Subject Selection Masking

I've already put in the request for this update so that it will recalculate in situations like copy/paste a specific layer to another image/variant and Capture One team has confirmed it's coming in a new update. It was purposely left off the original release but is coming. 

Yes as David says create a style from your preferred edited image including subject and or background AI selections and apply it to your photos in a batch, it works a treat unless you’ve erased a bit of the mask.

It does update and recalculate the subject et background masks  (with or without adjustments), but for this you need to use styles.

When you use copy paste, C1 uses hard or rasterized masks.

David 

Sorry if it got mentioned before and I missed it:
The AI masking is great and even though I was skeptical in the beginning I quite like it's implementation already so short after it released. 
What I think is definitely missing though, is the feature, that masks like "subject"/"background" need to be automatically recalculated when copy-pasting the settings. Otherwise, using masks for batch editing is impossible. This can be an optional switch or so, but it should at least be an option. At the moment, the workaround for that would be to delete the mask of the layer and select your subject/background again. 
What would also help, is better handling of layers. It bugs me, how layers and copying/pasting of settings of those are implemented. 
I can not simply copy settings of a layer and put them onto another layer. (It can only be done by pasting the whole layer, with the selection). This would mean, I could at least generate a new mask and simply copy the edits from the previous pictures layer to this new mask layer. 

Perhaps related to this request: https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/9740977222429-AI-masks-for-subject-detectgeometry dash lite

Thanks for sharing it, Thomas Kyhn

Hi again, many of you have already showed interest in participating in our user tests. Many more than we expected, and that's amazing! We have already run some tests with a handful of you, and will continuously invite people who wrote an email. Please be aware that we will not reach out to all of you. But I assure you, there will be plenty of chances to participate in user tests in the future.
Thank you for your patience.

I don't think you'll hear back until they have a concrete date and time to conduct the tests. There are some tests going on internally, so my guess is that you'll hear back within the next couple of weeks.

No doubt if you have reached out then you will most likely be part of the usability tests.

383407573678 I've also sent an email last week but haven't heard back from you guys.

Me too.

David 

Hi Sven,

i am interested in an onlineuser test, so i wrote an email to research…. (your link doesn´t work so i copy+paste the adress to email).

I think the mail arrived because i don´t got an email-error, but i also don´t got any answer from captureone - this was last week.

best regards Luggi

Hi everyone,

Thank you again for your participation in this discussion! We really appreciate your input.
As 374153015698 mentioned, we have been looking into this the last couple of months. We are now at a stage where we would like to usability test our current stage. For any of you who are interested in participating in an online user test, please write an email to research@captureone.com.
Looking forward to meeting you.

Sven

9302848910877 - it's not clear to me what the colour of the garment is, without the mask overlaying it.

But 

(1) there is no sensitivity control on the magic brush. Do you mean that the tolerance was turned right down to 1? (Lower values for tolerance will be likely to give you a tighter selection - higher values will include more.)

(2) depending on the colour of the garment, you might find that a better way to get a selection of it would be to use the Colour editor tool. Select the colour of the garment, then use the ... menu and choose "Create masked layer from selection".

Ian

Yeah, I'm just joining the choir here. Subject detection is something that is a critical to my kind of work (e-commerce/clothing). Shooting a white shirt against a white background I really need this. Lightroom does it perfectly, but I want to work with C1. Until it's fixed I'll have to work in Lightroom. Please add it as soon as possible.

Below you see what lightroom subject detection found without any assistance and what C1's magic brush could detect at best on the highest sensitivity.

AI masking is a necessary tool in todays age. The smart adjustments was a good idea in theory however compared to masking it’s just not a contest in priority.

Hopefully masking comes soon as I find myself using Lightroom much more just for that purpose even though I prefer C1.

I'm personally much less concerned with what other tools have or don't have. Like all here, I'm extremely competent in Capture One and have no problems doing the work I need to do on my images at as rapid a clip as I need to. It's not a FOMO thing.

AI isn't something you just bang out and it would worry me a lot if the team just slapped out something so they could put an AI tag on it to get the punters in. I'm also not "threatening to move" or planning to "jump ship" like all the YouTube click-baiters do. I use Capture One both because I like it and because it helps me get the best out of my raw images. It did so before the prominence of AI and it continues to do so now. With all of the swirl, it's almost like no one could do anything at all until AI showed up at the door :-). Well I could and still can :-). 

All that said, I'm very happy that they're publicly moving forward with improvements to masking. I would never turn down improvements in something that can be tedious when I need to do it a lot. I really do know that there are a lot of people who REALLY need to do subject masking a lot, for sure. I do want C1 to do it right and do it in a "Capture One way", if that makes sense. Honestly, I don't want Capture One to be "just like Lr" (otherwise I'd just use Lr, right?). It's one of the attractions, quite honestly. They (C1) have a particular point of view and I want to continue to see that in the capabilities they deliver. They deliver a lot of unique and powerful stuff and I wouldn't want to see it lost in a race to the bottom to "be like everybody else".

No one wakes up one day and decides to deliver AI-based functionality. I expect they've been planning it for a while and when you see the great work they've done with Smart Adjustments and Face Focus and a few other capabilities, you can already see that they're building up that skill set in this area. Obviously they can already detect humans, tone, facial features and the like. When they do release it, it won't be perfect at first go. Just like it wasn't and isn't perfect anywhere on any product or any device today. The nature of it is that "it learns". Agree with others that we don't want it to be an HDR/Pano release (once-and-done (seemingly)). There's always that "myth of equivalency": "so and so's product is at such-and-such a level of quality (released for several years), therefore the first release of a similar feature by C1 should be at that same level". That assumes so many things that just simply aren't true. 

The great thing is: it's coming and this feature is "In the works". So well done to Danny for getting his request acknowledged and on the roadmap! :-) 

We need at least the same kind of mask that Lightroom have, and hopefully even better. I am sure Capture one can give us that. At the moment Capture one is light years behind Lightroom and on1 to mention a few. Even many of the mobile apps have Ai mask.

For example for me, as an underwater photographer, the magic brush is useless because everything is blueish, so in my case, an Ai subject detection tool is needed.

374165855697 You are right.. I would like to see AI assisted tool for Subject/Object/Region detection. Users either select partially or draw an outline around the edge and then AI to kick in to detect precisely and generate mask. It is absolutely important for Capture One to get it right in first release as much as possible. 

Magic Brush is excellent but it needs V2.0 update. Tolerance and Refine Edge to be  made dynamic/interactive. User to set Brush size and Opacity before making selection. Popup dialog after selection to allow user to tweak Tolerance and Refine Edge to make precise selection.  

The is no real reason why the use of AI or whatever tool(s) are added to C1 should be either / or, ideally they would give us a choice which would increase flexibility and accuracy whilst improving workflow. So an improved magic brush that had excellent edge detection, plus the ability to refine it as per Affinity, but also an AI subject detection.

Of course this does depend upon how important C1 see this as important and the amount of resources they put into it. What I sincerely hope they DON'T do is a half cocked/beta style of tool like the HDR and pano stitch, which have never been improved since they were released.   

The magic brush has its purpose but another tool for masking is needed. Subject detection would be very welcome but I encourage Capture One to take a look at how easy two other companies have made it to select objects very quickly. First, DXO Photolab 6 has the Auto Brush where you paint on the inside of the subject with slight overlap on the outside and it finds the edges beautifully. Their implementation could be improved but the end result is awesome. It would be great if Capture One would have something like that. Secondly, please take a look at the selection brush from Affinity Photo. I absolutely love it and it makes selecting objects a breeze. The ability to refine the selection after the first pass is icing on the cake. 

I would love subject detection, but I  know there will be many times it wont get it just right. The key is to have tools that are easy to use that will refine the mask quickly.