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Capture One v7 layer issue, fixed in v8?

Peter Klein

New member
I've been noticing a problem with Capture One v. 7.1.2 when I use "local adjustments" (layers) to dodge or burn in masked areas of a photo. It appears that high-contrast edges are "echoed" in an adjacent area with a line a pixel or two wide. I wonder if anyone else has seen this, and if the problem is fixed in version 8.

Here's the picture:


At Green Lake
by peter.a.klein (Boulanger-Croissant), on Flickr

And below is a 200% crop showing the problem (click on it for full size). I burned in the entire top 1/6 of the picture (the sunny grassy area above the water about 3/4 stop. Note the black lines "echoing" the tree trunk and shadow areas above it.

I've seen this issue in several of my recent images. B&W conversion is not the problem, the same thing appears in the color version. It's not sharpening, turning that off makes the lines lower contrast, but they are still there. The lines are not at the edge of the mask. If I reduce the amount of exposure change for the layer, the problem diminishes some, but remains. If I turn off the layer, it goes away completely. The issue makes dodging or burning dicey.

Thanks for any insights/advice.
--Peter
 

Peter Klein

New member
I opened a support case with Phase One. It turns out that I inadvertently had the "Auto Mask" box checked. This is the function that allows the mask to adjust itself to edges (e.g. to mask the bright sky but leave adjacent buildings out of the mask). So it was partially user error in this case--I didn't need to be using the auto mask feature for what I was doing. It was helping me with the edges, but messing up the interior of the mask.

They say that this is just how C-One's auto masks work at present, something to do with resolution limits and color information which is taken to be part of the mask information, so in complex and subtle situations sometimes the auto mask makes mistakes within the mask, thinking a detail is something you don't want included, when actually you do. They hope to improve this in the (unspecified) future.

(I've edited this post to reflect my own error, which I didn't realize when I first wrote it. No fair blaming Capture One for that. The Auto Mask is not perfect, but I had it turned on where a simple manual mask would have worked better.)
 
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