The secret sauce to Capture One Pro 8 is without a doubt a unique team of skilled and passionate people.
In this video and the next you get to meet the brainy PhD’s and passionate photographers all sharing the same love and passion for photography.
Find out who these people are, why they live and breathe for Capture One and why they think version 8 is the only choice for photographers who are serious about their images.
Feel the passion!
All the best,
Niels
The High Dynamic Range Tool in Capture One Pro 7 is a very powerful tool when dealing with the large dynamic range you often find in landscape images.
With this tool you can bring back details in both shadows and highlights. When doing extensive correction in both highlights and shadows it is often a very good idea to use the Clarity Tool to bring back more contrast to the image in order to give it a more natural look.
Before After
The image on the left-hand side is straight out of the camera. The image has been exposed to preserve the highlights with only a bit of clipping, leaving the shadows very dark. The image on the right-hand side is after the High dynamic Range Tool and the Clarity Tool have been applied in Capture One Pro 7.
The Clarity Tool in Capture One Pro 7 has three different methods for applying clarity to an image:
Punch:
The default method that besides applying local contrast also applies a bit of local saturation. This usually works very well on for instance landscape images.
Adds the local contrast the same way as “Punch” but without changing the saturation. When really strong clarity corrections are applied then this method often gives more pleasing results.
Classic:
This method was introduced in Capture One 6. It applies the local contrast without changing the saturation, but it does it in different way than the Punch and Neutral.
The image above where I added quite a bit of Clarity is a very good example to show the benefit of having alternative methods for clarity. In this example with lots of mostly gray clouds it is easy to see how the different method works.
Punch Neutral Classic
When comparing the Punch and Neutral method it is easy to see that the sunstroke as well as the yellowish sky over the horizon picks up more color when using Punch. The sunstrokes appear equally strong.
Comparing the Neutral and Classic method you will notice that Classic preserves the highlights better and it gives you much more details in the forest. On the other hand the sunstroke isn’t as strong as when using Neutral. You will also notice that Classic has a tendency to show a halo over the strong contrast edge of the forest.
So which method to use is very much an individual choice and is also very much dependent on the motive.
If you prefer Punch or Neutral, but are afraid to lose highlights details, I have a few tricks to overcome that:
1) In the Levels Tool bring down the target levels from 255 to for instance 245. This will leave a little headroom for the Clarity Tool.
2) Use a Local Adjustments Layer to add negative clarity over the highlights details with a smooth brush. This will reduce the clipping effect from the Clarity Tool.
Clarity Neutral Clarity Neutral including the little trick
Applying the trick with the Levels Tool and a negative clarity brush over the highlights in an Local Adjustments Layer brings back all the needed highlight details even when such Clarity corrections are applied as in this example.
All the best,
Niels
If you click in the textboxes next to the sliders you can adjust the value of the slider very precisely by using the up and down arrows on the keyboard. However if you want to make a big change you can hold down Shift while pressing the arrow keys and it will take a step that is 10 times larger.
The regular copy apply buttons in the toolbar copies all adjustments from one image to others. If you only want to apply a few of the adjustments, you can go to the adjustments clipboard tool and untick the adjustments you don’t want before pressing the apply button.
This is tedious however if you are only interested in having the adjustments from one tool transferred to all the other images. That is why we made the Local copy apply button. It is the small double arrow in the title bar of the tools that support it. Most of the tools in Capture One Pro 7 has a “local copy apply button”. This makes it easy to apply the adjustments from just one tool to many images.
Clicking the local copy apply button you are shown the part of the clipboard that contains the settings relevant for the tool. Then you can choose to either copy those settings to the clipboard or you can apply them directly without really using the clipboard.
To be able to work really fast we have made it so that if you hold down Alt while clicking the local copy apply button, it corresponds to clicking copy in the box. Holding down the Shift key corresponds to clicking apply in the box.
People are sometimes confused with how to use the apply button – the idea is that you select multiple images and then you can quickly give all the images e.g. the same Black and White Tool setting look as the primary variant by holding down the Alt key and clicking the local copy apply button.
If you like this way of working you should also try adding the “Copy and Apply Adjustments” button to the main window toolbar. Just right-click the toolbar and select customize.
Find the item called “Copy and Apply Adjustments” and drag it to the toolbar.
This button works exactly like the local one in the tools – however it copies settings across all tools just like the regular copy apply buttons f you press the “Copy and Apply Adjustments” button you are shown a dialog box containing the clipboard.
The “add color readout” cursor tool allows you to get small signs with readouts of the color value in different points of the image. You simply left-click to add them to the screen. If you want to remove one of the readouts you can simply hold down the Alt key, while clicking on it and it will disappear. If you have made multiple readouts and want to remove all of the at once you hold down the Shift and Alt keys at the same time, while clicking on one of them.
If you want to see how the image would look without the adjustments from one of the tools, you could simply press the local reset button on that tool and afterwards press undo. However there is a more elegant way to do it. Hold down the Alt key while clicking on the reset button in the tool and the tool adjustments will be reset as long as you click. When you release the Alt key and the left mouse button the adjustments will return.
If you hold down Shift while drawing a Gradient Mask, you can get the mask to snap to 45 degree angles. This is nice if you want your mask to be very accurate.
When a Variant is processed/exported to e.g. .jpg, Capture One Pro 7 saves the path to the output file. If you want to see that list, then select an image that has been processed previously (all processed images will have a small gear icon overlaid on their thumbnail).
Then click the “adjustments->process history” menu item to see a list of the processed files. You can click on them to have them opened in the default image viewer on your system.
Best regards,
Theis Hansen
The shift key is definitely worth getting to know better and can as any other wingman help you achieve great things.
Check out the shortcuts below and discover how the shift key can help you speed up your workflow in Capture One.
This is the first part of a small collection of shortcuts all involving the shift key from another one of those late nights in the office.
When starting Capture One Pro 7, it will automatically load the Session or Catalog you used last time before it closed. This is a nice feature because it makes it easy to continue working from where you left off.
However if you know you are starting Capture One Pro 7 with the goal of creating a new Session or Catalog, try holding down the Shift (Windows) or Alt/Option (mac) when launching Capture One and you will see a dialog box giving you the option of creating a new Session or Catalog. You can also choose to open an existing Session or Catalog.
I often use Sessions in Capture One Pro 7 for moving around images on my hard drive. It is better than using Explorer/Finder because it will remember to move the Capture One settings files along with the RAW files.
Usually I simply drag images from the thumbnail browser to the desired folder in the Library Tool. Depending on if you are pointing to a different drive than the one the file is on; Capture One Pro 7 will copy or move the file to the folder you drop it in (just like Windows Explorer). To force it to copy, hold down ctrl (a small “+” will appear next to the mouse cursor).
To force it to move the file, hold down shift (those shortcuts also work in Windows Explorer).
Capture One Pro 7 has two modes for dealing with multiple selected Variants. Press this button on the toolbar or click “Edit->Edit All Selected Variants” to toggle between the two modes.
When “edit all selected Variants” is enabled (orange) the buttons in the toolbar (like trash, rotate or process) will apply to all selected variants. When “edit all selected variants” is disabled, only the primary Variant (the one with the wide border around it) will be affected by the buttons on the toolbar.
While “edit multiple variants” is powerful, it is also dangerous since you could end up deleting or resetting all the selected variants instead of just the primary one you were looking at. We have reduced the risk of this happening by showing a warning when a dangerous operation is about to be performed.
A simpler way of working is to disable “edit all selected variants” and when you want to process/reset/trash all of your selected images then hold down the shift key while clicking the desired toolbar button. Then it will affect all selected Variants even though the “edit all selected variants” button has been disabled. Notice when holding down shift and hovering over the toolbar buttons, we show the number of variants that will be affected.
Using shortcut keys to select the cursor tool you need is very convenient. To make the shortcuts easier to remember, the shortcut key is shown for each cursor tool in the cursor tool selector. But how do you select the “Rotate Freehand” cursor tool when it has the same shortcut (“r”) as the “Straighten” cursor tool? Hold down shift and press the “r” key multiple times to cycle through all the cursor tools that have “r” as a shortcut key.
That’s it for this week. Don’t miss the sequel next week!
Best regards,
Theis