Have you already tried the new Style Brushes tool that comes with the free update for Capture One 21?
If you missed this release, check out my 10-minute video overview, where you can explore all the new features.
So, today I’ve prepared five ideas of custom Style Brushes to enhance your workflow!
Let’s start with Chilly Shadows!
Chilly Shadows
I like how cold and contrasting shadows can improve an image:
This one and some of the other photos here are from Signature Edits
To create such a style brush, first, we color tone shadows in Color Balance:
Next, we’re setting Contrast to 15 and making some safe HDR adjustments:
Finally, we’re adjusting Clarity and Dehaze to 20:
I recommend to set brush Flow at around 20 to gain more freedom of drawing. Now, we save it as a Style Brush.
Here you’ll find a step-by-step guide on creating custom Style Brushes.
Chilly Shadows is a pretty universal style brush and fits different images quite naturally, from landscapes to portraits. Even non-shadow areas can easily benefit from such adjustments:
The second idea is Sun-Bleached Toning.
Sun-Bleached Toning
This style brush adds bleachy-warm toning to your image.
Sun-Bleached Toning contains only two adjustments: extreme White Balance and low Saturation.
However, this style brush has three features:
- It goes way better with a 5% Flow setting or less.
- Keep in mind that White Balance always includes a Tint setting, so you might need to adjust it for a particular image.
- Finally, feel free to refine a layer with this style brush to get more accurate image impact.
The next style brush is designed to increase Saturation on portrait images safely.
Skin Intact Saturation
The most sensible area of any portrait is skin tone. I bet you don’t want to ruin it. To make portrait editing a bit easier, let’s create a style brush that affects the Saturation of all colors except for skin tone.
Simply select a color range of warm colors and invert the selection.
Now, we can safely increase Saturation without touching skin colors.
Of course, this style brush will not affect other objects of warm colors as well. Style Brushes is just not a universal tool by its nature. However, it can be pretty useful for some images.
The next idea is a style brush that removes magenta color cast.
Remove Magenta Color Cast
Sometimes, you can get a typical magenta color cast after setting White Balance manually.
If overall WB looks good, you can easily get rid of the color cast with such a style brush. Simply reduce the Saturation of the magenta color range and adjust the hue.
You can now quickly brush-off the color cast from your image.
Colorless Contrast
Finally, the all-time classic – high Contrast & low Saturation adjustments.
Let’s apply Contrast, reduce Saturation in half, adjust HDR, Clarity, and a bit of Dehaze.
Now, you can draw with colorless Contrast. Here, I’ll enhance the wall and the door with this style brush to add more depth and dimension:
This style brush fits most of the images, but the Flow settings highly depend on a particular image. I would set 10% as the universal value.
Download Style Brushes
These Styles Brushes are already available for download to all my patrons, including $3 pledge members!
Become my patron, and you’ll immediately gain access to:
- Style Brushes from this post
- Dynamic Symmetry Grids for Capture One
- Patron-exclusive tutorials
$9+ pledge members receive unique styles for Capture One every month!
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- 3. Must-Have Shortcuts
- 14. Hidden Features of Layers
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- 38. Automation with Macros
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