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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NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One.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

Control time and stay ahead of the game

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One.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

As some of you may know from following the Phase One blog and emails, I regularly serve as a digital tech for the brilliant and extremely talented campaign beauty photography Sarah Silver.

After working with Phase One on a behind-the-scenes look at Silver’s digital workflow, followed by a webinar hosted by Sarah and myself, Phase One asked me to write a blog post about my own workflow as an interior photographer.

The truth is, I’m a visual person, as I’m sure many of you are; I’d much rather see things in action. With that, we decided a video would be the best way to show how I photograph interiors using Capture One 8.

Huge benefit with one application

For this particular production, I partnered with my favorite interior design brand, Viyet; the online destination for nearly new furniture finds from top designers. Feauturing pieces from distinguished lines such as B&B Italia, Cassina, Christian Liaigre, Holly Hunt, Ligne Roset, and Mies van der Rohe, the online redesign brand is changing the game for high-end furniture consignment.

When we started looking at production dates, Viyet was about to launch its very first pop-up shop at the FLOR store in SoHo, New York. The launch featured interior vignettes designed by Jennifer Hunter & Goergie Hambright of J+G Design; and Patrick J. Hamilton, an interior designer regularly featured on ApartmentTherapy.com.

Perfect challenge

This turned out to be the perfect challenge for myself and Capture One 8: an intimate space with two uniquely designed interior concepts — and of course, not enough hours in the day.

Without further ado, please enjoy this behind-the-scenes look into our day with Viyet at the FLOR store, and the final images from the shoot.

Best regards,

Topher Scott

Fewer clicks, better results!

The Auto Levels feature in Capture One 8.2 now has some new options, allowing you to optimize your images more efficiently and with more control.

Auto Levels now has two different modes: linked RGB channel optimization and individual channel optimization.

The new individual channel mode can, for instance, be very efficient for optimizing landscape images of mountains in the winter and spring time, where the combination of UV, snow, blue sky and distant haze can introduce a color cast.

The left image has been optimized using Auto Level set for linked RGB Channel Mode. The right image has been optimized using Auto Level set for individual Channel Mode. The individual channel mode removes the color cast both in the highlights (the snow) and in the shadows giving a much more pleasing image.

A Level tool for each color channel:

Let’s take a look at the image from the comparison above. In order to show you the optical challenges I will start creating three floating Levels tools. This allows me to see all the individual channels at the same time.

Adding an extra floating Levels tool from the Window menu

The 3 Levels tool stacked together each showing one color channel

When placing a tool underneath another floating tool, it will automatically stick to the first one. Now with the three individual histograms open at the same time, it is obvious to see that the black offset is not the same for the three channels. Distant haze and the high amount of scatter light hitting the lens cause this.

Individual channel mode:

When the histograms look like this, it makes sense to optimize the Levels for each individual color histogram. This can of course be done manually by dragging the end points but the new Auto Levels mode makes it possible to automate this task. To change the Auto Level mode from the default linked RGB Mode to the individual Red, Green, and Blue Channels mode, go the Preferences under the Exposure tab.

Changing Auto Levels mode in the Preferences menu

It’s possible to go directly to the Preferences menu from the Levels tool via the tool context menu indicated by the three dots. See screenshot above.

In the Preferences for the Levels tool it is now also possible to set the Auto Level Clipping thresholds. These thresholds determine how far into the histogram the shadow and highlight slider moves when using the Auto button in the tool.

The result of using the Auto button for the Levels tool when in individual channel mode. Notice how each color histogram has been optimized. The Exposure Warning is turned on and shows just a bit of highlight warning for areas reading more than 250. The red circle shows the Auto button for the Levels tool.

The default values are set for clipping only 0.1% of the histograms, which works well for most images. Setting higher values for the thresholds will lead to more clipping but will also result in an image with more contrast.

In this example the Auto Level Clipping thresholds have been set to 5%. With the Exposure Warning turned on we see that a much larger portion of the image now exceeds the warning levels.

Comparing the two different channel modes:

Now let’s go back to the comparison image where the Auto Levels feature has been applied using the two different modes. When using RGB channel mode we see that the RGB levels histogram gets clamped leaving the individual color histograms untouched.

In Red, Green, and Blue Channel mode the individual histograms get clamped, which leads to a fully expanded RGB histogram. Again it is easy to see the benefit of using the individual channel mode in this case as it leads to a more clean green color of the trees, removes the blue cast of the distant trees and cleans up the color cast in the snow.

RGB channel mode Red, Green, and Blue channel mode

Picking a Shadow or Highlight point works differently depending on the Channel Mode:

When the channel mode is set for the default RGB channel, the Shadow and Highlight picker will set the corresponding sliders as well as any target value in the RGB histogram. This will ensure that the White Balance of the image is maintained, which is extremely important for many images

In Red, Green, and Blue Channel mode the Shadow and Highlight picker as well as target values will work in the individual histograms.

All the best,

Niels