All About The Mastin Labs Custom Workspace For Capture One
A custom workspace can really speed up your workflow and make your editing time a lot smoother!
At Mastin Labs, one of our primary goals (after helping you put the beautiful finishing touches on your images, of course) is to give our customers a fast and straight-forward editing workflow using our products. One way we’ve done this for our Capture One users is to create a custom workspace you can install that keeps all the tools you need for our 3-step Workflow in one handy location.
If you use Mastin Labs Capture One styles, here's our our custom Capture One workspace. Our workspace is also an excellent tool to help you get your bearings if you’re new to Capture One. Let’s take a quick tour through the workspace so you can jump right in. From top to bottom, here’s what’s in the Mastin Labs workspace for Capture One.
Histogram
The histogram tool displays a graph that represents the tones and values of your image, as well as your ISO, shutter speed, and aperture settings. Capture One’s histogram has a gray shadowed area that represents the luminosity values from pure black to pure white and line graph overlays for red, green, and blue values.
The histogram is an invaluable tool to visualize the data in your photos. Whether your screen’s brightness is high or low, whether you calibrate or not, the histogram will show you exactly what’s there even if your eye may deceive you.
Base Characteristics
The base characteristics tool is one that most users won’t need to touch, but we’ve included it to make life easier for the small percentage of people who will have a specific need. If you set your camera to an internal profile other than its default (Landscape, Portrait, etc.), you’ll need to change the curve in this tool to “Film Standard.”
Currently, changes to this tool will only be necessary if you’re using a non-default camera profile along with our Portra Original style pack. Though, as updates roll out for other style packs, the information in this section will apply to those as well. That’s because we wanted to give our styles full compatibility with layers, and to do that, the base characteristic curve is no longer “baked in” to the styles.
For photographers who are using their camera’s default camera profile, which is most of you, you can forget this tool is there.
Exposure
The exposure tool contains sliders for exposure, contrast, brightness, and saturation. For a three-step workflow, you’ll only need to use the exposure slider. Exposure adjustments are an essential part of the recommended workflow for Mastin Labs products. Often, after applying a Mastin Labs style, you’ll need to bump your exposure up a little.
High Dynamic Range
The high dynamic range tool in Capture One 20 consists of four sliders: highlight, shadow, white, and black. If you’re using an older version Capture One, you’ll only see two sliders: highlight and shadow. These aren’t part of the three-click workflow, but it’s nice to have them easily accessible in case you run into a dynamic range issue that you can’t fix with the tone profiles in your style pack.
The highlight and shadow slides can make more sweeping adjustments to their respective tones in an image, while the white and black sliders are useful in fine-tuning only the very brightest and darkest parts of the photo.
White Balance
White balance is also a crucial part of the three-step workflow. In the white balance tool, you’ll find a “mode” dropdown menu and sliders for Kelvin and tint adjustments. The dropdown allows you to choose from Capture One’s white balance presets or revert to the settings at import by choosing “shot” from the menu.
Use the Kelvin slider to adjust the white balance temperature from cool to warm. Moving the slider to the left makes the image cooler, and moving it to the right will increase warmth. The tint slider adjusts the image’s tint on the green to magenta scale. Sliding it to the left makes the image more green, and sliding to the right adds magenta.
Keystone
The keystone tool has four sliders for perspective correction and three buttons in the bottom right corner that you can press for a guided adjustment. Keystone refers to the perspective phenomenon that makes buildings and the like look like they’re leaning back when you point your camera up at them. Professionals who rely on combatting keystoning in every image (architecture photographers, for instance) will invest in tools like tilt-shift lenses. But, for one-off cases, the keystone tool is a great fix.
The vertical slider lets you skew the image to correct the perspective on a vertical axis, while the horizontal does the same on a horizontal axis. The Amount slider allows you to back your correction off a little if you feel it looks unnatural. The aspect slider stretches the image. The zero position is neutral, and sliding to the right will stretch it horizontally while sliding to the left will stretch vertically.
The buttons in the corner place guides on the screen that you position to let Capture One make automatic adjustments to the image’s perspective. From left to right, the buttons add vertical, horizontal, or guides for both vertical and horizontal changes. To use them, click the button you’d like to use, position the guides in line with lines you want to be straight, and click “apply.”
Styles and Presets
Last but certainly not least, we have the main event in a Mastin Labs workflow - the styles! The styles and presets tool is where you go to find your Mastin Labs styles, as well as any other styles you’ve installed and the ones that come with Capture One. There is an area at the top that shows what presets you’ve applied, and beneath that are expandable lists for user styles, built-in styles, user presets, and built-in presets.
If you’re accustomed to Lightroom language, it may seem a little confusing that there are presets in Capture One too. In Capture One, presets are saved settings that affect one tool, while styles apply changes to multiple tools and create an overall look.
To use your Mastin Labs styles, expand the “User Styles” list. There you’ll find any styles that you’ve installed. Within each Mastin Labs pack, you’ll find settings to apply the base film style, adjust white balance, set a tone profile, toggle lens correction on or off, and apply grain settings.
Now you know your way around the Mastin Labs custom workspace for Capture One! Instead of looking through various tool tabs for the setting you use the most, you can find them all in one place.
