If you’re using Capture One, you probably know that the newest version (14.3.0) dropped today. If you’re reading this, you’re probably installing it and putting it through its paces. The new Magic Brush works super well for dealing with sky and flat-coloured textures, which is of great help to those of us doing architectural photography (who would have otherwise used the Color Editor, created a color area mask, and then edited it from there. OK, so there are situations when I’ll still end up doing that), but…

When it comes to mask visibility, Capture One giveth and Capture One taketh away: one of the things you’ll find yourself wanting to do is switch between ‘always show mask’ and ‘only show mask when drawing’, particularly as you learn how the Magic Brush works in your workflow. They’ve moved these options (only) up to the menu bar, which is somewhat inconvenient, but worse yet: they removed the shortcut keys for these and there’s no option to get them back! .

Having submitted this notable omission as a bug on every beta release they put out and it still isn’t fixed in the release version, it’s time to take matters into your own hands. Here’s what to do if the lack of shortcut keys for these functions bugs you as much as it bugs me:

1. Open Capture One 21

2. Go to System Preferences, Keyboard.

3. Open the Shortcuts tab

4. Open App Shortcuts

5. Click the + button, and add Capture One 21

6. Create a shortcut key for Always Display Mask and Only Display Mask When Drawing. Unfortunately, you can’t have them toggle (which is what I’ve always wanted), but you can put them on adjacent keys. I’m using Option+M for Always Display Mask (which is close to the old M shortcut for this in previous releases), and Option+N for Only Display Mask When Drawing. Since I edit with a touchpad to the left and a Wacom tablet to the right, this puts the two shortcuts in a convenient place when I’m editing.

7. To make sure it works, go back to Capture One and check the Layer menu. You should now see the shortcut keys you assigned show up in the menu for the appropriate options, as Capture One should have given you the functionality to do in Edit Shortcuts… but, for reasons known only in Denmark, they didn't.

Happy editing!

Oh, and speaking of stuff they left out: if you’re a pro user, you’re probably also missing a bunch of the functionality and smoothness that the old Process tab workflow had. I know I certainly am—a bunch of stuff including setting metadata, subfolders, etc. that used to be a couple of clicks away in the old workflow is now much slower and clumsier, not to mention being able to work on another project easily while seeing where C1 is on its batch export. If you miss the old Process workflow, and you own Phase gear/are a POCP/otherwise get premium support [read: they actually might listen to you], go submit a support case and ask for it back in a future release. I did in beta and will be going over there to yell at them further for this. To paraphrase the old political saw: today we protest, tomorrow we script.