The Capture One Color Editor is designed for subtle manipulation, not wholesale colour substitutions. It has much in common with the Replace Color tool in Photoshop and Elements, but restricts itself to modest hue shifts rather than complete colour changes. It’s really useful where the image as a whole is more or less right, but individual colours are slightly off-key or over/under-saturated.
This moody Welsh landscape is a good example. It’s already had some editing work done on it to enhance the clarity, contrast and overall saturation, but I’m not happy with the greens (they’re more brown than green) in the hillside and that stormy sky should be grey, not blue.
01 Pick a colour
You’ll find the Color Editor panel on the Color tool tab, though don’t forget you can customise the tool tabs in Capture One to combine the panels you use most often. It looks complicated, but I’m going to use it on a pretty basic level. In fact, I’m using the Basic tab (there are Advanced and Skin Tone tabs too), and all I need to do is select the Pick Basic Color Correction eyedropper (1) and click on the hillside on an area of colour I want to change (2). The colour I’ve clicked on is identified in the colour wheel at the top of the Color Editor panel.
02 Hue rotation
Capture One uses the hue/saturation/lightness colour model for this tool, and I can start by adjusting the hue value – in Capture One, this is called Hue rotation (‘hue’ can be thought of as colours around a colour wheel, hence ‘rotation’). Pushing the slider to the right shifts the brown tones I clicked on in the hillside towards the green end of the spectrum, but the rest f the colours in the image aren’t affected.
