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Capture One 24 has a series of new and exciting features to speed up your culling, editing and photography workflow

6 new features in Capture One Pro 23 to get excited about

Capture One Pro 23 offers a bunch of new tools and functionalities to make your workflow more efficient and flexible. Here’s a rundown to get you excited to work faster, together, and, ultimately, less.

1. Get the right look with Smart Adjustments

Getting a consistent look across many images can be difficult and time-consuming if they are shot under different lighting conditions. Smart Adjustments are here to help automate that part of your workflow. The new tool, which has been designed for portrait, wedding, and event photographers, uses faces and skin tone as guidance to determine which adjustments to make to your photos.

The most critical adjustments for achieving a consistent look are Exposure and White Balance. With Smart Adjustments, these can now be automatically tuned to match a reference image of your choosing.

How to use Smart Adjustments

So how do you use Smart Adjustments? Simply follow these steps:

1. Edit one image to your liking with Exposure and White Balance.
2. Find the Smart Adjustments Tool in the Adjust Tab.
3. Hit “Set as Reference”. A thumbnail will now indicate that the reference is saved.
4. Then select one or multiple images and hit “Apply”.

By default, both Exposure and White Balance will be adjusted but you can set this yourself using the tick marks. Smart Adjustments will then try to match the look of your selected images to the reference image.

Save your reference as a Smart Style

As you will see, the Smart Adjustment tool has a “Save Style…” button as well. This allows you to save your reference as a Smart Style for future use by including Smart Exposure and/or Smart White Balance. You can, for example, make a Smart Style that simply fixes White Balance in your portraits that you can apply directly during import.

But why stop there? Smart Styles can include any other adjustment as well. This allows you to make one-click Styles that will adapt White Balance and Exposure to your image – if you’re photographing people. Depending on your editing habits, reference, and images, you will be able to finish 70-100% of your editing in a single click by using a Smart Style.

Four images edited with a Smart Style to get a consistent look. One-click batch edit:

Why not just copy/apply adjustments?

Copy/apply can work perfectly fine for your images if they are shot under the same conditions and have the same starting point. This could for example be studio portraits with controlled lighting setups. But some images do not fit this description. You might be shooting outside, where the light can change from one shot to the next, or inside a poorly lit room. Smart Adjustments will help you greatly in these cases. Instead of matching adjustment values, it matches the desired result.

How do Smart Adjustments work?

Smart Adjustments will try to match the light and color of faces while taking the environment into account. It’s designed this way to make sure the results look natural. This also means that Smart Adjustments will not provide exact identical values in the adjustments between images, even if the images are almost the same. If you need the same values between images, you can copy/apply them instead.

Learn more about automated photo editing here

2. Faster culling and upgrades to the importer

Culling thousands of images can be a tedious task. Capture One Pro 23 comes with new features to make the culling process faster, easier, and more enjoyable. Available both from the Importer and a new dedicated Cull view, you can benefit from zero-delay browsing, group view of similar images, star ratings and color tagging, zoom to 100%, filtering, and the ability to change capture time.

Make your selections before importing…

Some photographers like to throw away the trash before they even copy their images from their cards. To do this, you need a way to review your images directly on the card, preferably with great performance. The importer in Capture One Pro 23 offers all the above and allows images to be reviewed in a large size, making your photo culling easier.

You can star rate, color tag, or use the simple pick functionality. The pick functionality decides which images you import, while the color tags and star ratings are metadata that is applied to the images for further use.

To easily compare similar images, you can enable “Group Overview”. All the images will be divided into groups based on their similarity. This is especially useful in Viewer mode, where an extra browser shows the images in each group, and the standard browser shows the groups. In this view, it’s easier to evaluate what you want to keep. If the groups are not created as you want them, you can increase or decrease the similarity to make the groups larger or smaller.

… or use the brand-new Cull view

If you prefer to import everything into Capture One Pro before you make your selections, or if you have been shooting tethered, the Cull view offers the same speed and grouping functionalities as the Importer. It’s available from the top toolbar next to the Import and Export icons.

Both views use the embedded previews of the RAW files. This provides great performance. However, depending on the in-camera settings and camera manufacturer, the colors and resolution might differ from the RAW file.

Learn more about how to speed up your photo culling here

3. More control with Layers in Styles

One of the most requested features for Styles has been the ability to include Layers. This new functionality in Capture One Pro 23 adds a new layer (pun intended) of flexibility to the workflow and makes Styles even more powerful. Here are some ways they can benefit you.

Combine multiple Styles into one

Many photographers have found that mixing two or three Styles as Layers and reducing their opacities can result in quite interesting edits. With the support for Layers in Styles, it is now possible to save those edits as Styles to use again and again. The opacity of each Layer will be included in the Style as well.

Apply a Style as a Layer with reduced opacity

Another requested feature has been to always apply a Style at reduced opacity when applying it as a new Layer. This allows easy control of the Style since the opacity can be used to both increase and decrease the effect. To make a Style that can be applied like this, simply apply it to a clean image as a new Layer, reduce the opacity to what you want, and save that as a new Style (from the Styles and Presets tool).

Split adjustments into multiple Layers

Putting color and contrast adjustments onto their own separate Layers can make Styles much more flexible to use. This allows you to reduce or increase the impact of each part of the Style without affecting the other.

Layers with adjustments can be included in a Smart Style, just like any other Style. However, the Smart Adjustments will always apply to the Background.

Learn more about Smart Styles here

4. Change capture time

There’s nothing more infuriating for an event photographer than having shot an event with multiple cameras that were not synchronized to the same time setting. If the difference is big enough, the chronological order of the images will be completely off. The only way to correct this is by changing the capture time on the images from one or both cameras. Traveling photographers also know this issue if they haven’t updated their cameras to match the time zone they are shooting in.

It’s now possible to fix this with Capture One Pro 23. From the Image menu, the Metadata Tool, or the File Info Tool in the Importer or Cull view, you can change the capture time on the selected images.

The updated capture time will not be embedded directly into the RAW file but will be applied as a sidecar setting. This means that it will not be visible from other applications when browsing the raw files. However, it will be included when exporting images to ensure the correct order of delivery.

5. Variant redesign for better Album organization

If you’ve ever made multiple variants of the same image and tried to put them into different Albums, you’ve probably noticed that the variants stick together. It was not possible to distribute variants into their own Albums unless you did cumbersome tagging and used Smart Albums.

Those days are over as the behavior of variants has been improved to allow individual organizing. Now, you can simply drag variants into Albums as you please without the primary variant tagging along.

6. Capture One Live for everyone

Capture One Live is now free for everyone. Yes, you read that right! From now on, everyone can share online sessions with their collaborators and clients. This free version of Capture One Live comes with a few limitations, such as session duration and how many sessions you can have running at once.

Those who need more security when sharing their images can now get more control over who can view their Live sessions with reviewer management in Capture One Live Unlimited. You will now be able to invite only the people you want to the online Live Session, setting different permissions for different users to make sure your photos stay safe. The people who have permission to view the session will also be able to comment in their own name, making it easier to collaborate with and get feedback from multiple people.

To make it easier to go share your images, you can now activate your Capture One Live sessions when you create new Albums or directly from each collection by right-clicking them. We have also removed the annoying “Load more” button on the web page – you won’t have to click to see your photos anymore.

All in all, Capture One Pro 23 brings improved efficiency to your workflow, helping you spend less time on tedious tasks and leaving you with more time to create beautiful, high-quality images.

New to Capture One? Try Capture One Pro 23 for free here

Introduction to Cull View

If you already have your photos inside Capture One and wish to take advantage of the culling features, you can open the Cull view, available in the toolbar next to Import and Export.

This will show the currently selected collection of photos and doesn’t require rendered previews.

The Cull view is a great tool for quickly going through large batches of photos for selecting the best ones.

capture one tool introduction smart adjustments

Introduction to Smart Adjustments

Get consistency in your portraits or event photos in a few clicks with Smart Adjustments

Automatically adjust Exposure and White Balance to match the look across images, heavily reducing the need for manual editing.

Glass – a new digital home for photographers?

When social media was born in the early 2000s, human connection, community, and discovery were at its core. In 2007 Facebook introduced the “like” button, starting its first experimentation with algorithms. Since then, they have been dictating what we see on our feeds and when we see it.

Born out of a frustration with this development, the increased preference for video, and ads taking up more and more space on other social media, Glass is offering to become the new home for photographers online. The photography-first app, which launched in August 2021, goes back to the basics of creating a photo-based community and shared creative space on the internet.

We spoke to Glass co-founder Tom Watson about what makes Glass special, what it can offer to photographers, and how they think about the future of the industry.

What is Glass?

We’re a photography community and platform. We have a few key differences from other platforms. No ads or algorithms, no invasive data-tracking, no public counts, no video, no outside investors telling us what to do. We forego all of that by charging a small membership fee of $5 USD a month or $30 USD a year. Oh, and a chronological feed. With a gorgeous (optional) public profile.

We wanted a space that listened to and was built for photographers, instead of using them to rapidly grow a platform and then pivot away from them because investors need a better return.

Why would a professional photographer join Glass?

We get this question framed in a different way all the time — ‘Why would I want to market to other photographers?’ And it’s such a sad way to frame the question because there’s so much more to photography and sharing it online than marketing. As Instagram shifted from sharing photos to becoming a full-blown marketing channel that only shows your work to 10% of your followers without dancing or paying, our behavior with sharing photography online shifted too.

The work you create for an algorithm is different from the work you create when you’re shooting for yourself. Growing as an artist requires experimentation. Glass is the spot for that experimentation.

Glass founders Tom Watson (left) and Stefan Borsje (right).

Are there any well-known professionals on the platform?

Danielle Leong shared her work in progress on the way to her first gallery show. Om Malik joined Glass immediately after our launch even though he swore off joining another photography platform years ago. Artist-in-Residence at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Christopher Michel has been sharing snapshots and stories from his travels. Sam Hurd, one of the best wedding photographers working today, recently shared some of his thoughts on Glass. I really loved this quote from his post:

“Eventually I realized I felt something I hadn’t felt since starting the blog on my own website… freedom. The freedom to post at 1am. The freedom to post at 9am. The freedom to post at 10pm.

The freedom to post whenever I wanted (with whatever caption I wanted) because there was no ghostly algorithm scooping me up with all the rest then measuring the performance of my content against some unknown metric.”

With being sincere and transparent on the app – including showing EXIF data – are pros giving away their secrets?

Sharing your EXIF data is optional — we only display what’s there. But one of our favorite things is members regularly sharing in their captions or the comments how they made the shot they’ve posted.

The gear or presets you use isn’t the thing that makes your work special. It’s you. It’s your eye. How you see the world, how you interact with your models, the intimacy you create, the light you catch.

The best chefs in the world write cookbooks with explicit instructions on how to make their most popular dishes from their restaurants. But their restaurants have reservations for months and months in advance. They don’t put themselves out of business by sharing their secrets. The secrets aren’t what make them great. It’s their skill and dedication to their craft. Photographers are the same way.

Can you explain this feeling of ‘purpose and calmness’ while being on the app?

Facebook and Instagram’s business model is built on engagement. How long can they hold your attention so they can sell it to a third party.

These choices introduce a scarcity mindset. There’s only so much time, only so much attention, to go around. It creates artificial conflict and comparison. But the greatest part of the internet is the abundance!

When I was designing Glass, I intentionally set out to build the opposite of a dopamine casino like Instagram. Glass is just edge-to-edge photos. No ads, no videos, no UX dark patterns making you click or shift your behavior. No addicting behavior built-in. It’s just photos in a chronological feed.

Which sounds simplistic, but it’s a really novel thing. It allows you to focus. Notice things you’d otherwise miss. Your good feelings are earned. It’s restorative rather than extractive. It’s inspiration instead of comparison. It’s a calm community instead of winner-take-all algorithm to game.

You mention ‘early Flickr’ in several interviews – can you explain what do you mean that? How is Glass bringing that back?

Every photographer online has had their heart broken by an app or platform they once loved. Depending on how long you’ve been posting photos online, it may be three or four. Flickr getting sold to Yahoo, a forum you loved shutting down, Instagram pivoting to video, whatever. For us, that moment was Flickr missing the boat on mobile. Flickr was the first time a global community of photographers got together to share online.

As the internet has grown over the years, we’ve gone from chronological feeds to endless algorithmic feeds. That shift has caused a noticeable difference in how we all interact with the internet. As algorithms took over and prioritized polarization and other’ing instead of real connection, we lost a human part of the internet. Internally, we call it an earnest internet. That’s what we’re trying to revive and help thrive.

It informs all the decisions we make. From deciding to not do ads or video, to skipping engagement algorithms or data-tracking. But also in how we built our business or prioritized launching with safety features such as blocking and reporting instead of more features.

The experience of Glass is vastly different from other social media apps; any recommendations on how to experience it the best?

Honestly, it’s really simple. Just comment on photos. Have conversations about a photo that caught your eye. Ask a question about composition or editing. Be open. Share. And above all, be kind.

When you’re used to other platforms providing little hits of dopamine at every turn and surfacing content tailored specifically to you and the decade’s worth of data it has on you, Glass can feel like work. It takes effort to build relationships. But the relationships you build are more rewarding, more honest, more direct. And that effort is worth it.

What is your vision for the future of photography? How is Glass going to be a part of it?

There has never been a better time to make photographs. But sometimes it can also feel like there’s never been a harder time to make a career out of photography.

It’s hard to overstate the seismic shifts that photography as an industry has gone through over the last three decades. Tumultuous changes and explosive growth. The death of Film. Digital cameras. Sharing photos online. Camera phones that are legitimately wonderful and affordable digital cameras. The reduction of local journalism across western countries. Pivots to video. And now AI technologies are popping up left and right that threaten our livelihood and the future of our industry.

Any single one of these shifts would be considered world-shattering, let alone all of them. It’s hard to predict the future with how fast technology is moving right now, but a few things are timeless. Photography is best when shared. Art isn’t going anywhere and we’re seeing more solidarity among creators. Owning your audience and marketing channels is more important than ever. But investing in your craft and skill is just as important and it feels like that’s been lost in the last few years. We’ve been collectively shooting for an algorithm instead of ourselves.

As photography continues to be democratized, spending time honing your visual voice and point of view will be the thing that sets you apart. Glass is already a spot for photographers to experiment and grow in their work. The need for a space like this isn’t going away.

Sometimes an ‘Instagram killer app’ pops up within the photo community, but nothing had managed to create an exodus of photographers to a new platform just yet. Why do you think that is?

Instagram’s lack of a clear product vision and point of view is going to kill Instagram before another app does. Is endlessly scrolling video more addicting than endlessly scrolling photos? Apparently. But let’s not pretend like these weren’t clear UX decisions. The algorithm stopped showing people photos, but for six or twelve months there, everyone saw your story. Now you have to dance in a reel for someone to see it.

Our collective memory around Instagram seems to be stuck in 2015. But Instagram hasn’t served or helped photographers for nearly a decade. It’s increasingly difficult and erratic to use — folks spend hours every day trying to game an algorithm into showing their work to folks who already follow them in hopes that one of those people books them for a shoot. But it doesn’t work like that anymore. That version of Instagram, and the internet as a whole, isn’t coming back.

Instagram’s grip on the photography community feels absolute, but so did Facebook’s. So did Flickr’s. So did forums circa 1995. Photographers deserve better. But it requires a shift in how we think about funding internet businesses, how we use these platforms, and what we really need from them. It takes so much effort, so much energy, so much time, to build something new. Something different.

Glass isn’t just about showing off nice photos without ads. It’s about helping show that we can collectively build the internet that we want. That we deserve. An earnest internet. A kinder one. Instead of being built on outrage and addiction, we can build things that inspire and lift us up. It just takes a little effort and a little hope.

We hope you’ll join us.