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High-Contrast Scenes at Ormiston Gorge, Central Australia

Ormiston Gorge isn’t as big as the Grand Canyon, nor as deep or as wide, but it does have a spiritual presence. The age of the rocks, the ruggedness of the terrain, the light spinifex grasses and the white trunked gum trees create an enchanting landscape. Around two hours west of Alice Springs, it’s not far from Glen Helen Gorge where we were staying for the night and we planned to be there for the morning shoot.

We awoke at a reasonable time, 5.00 a.m. which was an hour or so before sunrise. A short trip in our vehicle and we found ourselves at the mouth of the Gorge. From the car park, you can take a level stroll around a dry river bed and into the gorge itself. There are several deep pools locked by towering rock walls, but to walk further requires a more agile state of mind and some rock hopping. We went this way on a PODAS a couple of years ago with Kevin Raber, Ken Duncan and Jeff Schewe.

The other option is to climb up a path. There’s a great gum tree up the top of the rise and it can be photographed from a point half way up, or up at the tree itself. I went all the way to the top and spent a magical hour watching the light intensify, the sun rise and the light snake its way from the top of the gum tree down to the bottom of its trunk.

Just being up and out at this time of the day is wonderful enough, taking a few great landscape shots even better!

Across from the tree, a finger of land pushes into the Gorge, requiring it to dog-leg around. As the sun rises, its rays skim across the top of this land, lighting up the trees and grasses, but I’m also seeing the strong reds come through in the rock faces below and behind. To my eye, it’s a strong composition, but it requires a telephoto to make it happen. Although many people think landscape photography is best approached with a wide-angle or a panorama camera, I find a lot of my shots work better by simplifying the scene with a telephoto.

The accompanying image is photographed with a 110mm Schneider Kreuznach, so it’s only a mid-telephoto, but long enough to crop the scene and eliminate the sky behind. By removing the sky, the image has the feeling that the rock face behind goes upwards forever, plus it reduces the number of compositional elements to deal with.

And while I might be teaching most readers to suck eggs, when shooting into the light, it’s important to not only use a lens hood, but perhaps shade the lens hood with a cutter or your hand as well. It’s essential to keep any unwanted flare under control.

Post Production

In Capture One, the processing was relatively simple, especially with the new High Dynamic Range algorithms running around inside.

However, to start I struggled with the colour balance a little. The natural or ‘correct’ colour was a little yellow to my eye and I wanted there to be more contrast between the colour in the sunlight and the colour in the shade. The camera had set the Kelvin at around daylight, which was very sensible, but I found by dragging the Kelvin slider down to 4600-4700 that I was able to produce a little coolness in the shadows, and this contrasted well with the warmth of the sunlight on the yellow grasses.

The exposure was pretty right, so next step was to increase the contrast and give the image some guts. This worked well, except in two places. The highlights on the grasses lost detail and appeared too light, while the shadow areas in the bottom left became a little muddy. No trouble, the High Dynamic Range tool is the answer.

Using the Shadow slider, I lightened up the shadows without going overboard. I still want this to be a dark part of the image, but I want you to be able to see what’s in it. Similarly, the Highlight slider allowed me to return detail and colour in the grasses up the top.

I find when using the High Dynamic Range tool that I have to return to the Contrast slider in the Exposure tool and, usually, add in a little more contrast. Not always, of course, but if you’ve been using the High Dynamic Range tool and struggling a bit, try using it in combination with the Contrast slider and between the three controls, Capture One Pro 7 is remarkably powerful.

Sitting back and looking at the image, I then increased the colour saturation (I like colour), cropped the top of the sky out of the image completely, added in a vignette to darken the edges and, finally, added a Local Adjustment to darken down the rock wall in the distance. This helps to emphasise the separation between it and the finger of land in sunlight.

Cheers,

Peter

How to Delete Images in Capture One Pro 7

Often, one of the first tasks to do after importing images into Capture One Pro 7 is to delete those images that you don’t want to keep. Doing so early in the workflow makes it easy to focus on the good images.

Capture One has always offered an easy and convenient trash concept when organizing images in a Session. When you delete an image from a Session, the image will be moved to the Session Trash folder. You can always look in the Trash folder and move files back if you regret your deletion. You only delete the files for good if you use the option “Empty Session Trash”.

When organizing your images in a Catalog, Capture One Pro 7 has a similar concept for deleting images but it works a little different and is dependent on whether the original files are stored inside the Catalog or on an external location.

Deletion of images stored inside the Catalog

When working with images stored inside the Catalog, Capture One Pro 7 also provides an easy method of handling trashed images. When you delete an image, it will be removed from the Catalog and added to the Trash Collection.

As with a Session, you can look in the trash collection and move the files back into any other user collection or into the All Images Collection, if you regret your deletion. If you want to delete the images permanently from the Trash Collection, you can right click on the Catalog Trash and select the “Empty Catalog Trash”.

When you delete an image, for instance from your Recent Imports Collection, you will get a warning telling you that the image will be removed from the Catalog and put into the Catalog Trash (as shown above).

Deletion of images stored outside the Catalog

When your original files are stored outside the Catalog, you will typically have organized the files into a structured folders system – e.g. by using year, month and event name in the folder names. One of the benefits of using images stored outside the Catalog is that you don’t need to have access to your images in order to work and search within the Catalog (check out this previous post to learn more about storing your images outside the Catalog) This allows you to bring a smaller Catalog with you on the road more easily. Another benefit of using images stored externally, is that you can have different Catalogs referring to the same original file, while you have total freedom to adjust the image in different ways in different Catalogs. For instance, you could create a Black and White Catalog, as well as a Catalog for Color versions of the same raw files.

When deleting an image that’s stored outside the Catalog, Capture One Pro 7 does not use the Catalog Trash but gives you 2 options. You can either remove the image from the Catalog but leave it at its location or you can remove it from the Catalog and into the OS System Trash. The first option makes sense if you have another Catalog that uses the same image folder.

Warning dialog when deleting a file where the raw image is stored outside of the Catalog

Deleting multiple images

Right after import, I typically browse through the Recent Import folder and delete all those images, I for sure don’t want to keep. If I delete the files as I browse through them, I need to choose the deletion option for each image. To avoid this, I simply use the shortcut for tagging the images I don’t like with the Red color Tag (short cut “-“). After sorting, I use the filter to show only the Red Tagged images. I quickly double-check that all the Red tagged images should be deleted before I select and delete them at once.

Red color tag has been used to tag images for deletion. The Filter tool is used to show the images with a red tag.

Removing from a Catalog Album

If you have organized your images into albums, and you decide that a specific image should not be part of that album later, you can remove the image. When doing so, you do not remove it from the Catalog but just from the selected album. The file is still part of the Catalog and you won’t get a warning.

If you want to remove the file totally from the Catalog, you need to locate the file in the “All Images” Collection and delete it from there.

All the best,

Niels

Preview Sizes and Offline Editing in Capture One Pro 7

One of the great benefits of working with Catalogs in Capture One Pro 7 is the ability to work on your images – even when they are ‘offline’.

When you work with a Catalog in Capture One Pro 7, you can choose to store your original images inside the Catalog itself or you can store them at their existing location, for example on external hard drives.

The Catalog contains a preview image of every raw file in the Catalog, so even if you don’t have access to your storage media, you can still work with your image Catalog, edit metadata, organise it and even make visual adjustments.

Why do we use Previews in Capture One?

Every time an image is imported into a Catalog, Capture One Pro 7 creates an exact preview of the raw file and stores it within the Catalog. Most operations in Capture One Pro 7 actually work with the preview, as it is much faster to use the smaller preview file than constantly having to read the much larger raw file.

Therefore, the images you see in the Browser and Viewer are the preview images. Capture One Pro 7 only needs to access the full raw file in order to show the image in the viewer if you need to view the image at 100% or if you work on a monitor with an extremely high resolution. Capture One Pro 7 also does some smart caching, by reading images before and after the currently selected image thus making the shift to the next or previous image faster.

The preview will of course visually match the output image based on the adjustments made in Capture One Pro 7.

Preview Sizes in the Capture One Catalog

The size of the preview inside the Catalog file can be controlled by the Preferences Dialogue under the Image Tab.

By default, the preview size is set at 2560 pixels in Capture One Pro 7 while the preview size was only 1024 pixels in version 6. Because Capture One Pro 7 now uses a much smarter method for compressing the preview files, the new default preview at 2560 pixels takes up roughly the same space as the old preview at 1024 pixels in Capture One 6.

The new high resolution default preview in Capture One Pro 7 really gives you great benefits when you work with offline files. The 2560 pixels give such a high resolution that you may not notice that you are working with offline images. Typically, you can even zoom into the images to about 50% without missing details in the images.

If you are working a lot with your images offline, it makes sense to use a larger preview size. A large preview will increase loading times for previews in the application, but on more powerful computers this will be less noticeable. Larger preview image sizes will also increase the general size of the Catalog.

Catalog Size Comparison

The following table shows the Catalog size for different number of images and preview sizes for Canon 5D Mark III raw files placed outside the Catalog.

Nr. of images	1000	5000	10000	25000	%
RAW size( Gbyte)	28	140	280	700	100%
preview size = 2560 (default)	1.62	8.12	16.24	40.6	5.8%
preview size = 1440	0.53	2.63	5.26	13.15	1.9%
preview size = 1024	0.28	1.41	2.82	7.05	1.0%
preview size = 640	0.15	0.76	1.52	3.8	0.5%

From the table, you can see that using the default preview size at 2560 pixels only takes up 5.8% more space than the original raw files but you get such a nice and large preview file for working with offline files. On the other hand, the Catalog will take up 40.6 Gbyte if you have added 25000 images. So, if you find that the “offline” preview quality is good enough with 1440 or 1024 pixels, then your catalog can actually be considerably smaller.

Changing Preview Sizes

To change the preview size, simply select a new value in the pull down menu.

Any changes made here will only affect images imported after the change has been made. The previews of existing images will have the size set in the preferences at the time of import.

If necessary, you can update existing images with a smaller or larger size preview by :

1. Choose the new preview size

Select the images in the Catalog to be updated
Go to File>Regenerate Previews. The Activity Monitor will show the progress of the preview generation.

Existing previews will be replaced with the new preview size. Subsequent imports will also be made with the new size.

This may be useful to do if you have in the past chosen a smaller preview size and would like the benefit of a larger preview size.

All the best,

Niels

Adding Keywords in a Session or Catalog

Keywords in any collection of images (a collection could be an Album or Smart Album, for example) are displayed in the Filters tool. The only keywords that are displayed are the ones that belong to that particular collection. For example in this Album, we can see that 28 have no keywords at all, five images have the keyword Ice and 23 have the keyword Landscape.

Keywords are added in the Metadata tool which can be found in the metadata tool tab. Keywords that already exist in a collection can easily be added to further images, simply with a drag-and-drop action.

Adding Keywords

To add multiple keywords to an image or collection of images, the easiest place to do this is in the Metadata tool. Any image has the possibility to store a great deal of metadata, which can either be generated automatically, in the case of Camera EXIF data, or can be added by the user at a later date, following the metadata IPTC standard.

Keywords are added in the last section of the tool.

To add a keyword to a currently selected image simply click on the plus icon and enter the keyword into the text box.

To continue adding keywords to the same image on a Mac, hit Enter after each keyword to immediately add a new one. Hit Tab to finish the keyword entry for a particular image. On Windows, you need to click the plus icon for each new keyword you want to add and use Tab to finish the keyword entry for a particular image.

Adding Keywords to Multiple Images

To add the same group of keywords to more than one image, use the Copy Settings button (indicated by the top circle) in the Metadata toolbar.

For this particular image we can see that Rating and the Keywords will be copied when we click on the Copy button.

Next, select the other images that you would like to add the Keywords to, click the Copy Settings button once more. If we don’t want to copy the Rating across to other images, we can simply uncheck it…

Finally, click on Apply.

TIP – To avoid entering the Adjustments Clipboard dialogue, hold down the Option key (OS X) or Alt key (Win) to copy immediately or select the image with the master metadata and the images which you want to apply that too, and then Shift click the Copy Settings button. The changes will be applied immediately!

Adding Keywords with Drag and Drop

To add a single keyword to one or more images really quickly, simply drag and drop those images onto the keyword in the Keyword section of the filters tool…

You can use the No Keywords filter to help you see which images in a collection still need Keywords applied.

All the best,

Niels