notifications thanks a lot take care