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How to compensate for lost sharpness at small apertures

The Lens Correction tool in Capture One Pro 10 has been improved and now also includes Lens Diffraction Compensation. This is a feature that compensates for the loss of sharpness and micro contrast that occurs in images shot using small apertures.

Whenever you need a larger depth of field in your images, you can now stop down your lens at least one stop further than what you would previously have done without losing the perceived sharpness of your image.

What is diffraction?

Diffraction in a lens is not about how well the lens has been designed and manufactured, but it’s something that’s determined by the laws of physics. As light is an electromagnetic wave, it does not always travel in a straight line. When light waves pass near a barrier they tend to bend around the barrier and spread out. The aperture in a lens acts as a barrier. When light waves pass through a large physical aperture in a lens, hardly any bending of light will occur. But when stopping down the lens, some bending of the light will inevitably happen. An image of a perfect point light source will then no longer be a sharp light point, but will be a more diffuse light point. In a normal image, you will see this as loss of sharpness and micro contrast. This effect of lost sharpness becomes increasingly visible the more the lens has been stopped down.

When will you see diffraction in an image?

How much you see the negative influence of lens diffraction depends on the pixel size of the image sensor in your camera and the aperture you are using. The table below shows when you’ll typically see the loss of sharpness caused by lens diffraction when using cameras with different sensor size and pixel count.

Example of lens diffraction

In this example, I want to show you how much sharpness and contrast you actually lose because of lens diffraction. In the test below I used the Phase One XF 100MP camera system with an AF 45mm lens. The camera has a Low Vibration mode which utilizes the electronic front shutter curtain and the built-in vibration sensors to insure vibration free exposures. This means that any decrease of image sharpness in this example is purely caused by lens diffraction.

$Scene used for showing the effect of lens diffraction$

Scene used for showing the effect of lens diffraction.

200% zoom into the center of the image.

The images have been shot using apertures from f/8 to f/22. At f/8 the image is still showing maximum sharpness. At f/11 you can just about notice a minor decrease in sharpness.

At f/16 a decrease in sharpness is obvious, and at f/22, it becomes so soft that details are disappearing.

Diffraction Compensation

In the example above it is evident that if you stop down your lens too much, you will lose sharpness and micro contrast. When checking on the Diffraction Compensation in Capture One 10, a special kind of complex re-sharpening of the images will take place to restore the lost sharpness and micro contrast. Needless to say, if details are totally lost due to diffraction they cannot be restored, but even such images will still greatly benefit from the Diffraction Compensation tool.

The Lens Tool with Diffraction Compensation turned on

100% zoom into the center of the scene.

In the column to the left all the images are shown as they will appear using the default settings in Capture One Pro. For the images in the right column, the Diffraction Compensation has been turned on.

As can be seen in the example above, the Diffraction Compensation tool does a fantastic job in restoring the lost sharpness and macro contrast. The image shot at f/16 is now perfectly usable, and even the image shot at f/22 is reasonably okay.

Diffraction Compensation is turned off by default in the Lens Correction tool because it can add more processing time and minor noise increase, even for images where the correction is not required.

Diffraction compensation for more depth of field

Knowing that the diffraction limits the sharpness of my image, previously I would typically have used f/11 as my smallest aperture for medium format images. Now with the new Diffraction Compensation, I don’t hesitate to stop further down if I am in need of more depth of field.

For making the above image with the Phase One XF 100MP camera system with the Schneider Kreuznach 55mm LS f/2.8 lens, I had the new Diffraction Compensation feature in mind so I chose to stop down to f 14 to get the large depth of field in the scene.

At f/11 I could not get the lighthouse and foreground sharp at same time. The 2 top images are 100% zoom into the same image where focus is perfect on the lighthouse but loses the foreground. For the second row of images I moved the focus closer but lost the sharpness on the lighthouse.

Using f/14 I can get enough depth of field in the image and by using the new Diffraction Compensation option in the Lens Tool I easily compensate for any loss of sharpness.

Sessions 103: Expert Knowledge

In the third and last post of the Sessions series, we’ll discuss how to bring the Capture One Pro workflow together on set. More specifically, we’ll cover how to cull in the Pro Session workflow.

Using what we discussed in the last post as a base, this post will go over how to view and do the tagging bit quickly. Moreover, we’ll throw in the Capture pilot for good measure. First, we’ll go though some basic mark up of “rejects” and “keepers” and explore some custom shortcuts to make this as easy and fast as possible. After this, we’ll expand those ideas into something more advanced using the Session concepts from posts 101 and post 102.

Workspace for Culling and Rating

Workspace set up is very personal because no two photographers work the same. There aren’t many rules here, only that try to focus your tasks with the tools needed. To that end I build a workspace for every stage of the workflow – One for Capture acquisition, one for rating, one for editing, one for output etc.

For the rating and culling task, I normally like to have the browser right in “strip” mode. I think it’s maybe some left over 35mm nostalgia of looking at neg strips. As you edit down it feels like going downhill, which is strangely satisfying. I also have a shortcut to hide viewer on hand, which gives me a full screen of thumbs view for overview.

Shortcuts used:

Set the Browser right (Shift + CMD + b)

Hide Viewer (Alt + CMD + v) (though I use a custom shortcut “§”)

Navigation

The two shortcuts we need in order to do simple navigation are ‘Next’ and ‘Previous variant’ (CMD + l/r arrow)

Just a note, as this previously created confusion, it’s possible to navigate the browser with just arrow keys. However, the official shortcut for “Next” is CMD + arrow. This is because it depends on window “focus”. I can lose focus on a window by simply clicking another element in the UI. Focus is now on last panel interacted on with the mouse click. For example, if I use the mouse to click a property in the tools (eg. exposure) and use arrows to nudge a value field, then focus is on the exposure tool. As a result, the arrow keys don’t Navigate to the next image.

To use arrows to navigate the browser without focus, use CMD + arrow. This is especially good to know if you want to navigate when in full screen or with the browser hidden.

Simple culling method using “flags”

As in the last post about my tagging logic, I’m using the “traffic light” logic of tagging images (much like Lightroom’s flagging method) with a red tag for “reject”, yellow tag for “maybe” and green tag for “pick”. On my keyboard these are assigned in a custom shortcut set (moved from the default which I find a bit hard to remember) to the num pad on my full size keyboard – 7, 8 and 9. I can then move through images with arrows and rate under the one hand and use the other for modifier keys and drinking coffee.

Next up, “select by red”, “select by yellow” and “select by green” are assigned to CMD+ 7/8/9. This becomes important once I’ve marked stuff to quickly grab the good, the bad, and the ugly, and then follow up with an action like process or trash.

Shortcuts recap so far:

CMD+ right arrow – next
CMD+ left arrow – previous

7 – green (Yes/Pick)
8 – yellow (Maybe/Review)
9 – red (No/reject)

CMD+ 7 – select green tagged
CMD+ 8 – select yellow tagged
CMD+ 9 – select red tagged

Culling down

Now you can use the next command to go through the images, one by one. For something bad, mark it red. If you find something you aren’t sure about, mark it yellow. For something good, mark it green. Repeat until you have reviewed all images.

Advance navigation using selections

Going through images one by one is fine, but with volume (particularly volume around a similar subject like fashion and still life) it’s better to advance 2 or 3 up at a time. That way, you get a sense of “framing”; how do these images look in context. Advancing one by one means that unless I go back and forth, I can’t really compare this great image with the other great image. In Capture One 9.2 a new concept of advance and rate was added called “Next set”.

“Select next set” is an incredibly efficient way to hammer through a collection of images by allowing you to advance in multiples of up to 12 at a time.

Instigating this is simple. Make a selection (e.g. 4), then use the “Next set” shortcut (Alt+ l/r arrow) to advance to the next set (of 4)”, and then the next 4 etc.

Only issue with having multiple images selected is, normally, tagging an image “green” will rate all images in the selection green. That’s no good. Enter the “Edit Primary” toggle.

Edit Primary. What the hell?

If you select a bunch of images, and look closely at the browser, one thumbnail has a bigger border than the rest. This is the Primary Variant.

The “Edit primary” feature basically decides if the next command you do (e.g. reset, tag or delete) applies to all the selected, or if it only affects the thumbnail with the thicker white selection border within the selection.

As an example, I have 6 images selected. I want to mark the first image red, but edit primary is enabled (orange icon). If I press “9” (my shortcut for red tag), I mark them all red. No good. Undo.

I switch it off and press “9” again, I mark just the one with the bigger border red. Great! Now I can use the normal short cuts to navigate within the selection and target the next image to rate.

Now you can combine this with “Next set” to rate individual images properly within the set, and then jump through batches of shots.

One last tip here: If the browser is focused (remember UI focusing from Sessions 2), you also get an extra benefit of expanding selections using shift + arrow. Select the first image, then shift and press right arrow repeatedly until you select 6 images. If you add too many, use shift + left arrow to remove from the selection. If it all goes horribly wrong and your selection is not what you want, shift and click the primary to deselect all but one, and try the process again until you have 6 selected.

Smart albums bit from Sessions 102

In the sessions blog we set up a session with smart albums. If you missed it, check it out here.

Once you tag an image, it meets the criteria for the Smart Album and appears in there (referenced from its actual location). This process is dynamic, so keep tagging with the system above and everything tagged will be auto sorted for you into the albums. As smart albums work across all Favorite folders, this quickly gives you an overview of keepers from all shot folders.

Capture Pilot

The last piece of the puzzle here is getting feedback from the client. I won’t go too much into the ins and outs of Capture Pilot here, but the nutshell version is you can send any collection to it, including the special virtual collection stuff, and get someone to view that collection on the iPad to review and rate things. So, in the workflow I sent the green smart album to the Capture pilot. It’s a good idea to untick the permissions for color tags in Capture One so the client doesn’t untag an image (this will remove it from the smart album). Instead, I give the client star ratings which gives a secondary layer of validation on anything the photographer picked. Anything with 4 or more stars lands in the Green4+ Smart Album as something that’s interesting.

Once the shoot is over and you want all the client selects on disk (with adjustments), you can select all from the Green4+ Smart album and file > export (originals) to send the RAWS + adjustments to any location you so desire. You can even leverage the token paths feature (image folder token) to auto organize them back into folders derived from the parent folder in the session for repatriation to the scheme you captured in. That sounded complex. Maybe that’s for another post for another day…

Sessions 102: Power User

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

In Sessions 101 we looked at an overview of the Session concept. In this post we’ll take Sessions to the next level.

While it solves a very simplistic workflow in its basic out-the-box form, the modern high volume shoot needs a bit more management. Fortunately, Sessions are super expandable when things get bigger. There’s a couple of good reasons for pushing beyond the standard Session – especially when dealing with serious volume.

Shooting 100’s of GB’s of files to a single directory is a big mistake. The words of wisdom here are “expectation management”. Although not technically wrong, and although it does work, performance and stability will start to fall off after a couple of hundred 60Mpix files. It’s common sense not only to keep your viewing and load times speedy (and client happy) but also to organise a bit for sanity.

So, don’t dump 5 days worth of pictures in one place and expect zero problems; Being a bit more modular will also help you if something were to (and it does occasionally) go wrong with a back-up, or to do a reprocess on image X for the client.

The revolution will be organized

By leveraging the proper organisation tools, you don’t need to move any files. Moving files out of a capture sequence to selects is, in my mind, a big mistake. Personally, I avoid the idea like the plague. I much prefer to keep chronology and timeline in the shot folders for proper review. To extract the keepers, I use other methods. Note there is a heavy slant here on “I”. You can of course do what you like if this doesn’t jive with how you like to work.

Ok, sounds reasonable. How do I do that?

First, we need to rewind back to the Session and the default Capture folder within it. From a new session, select the Capture folder in the “sessions folders” area at the top of the Library (this is a shortcut to the currently assigned Capture folder), then right click > show in library. This will open the library’s system folders to show you the current location of the current Capture folder in the file system.

Now you can do this bit how ever you like (and believe me I’ve seen users do this just about every way possible) but I suggest sub-foldering “Capture” to hold all the shot folders. Some people put folders in the session folder (in the same directory as “Captures”), but I find this counter intuitive to the concepts discussed in Sessions 101. By organising inside Capture, I know any and all RAW captures will be inside Capture (a sort of logical drill down) and not end up in some random Capture 2 or untitled folder in the session.

Right click on the Capture folder in the system view and choose “new inside”. This will allow you to make a new folder inside Capture. Typically, you get a pop up asking if you want to add the previous Capture folder to favourites. You can ignore this for now.

The idea of subfoldering the Capture folder into shot folders is to look for natural breaks in the day. This might be product ID, model changes clothes, every hour, or any divider you can think of that helps with breaking up the volume of images. Not only does it help you organise, it reduces system resource pressure on images per directory.

Naming of these folders is thus a bit dependent on the above, but something descriptive (like “Shot 1”) or logical (like date) – or a combination of the two – is good.

If you are shooting product, maybe the SKU or product code for the item is also pretty sane. The reasoning here is in the pipeline of production we can then leverage the Next Capture naming tool. This uses the Token concept, and with the correct tokens in place, you can extract the name of the current Capture folder up to the “Capture Name”. This sets up the naming based on the folder name as they land in it. If you change Capture folders, the name follows with it. This creates a wonderful sense of automatic order and organisational relationship for assets and parent directory – and also means reduced input and user error when setting up collections.

Once you have set this up, try to create a new folder, select it and again right click “set as Capture”. You should now see the Camera icon move to this new folder, indicating the current Capture folder has moved. This is now the new “Capture folder” – note this is distinctly different from the folder called “Capture”! Repeat this process to make multiple “Capture” folders and you can quickly start to build up an organized shoot as the content changes through the day. If you float the next Capture naming tool out, you can see the name update as you change folders.

Now you are properly on your way to a professional session user’s workflow.

Next up we will look at how to leverage higher level session concepts for thing like organising and culling: Favorites, Albums and Smart albums. This bit can take a chunk of the work out of the traditional workflow of moving to selects.

The Favorite

This is a marker in library (small heart icon) and you can use it on folders. It has three uses:

One: it makes a small heart on the folder in the library. The folder is then represented in Favorites area and clicking on it is effectively now a shortcut to the actual folder. This is for the most part purely UI for organisation and allows you to view the folders in the session as a flat list (which helps keep the UI tidy with deep folder structures or lots of Capture folders). You can also set Favorites as Capture/Selects/Output/Trash like it’s the actual folder, without having to find it in system.

Two: it indexes the content of that folder in the session database file, making it faster to load and opens up the contents for search. This is useful for Smart albums. Adding more folders to Favorites means more folders to search across.

Three: Folders marked as favorites (and their relative position to the session) are remembered when making custom templates.

Back to search, in chapter one we talked about how the Catalog worked; To view and index files in the Catalog, you have to import – then the catalog can search them. In sessions we use the Favorite concept as a tag to tell the session to “include this folder” in the index. You can also remove the folder from the Favorites list to exclude the contents from search. Once indexed, the smart albums can be used.

To make a folder a favorite, select it in the Library and right click -> Add to Favorites.

Smart Albums

Albums and Smart Albums are concepts that both require a bit of a disconnect from the physical ideas of files and folders we have dealt with so far. They are in effect “virtual” folders – meaning they can hold and show you an image but it’s just a reference to the actual file which is somewhere else. For albums, the main use case is something like “my best images” as you can drag in your picks from several folders to show you a collection of your awesome. However, the Smart Album is altogether… smarter. Obviously.

Smart Albums are to pictures what junk email filters are to Outlook. You specify rules for it, and if it finds images in the favorites that match, it will show it in the Smart Album. Remove the qualifying criteria from the image, and the image will from the smart album. This is especially cool for rating and culling.

To make a Smart Album, find the Session Albums section in the Library tool and click “+” then -> Smart Album. Name it “Rejects”, then choose the preset for “red”. Press Done to save. In the old days of Capture One 3, one used the “traffic light” logic of tagging images (much like Lightroom’s flagging method) with a red cross for “reject”, yellow question mark for “maybe” and green tick for “pick”. I still do this today (or at least something close to it) by using colour tags.

For every Session, I repeat this process 4 times to make four Smart albums. One to show me images with a red (rejects) tag, one for yellow (maybe) tags and one for green (picks). Lastly, I make an additional Smart album that I call Green4+ (which shows me green AND 4 or more stars). How all this comes together we will review in the final Sessions post later this week.

Supposing I do this kind of thing a lot. Can I make set up quicker? The last tip for today is templates.

Templating a template

As we discuss in 101, a session is a (very basic) template. Making something a little more useful for bigger shoots is a good time saver. Custom templates is possible in Capture One 8 and later.

A custom template primarily remembers 3 things in the template. Folders which were favorited, albums/smart albums, and the Next Capture naming set up. Once you have set up everything (as above), go File > Save as template.

Next time you make a new Session (File>New Session) from the dialog, you can choose a Template from your custom list. A new session (with new name) will be made with all the shoot folders and albums. This considerably reduces time configuring your workflow for the shoot!

This is in a good point to end on a bit of advice. It’s not an inconsiderable amount of work to get to this “ready to shoot” stage. What I have described so far is a typical amount of prep for any big shoot and when it gets to pre-light most operators or technical producers will build collections in advance so time spent noodling around in software during the high pressure shooting phase on the day is reduced. So – be ready, and make the shot folders ahead of time if you can. Anything you can do to reduce fiddling around with naming and folders when under pressure will help you immeasurably when its hammer time and seven agency bods are looking at you wondering why the shoot stopped. That’s not a good feeling.

Sessions 103: Expert Knowledge

In the third and last post of the Sessions series, we’ll discuss how to bring the Capture One Pro workflow together on set. More specifically, we’ll cover how to cull in the Pro Session workflow. Read it here.

Sessions 101: Discussing the concept

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

The “Session” is a classic and powerful workflow construct of Capture One Pro. It’s still THE go-to workflow used by nearly all production, studio and commissioned photographers. It’s a HUGE feature, interconnected with several other tools in several layers and immensely powerful when leveraged properly. This is especially the case in a tethered workflow. We’ll see later how Sessions were born for this exact concept.

In this 3-part series on Sessions we’ll start with one for new users. In this post we’ll discuss the concept, and build up to how to use it like a professional in the studio. If Catalogs isn’t really the way you like to work, or you’re looking to get started in the professional studio industry, this guide might just be for you.

If you’re already familiar with the basics of this field, you might want to skip this versions and jump directly to Sessions 102: Power Users or 103: Expert Knowledge)

What is a Session?

The main differences between a Catalog and a Session boil down to the “file life cycle” (the movement/storage of files) within the working project. This also includes the data structure for edits done behind the scenes – and (more or less) how this lets you interact with images in relation to the file system. More on that later.

The Session was born out of the first tethered camera implementations. When Phase One made the first “one-shot” CCD backs (i.e. not a scanning back) in the late 90’s they had no storage on board and could only be tethered. The files were delivered to the computer directly. The immediate question then is, where should the files be put?

Forget for a minute anything about Sessions and lets break down some simple ideas within the problem above.

First, there’s this data in/data out issue. If I create a series of files, it makes sense to organize it by making a folder for them. But this is a RAW converter and I’ll be processing JPEGs and tiffs out, so I need a folder for those files too.

Those folders and all the other assets should probably be in a sort of overall “top” project folder to keep things logical.

I’ll probably also want to move stuff around and delete some stuff. However, it’s best if it’s all relative to the project so nothing wanders off to system trash or moves to the wrong place. Therefore, I’ll make a few temporary folders for storing rejects and picks.

Folder workflow

So, now I have my project folder, a folder for RAW files from the camera, and an output folder for the processing a local trash folder and a selects folder for any keepers.

I now connect the camera to the software for tethered shooting (“transfer of files to the machine via cable” immediately). But computers are dumb, so I have to tell the machine where the files that the camera produces should end up. In Capture One I find the folder I made earlier for storing RAW images for the job, then right click on it and “set as Capture folder”. Now, the computer knows where to put the images. I need to do the same for the processed folder (where all the conversions are kept). So, again I go to the folder browser and find my folder – right click, set as output. Now, when I process images, they go there. Same for the local trash and selects.

In a way, I’ve now made a very simple in/out file workflow. I’m working on a kind of “files and folders” parity within the app interface, almost as manipulating the Finder/Explorer file system directly.

Stop: Session time

This is fantastically simple. Except that now I have another job for today. I have to make sure to correctly reset all the naming, and create the folder structure again. Obviously, I don’t want Susan from Agency A to see work from yesterday for Stuart at Agency B.

The session concept solves this by taking all the above and turn it into a reusable and compartmentalised template for the above workflow points.

When you create a new Session (File>New Session), it creates a “top” folder containing four other folders. These folders are automatically assigned the tasks for the photographer:

Captures (destination folder for tethered)
Selects (a folder you can move assets to, if deemed important)
Output (assigned as the destination for all processing)
Session Trash (a place to store deleted files for the session)

Alongside, this folder structure is a .cosessionDB file. This is used for caching and tracking file movements done in Capture One and enabling concepts like search. This we will cover in part three: Advance Use of Sessions.

Now, all I have to do is Capture (file in), and Process (file out). For the most part, simple jobs can be managed with little overhead or input from the photographer.

Geeky stuff

The last piece of the puzzle with understanding sessions is the behind the scenes mechanics of storage of settings, and cache for the images.

In a Catalog, these are stored and indexed inside one big database object for everything. Also, for images to be viewable they typically have to first go through a “gatekeeper” process – the Importer. This model has advantages for search and large collections where an overview or collections with many events is required. The centralised cache design should give better performance on networks.

Sessions though, store cache and settings locally – within in a sub folder of the RAW files folder.

The Library tool in Session mode is a file/folder browser and doesn’t require the importer to view images. A simple click on a folder of RAW files in the library is enough to trigger generation of cache. Settings and images will start to load immediately. Once created, these are used again next time you revisit the folder. Any further changes/edits made in Capture One are written to the settings files, which are the user’s effective stored adjustments. Note, each image has its own settings file, so this redundancy and modular design makes it easy to work with distribute and backup. As long as you have a folder of images with the settings, you can view this on any machine – even without the accompanying session database.

As in the opening chapter, this is the main difference between Catalogs and Sessions – this direct ability to interface into a file system contents via the library tool, and no importing required.

Sessions 102: Power User

The second tip discusses how to expand the Sessions workflow with multiple directories for bigger projects. Read it here.

Please leave a comment if there’s a topic within the Session workflow that you would like to know more about.