04 Paint your mask
Now I just paint around the base of the candle where I want to create my pool of light. The adjustment mask shows up in red as you paint, but disappears when you stop.
05 Making adjustments
Over in the tools panel on the left, I’ve increased both the Exposure and the Saturation settings, and only the areas I painted over with the mask tool are affected.
You may find your mask has accidentally spilled over areas you want to leave alone. Here, the top of the candle now has areas which are look a little overexposed.
To fix this, you open the mask button’s pop-up menu again and select ‘Erase Mask’.
06 Erase Mask tool
Now I can paint over the areas of the candle I want to protect. The mask is displayed in red as you paint, so it’s easy for me to remove the mask from the candle – this time I’m using a slightly smaller brush so that I can be more precise.
07 The finished photograph
I think this has worked really well, and it shows how straightforward Capture One Pro’s adjustment layers are to use. What’s more, the adjustments are stored within the Capture One library or session settings, so that when come back to your picture in the future, its adjustment layers will still be there, ready to be adjusted or removed as necessary.
