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Improve Capture One

Request a new feature, or support for a camera/lens that you would like to use in Capture One.

Status Awaiting review
Workspace Feature requests
Categories Capture One Pro
Created by JT Pennington
Created on Apr 7, 2024

Ability to swap AI brush/eraser selection between the AI subject and AI background mask

I searched around and found a bunch of things about masking but none of them seemed similar to this request, so I'm making a new one.

The new AI masking is fantastic. Being able to select just the subject or just the background is a game changer in many ways. However sometimes it doesn't get it right. I'm ok with that because I know I can go in and fine tune it.

The problem is that while I can manually remove to the Background AI Mask with the AI Eraser and I can add to the Subject with the AI Brush (or vice versa)... There doesn't seem to be a way to do both at the same time. aka... swap the selection between the special AI background and subject masks.

This primarily happens when copying edits from one image to another when it auto applies both a background and subject mask during the paste process. In that case you're not selecting the background, refining it, and the selecting it. They're happening together before you can edit the photo. This means you have to spend a lot of time trying to manually fix the masks between the auto Background/Subject selections.

Let me give an example. An portrait of a person, sometimes when using an AI mask part of the persons clothing will become part of the background mask. I've seen this with some dresses, it seems like the changes in lighting of the folding can cause some issues.

In this case, when I apply edits from the prior image part of the dress ends up in the background mask and is not in the subject mask.

I can select the AI eraser and deselect that part of the dress from the background, but now its not apart of either AI mask, so then I have to go in with the AI Brush and select and add it to the subject. The problem is that getting the cursor in the exact same position so it selects the EXACT same pixels is virtually impossible. This leaves a ton of extra work trying to go in and refine the mask to get it right without overlapping or leaving anything out.

99% of the time I have to add something from the background mask... I have then remove it to the subject mask. On the flip side, if I'm removing something from the background mask... I then have to add it to the subject mask. Every once in a while I dont mind doing this, but when I'm working with a hundred photos it ends up adding hours to my editing when I have to refine the AI background/subject masks for every photo.

Since the pixels are already calculated and selected when using the AI eraser, it'd be nice if there was a way to flip that selection between background/subject masks.

From an end user perspective, it doesn't seem like it'd be that difficult to do, add a modifier key that when used removes the selection from the current AI Layer Mask and adds it to the other (or vice versa) but since I don't know how those initial AI Background/Subject Masks are created or how they're managed by Capture One, I don't know how complex the code would actually be.

Current workaround

The only workaround I know of is spending time trying to manually refine the masks which ends up slowing down