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Save time on detailed work

Personal work is very important to me. Perhaps it doesn’t pay off straight away, but it gives you a lot of exposure online and usually leads to commercial work. So I tend to say I earn all my money with my commercial work and spend it on my personal work!

“Do what makes you happy and see what happens”

One of previous personal projects “Flower Man” was shot in Calcutta. CNN has just picked that up for example, but it is always difficult to know what is going to work and what isn’t. I think you should just do whatever makes you happy and see what happens!

An obvious choice

I have been using Capture One for some years now, and I although I wouldn’t say I use every feature in Capture One, there are a few standout features that make it an obvious choice for me. I was one of the first photographers who had early access to the new Phase One XF camera, which has just been launched. I had to make a choice on what medium format camera system to go for a few years back and due to Capture One, I chose Phase One. The integration between the software and the camera is so important and I am happy to see that improved again with the New XF and Capture One.

A lot of my personal work is extremely detailed, with many layers in Photoshop separating the model from the background and other elements. But this really takes a lot of time and for some commercial work I need a smooth and fast way to adjust and process a lot of images quickly. This is where Capture One wins!

Hollywood street characters

In this blog post I have decided to use an image from my next personal project – Documenting Hollywood street characters. The idea came to me on an editorial assignment a few months ago. I went to Los Angeles to shoot a cover story for a Danish magazine and my hotel was located close to Hollywood Boulevard where all the street characters are. These characters pose with you for a photograph in exchange for a ‘tip’ of a few dollars.

Spidermen and Minnie Mouse

What really fascinated me was the difference in the characters, some of them look actually like the real deal and others just look like they just came back from a big night out in a funny costume. I like the fact that there are always several Spidermen on the boulevard and the spiderman that I ended up shooting was actually an african american guy….and who would have thought that inside Minnie Mouse there is and old Mexican women?

I didn’t just want to show their characters, I also wanted to show the person behind the mask. It’s the combination of the character and person that really fascinates me.

Meet Captain Boulevard

This image is of Captain Boulevard! One of the features that I use a lot now in Capture One is Local Adjustments. Before I would develop three of four images from Capture One with varying exposure and blend them together in Photoshop. This was hugely time-consuming, especially if the corrections that needed to be done were relatively minor.

This also saves a lot of data. Generating 16-Bit TIFF Files and adding three or four layers to a Photoshop file, soon grows to a lot of Megabytes. Taking care of the layers in Capture One prevents this as I am simply working on the RAW data.

Here is the image straight out of the camera. Obviously, I expect I can make the right exposure, but it still helps to have a file that can stand up to and be pushed in Photoshop if needed.

My basic corrections are nothing more than an exposure tweak, setting the White Balance and also a slight vignette.

The Vignetting tool in Capture One is very simple: Just a slider for decreasing or increasing the exposure on the Vignette. But what I like the most is that the overall effect is very natural. It doesn’t look fake but perfectly seamless.

My next step is to apply some very simple Local adjustments.

Using the Brush tool (indicated by the orange circle) I have drawn a simple mask on the left-hand side (shown in Red) just to reduce the exposure down a little. By right-clicking with the Brush tool selected I can change the parameters of the brush. One thing I tend to do is keep the brush opacity relatively low. In my opinion, this makes the adjustments more subtle and gives me the option to increase the effect by brushing over the surface again with a brush set to an equally low opacity.

The next Local Adjustment is on Captain Boulevard’s chest and body. I just wanted to lighten this area a little and add a bit more ‘modelling’. If you haven’t tried this in Capture One, it’s easy to do! Just keep the brush opacity low and make single or repeated strokes over the area. Find the combination of exposure adjustment and brush opacity that works for you and your image.

It’s subtle, but I spend a tremendous amount of attention to detail, whether that be in Capture One or Photoshop.

Finally, as is often the way with portraits, I found I preferred the body position of one image and the facial expression of another image!

So after exporting the finished body and head from Capture One as 16-Bit TIF files, its over to Photoshop to mask the two together. Here is the final image…

Check out more of my work here

All the best,

Ken Hermann

Getting started with Capture One Pro 8

This week we have the pleasure of featuring another one of our talented Ambassadors on the blog.

Join Craig Beckta, professional portrait photographer, on a guided tour to Capture One. Watch him go through the interface and some of the most important features – all you need to get up and running with Capture One Pro 8.

“I used to be a helicopter mechanic in the Airforce for 20 years prior to being a full-time photographer. One of the things they stressed was using the right tools for the right job and that always kind of stuck with me. I’ve tried lots of different software, but for me Capture One seems to be the right tool for the job”, says Craig Beckta.

http://youtu.be/eA7_F3ETk40&w=590&h=443

Also check out my photography tutorials at Youtube. They have been viewed over a “1.4 Million” times in 193 Countries around the World!

Also connect with me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

Best regards,

Craig

Sessions + Catalogs: Get the best of both worlds

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

Capture One offers two distinct ways of managing your files. Either via a Catalog (or Library as you may know it) or uniquely to Capture One, a Session. Each method offers advantages in file handling, but what if you wanted to take advantage of both of these?

This is exactly what I do with my personal work at home. I get the advantages of both systems in a workflow that works for me.

Why I work with both

Before I go further, perhaps it will help to explain my home situation in terms of physical storage, and how I catalog my images. I have a home office remote from the house (which happens to be a log cabin in the garden – ‘Yard’ for the USA!) which contains my hard drives for image storage.

My only computer is a laptop, which is then easy to move between house / office / home office and also travel with when working on the road for Phase One.

Because of storage limitations I don’t keep ALL images on my Laptop. Even though it has a 1TB hard drive, that’s pretty easy to fill up, in this day and age! I do however keep my Catalog database on the local laptop hard drive, which gives me the ability to browse all my images without being attached to my office storage, because Capture One previews are ‘Smart’. Meaning that I can still browse and edit images.

This is a great benefit, as all your images are always on hand for viewing and sorting.

This is what my internal drive currently looks like in terms of some of Sessions I am currently working on. They are all stored on a folder called ‘Capture One Sessions’….

Each session follows the default format of the automatically created folders, Capture, Output, Selects and Trash. We can see if we look at one at random…

This particular Session shows a trip to Las Vegas. If we expand it out you can see that the Capture folder has been subdivided and the Output folder has been subdivided in the same way too.

As a side note the Output sub folders were generated automatically to mirror the Capture folders using a new feature in Capture One 8.2. See this blog post for more info.

Also my output folders contain my exports in different formats using different Recipes in Capture One. This gives me a good way to sort them to their final destinations. i.e Facebook!

Benefits of working in a Session like this

So working in a Session like this gives me a good way to..

Decide on the images I really want to keep (delete the losers!)
Organise the Captures and Output in a useful way
Keep it locally on my laptop so I can access it whether at the office, in the house, in the home office or in an airport!

When I consider the Session to be ‘finished’ I can then move it to my Catalog. From here on, you might decide on a different workflow to me, but I will present some other options at the end.

As a general rule I don’t tend to move the Outputs to my Catalog because I am not a heavy Photoshop user. I can do 99% of my work in Capture One and by this point the outputs have already found their home (for example Instagram and Facebook). If I need to, I can just generate them again from Capture One with a lightening fast export! But if I need an output folder or two, I can also import them using the same steps below…

Copy the Capture folder from my Laptop to my external hard drive where I store all my images for Cataloging.
Open up my Catalog
Import the Capture folder into my catalog.

That’s it! But what about adjustments, ratings, metadata and so forth I hear you cry? That is all brought over too, if you remember one simple check box. Here is a grab of the import window settings when I import into my Catalog…

‘Store Files’ is set to ‘Current Location’ as I have already copied them over to the right location on my external hard drive.

Checking ‘Include Existing Adjustments’ means all that important adjustment data is brought over.

Once the import is done and I have made sure a backup has kicked in, I can simply delete the Session.

Job Done!

Alternatives

You might be wondering why I don’t use the ‘Import Session’ option that is available in a Capture One Catalog? The reason is that I don’t need all the Session folders (For example the output) so its a bit of a waste of time for me. But if you are wanting to import the entire session into your catalog, this is an excellent choice!

You can find this option under File>Import Session. Bear in mind that the Import Session Command doesn’t move the Session anywhere, so before using that command, make sure you have moved the Session to where you want it to be Cataloged.

As an alternative I could make smaller Catalogs on my laptop and then import them into my ‘Master’ catalog. This is entirely possible in Capture One, but I enjoy the simplicity that the Session option has to offer.

Further Learning

To learn more about Sessions in general, watch a short tutorial on our Youtube channel

To follow an in-depth webinar recording comparing Sessions to Catalogs, watch here.

Best regards,

David

Advanced cropping tips for a faster workflow

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One. To learn more about our latest version, click here.

A popular question line in many of our webinars on Capture One often concerns cropping. For example, “How do I crop to specific dimensions?’ or “How do I crop to a certain width in Cm/Inches/Pixels”.

In this blog post I will run through a couple of examples and golden rules, which you can apply to your own workflow.

A golden rule

When cropping, it is worth keeping in mind that cropping dimensions and other factors are directly related to the currently selected recipe, in the Process Recipes tool.

In the first example below, the recipe ‘TIFF 8 Bit Full Size (Adobe RGB)’ is selected. Notice that the Scale option in the Basic tab of the Process Recipe tool is set to Fixed and 100%.

Then, if we look at our cropping values in the Capture One viewer, the pixel dimensions show that Capture One is simply cropping to the maximum possible resolution. (These cropping Labels can be disabled in the Capture One Preferences if you would prefer not to see them, but they are useful!)

Now, if I choose recipe where the scale is somehow changed, in this case limiting the number of pixels to a certain value on an edge, then the pixel values in the crop will reflect that also.

So, hopefully you will consider this as a clue as to how we can crop to specific dimensions by linking the Crop tool to the Process Recipe. But more on that later, let’s start simple.

Often the most you need to do when cropping is to honor a certain aspect ratio. This is very simple to achieve. With the new quick cursor tools in Capture One 8.1, this is even simpler – with the Crop tool selected, simply right- or control-click.

Then choose the aspect ration in the Ratio drop down menu.

So, for example, if we needed a 2×3 output we would choose it accordingly. Usefully, it is not necessary to have a portrait or landscape aspect ratio. The crop will ‘snap’ to either if you choose to give priority to a landscape or portrait crop.

New Aspect Ratios can be created by choosing the first option in the same menu.

This method can be used for creating outputs that fit into an aspect ratio. For example, you can make an aspect ratio set to ’10 x 8’ for producing 10 inch by 8 inch prints, knowing that it will be the right ratio to print to that size, if you are prepared to let the print engine resize to the actual dimensions. There is nothing wrong with that method, especially if you may want to print larger at a point in time, but if that is not the case, then you are creating too large an output for the task at hand.

If you want to link the Crop tool to the currently selected Process Recipe, then it’s very simple. In the available options in the above Ratio menu, choose Output.

The next part is to change the scaling options in the Process Recipe tool to specific dimensions.

Now, when the Crop tool is used, with that Recipe selected the Crop tool will always crop to the correct aspect ratio and output to the correct dimensions.

If you have ever seen that one of the crop labels is marked in red, this usually means that the Crop tool aspect ratio has not be set to Output, and therefore mismatches the Recipe, or the required output is not possible in terms of available resolution or Capture One’s scaling restraints.

The possibilities of cropping in this method are not limited to exact dimensions. If you take a look in the Scale drop down menu, several other options are possible. For example, limiting the long or short edge to a certain number of pixels has lots of uses in web size requirements.

This is another reason why it is worth exercising the full possibilities in a Process Recipe. It can save you huge amounts of time and improve the quality of output.

Best regards,

David Grover