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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

Powerful Search & Filtering in a Session or Catalog

Capture One Pro 7 introduced a much improved toolset for searching and filtering your images – not only in a Catalog but also in a Session.

By default, the Filters tool is placed in the Library tool tab, containing the basic filters of Rating, Color Tag, Date and Keywords.

Whenever you browse to a collection of images, the search filters show a corresponding number to the right, which represents how many images match those criteria. For example, in this collection we can see that twenty images are rated at five stars and ten images are tagged with Green.

To filter the Browser view to a certain criteria, simply click on the button next to the value. In this case, we have selected to show only the five star rated images. The browser view will be instantly filtered.

Combining Search Criteria

To activate more than one filter simultaneously, simply click on the filters you want to activate whilst holding the Option key (Mac) or the CTRL key (Win). This will filter the results in the browser based on all the selected filters.

So consequently, only images with a Green tag and a Five star rating will be shown in the Browser.

Using the ‘Date’ Filter

The Date Filter acts as a very useful timeline on a collection of images. It is split into Year/Month/Day so it is very easy to locate images shot in a particular period.

Here we have selected to view the seven images that were captures on the 17th March, 2012 – with just one click.

Adding Other Filters

Besides from the default set, a whole host of other filters can be used to search an image collection. Click on the arrow in the Filters tool bar and choose Show / Hide Filters.

This will show the complete list of available Metadata filters.

Simply check any of the boxes to make them available in the Filters tool.

Saving Searches as Albums

It is very simple to save a search using the filters as an Album or Smart Album. Whenever there is an active filter, the Advanced Search option in the Filters tool search input bar is colored orange. Clicking this will show the currently selected search criteria in the Advanced Search window.

To save this as an Album (of the filtered images) or a Smart Album (of the current criteria) use one of the options in the window. The Album or Smart Album will then appear in the User Collections as shown below:

Composition Overlay with Capture One Pro 7

Capture One Pro 7 comes with an Overlay Tool that allows you to display another image on top of the image that you are editing or are capturing. This feature is designed as a guide to help you compose your image according to specific composition requirements.

The tool can be a big help if:

You get a fixed layout for your image from an art director
You want to recreate an image with the exact position of specific objects
You want to compose your final image in Photoshop using several exposures with different lighting

The image above is a screen capture from Capture One Pro 7 from when I was creating an image for a New Year greeting card. Using an overlay file showing the text for the card made it much easier to compose the image to fit with the text.

The final image composition is shown to the left. On the right you see the text background as a PSD file.

You find the Overlay Tool in Capture One Pro 7’s Composition Tool Tab. As it is the operating system that handles the overlay files there is difference between Mac and PC. You have the following options for overlays formats:

	Mac	PC	Comments
PSD	+	–	Support transparency
PDF	+	–	Support transparency
PNG	+	+	Support transparency
TIF	+	+
JPG	+	+
RAW	+	(+)	Pc has only support for selected Raw files

Especially the formats that supports transparency can be very useful. An overlay file with text made on a transparent background will simply show the text on top of the image that you are working with.

The Overlay Tool in the Composition Tool Tab

To load an overlay file, you can either click the “browser button” to open a file browser for selecting the overlay file or simply drag a supported overlay file into the white square in the Overlay Tool. After you have selected the overlay file select “Show” and use the sliders or the hand to position the overlay correctly on top of the image.

It is also easy to reestablish a previous image composition, as you can use an existing raw file as an overlay file.

If you are making multiple exposures of a scene for later assembly in Photoshop, remember that you can always use a previous exposure as an overlay file. With the Opacity slider you can then easily blend the new exposure and the previous exposure used as an overlay to validate your work.

I wish you all a Happy New Year and look forward to welcoming you back in 2013!

All the best,

Niels