Skin Correction in Capture One. Editing Raw files.

“I am a photographer, not a retoucher” – this is what some of my clients got to hear in the past when requesting skin correction and high-end editing. Not surprisingly, my focus is on taking pictures and not getting into complicated editing processes such as Frequency separation. On the other hand, whenever I do edit a project in the present, I find myself enjoying it more than before. The main reason behind this change is that I managed to speed up the full skin correction process with Capture One Pro.

Today, I would like to share a short recap of this technique, followed by a short step-by-step example of skin correction in a fashion editorial.

Most of my work is as a portrait photographer for beauty, fashion, and advertising projects, naturally, skin is key. Unless you work with a model with absolutely perfect skin (if there is such a thing in real life), there is always something to correct. The challenge is, that even if you modify the morphology, color, and texture of the skin, the skin should look still natural in the resulting image. In case you remember the Wax Skin Effect that was popular during the mid-1990s, these times are long gone... This is why, I sometimes leave small birthmarks or other irregularities on the skin while retouching, to maintain a natural and realistic look.

During a meeting with representatives from Capture One Pro in Copenhagen in 2021, I brought the skin correction topic to the table. I expressed the need for a set of tools for skin correction directly within Capture One Pro, without being forced to export the files into another software. My goal was to work in raw files as much as possible, until the very end of the editing process.

This will also help to avoid quality loss due to the image compression during the export process into other formats (PSD, tiff, etc.) required for third-party editing softwares.

Some time after the Copenhagen meeting, Capture One developed a very interesting new set of tools. I do not know if my feedback had anything to do with this or if it was just a development whose time had come. In any case, I am thrilled they added the Style Brushes to the toolbox. With these, you can adjust Brightness, Saturation, and Contrast and add or remove Haze. In combination with the Clone Tool and the Luma Mask, I am now able to accomplish the full editing process in Capture One Pro from start to finish.

This process is much faster and more comfortable for me than switching between platforms or using a mix of softwares. I feel more confident using only Capture One Pro as my main tool, which allows me to edit raw files without any quality loss during the full editing process and keep my original files flexible enough until the final export. To me, this improvement is almost magic.

The images below are samples from a fashion editorial I edited entirely in Capture One Pro, including skin correction. The light balance, color balance, and other adjustments were created on the raw file. As follows I am sharing some notes on the process step by step.

A) At the very beginning, I use the Clone Tool to get rid of the most visible unwanted areas in the image. Hard marks, pimples, baggy eyes, etc.

In this step, I am creating the base by “flattening” irregularities in the skin.

B) Secondly, I am using the Brightness (- +) Style brush as a Dodge & Burn tool. Painting with light or shade, I visually bring specific areas to the front while pushing other areas further back into the image.

C) In the final step I am creating a set of Luma Masks, which allow me to control the highlights and shadows in larger areas. Using the Luma Mask, I can influence the intensity of the purest White in the image, the same goes for the tones of the shades. And of course, by the use of this Luma Mask, I can also control the temperature in areas where I want to balance tones, depending on my color palette.

Final edit

The full set was taken in beautiful Bologna during the spring of 2023 and this editorial example was subsequently published on the Vogue Italia website. I hope you found this article useful. In case of any doubts, drop me a line.

Thank you for reading.

Gabriel Matula.