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Smart Wedding Photography Workflow in Capture One Pro

NOTE: This article discusses an outdated version of Capture One.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

You have just been out shooting for eleven hours and filled up a couple of cards with hundreds and hundreds of wedding images. Everything from preparation to midnight snacks is captured. Now it’s time to import, select, edit, finalize and deliver your stunning images in different subfolders for the convenience of your customers.

How do you approach this huge task? I will show you my typical workflow for this. Photographers are different and I don’t expect everyone to work like me. I simply hope you can take home at least one tip from reading this blogpost that will improve your workflow.

Session-based workflow

Personally, I like to create a new Session for every wedding I shoot. This way I have complete control of my images and I can utilize the benefits of the Session structure. I have a physical folder for all the RAW images and I can split them up into virtual Albums within the Session – without moving the files physically.

So, how does this work?

Recommended: To take full advantage of James Johnson’s expertize on Sessions in Capture One, we highly encourage reading one or more of his related blog posts:

Step 1 – Creating and setting up a session for weddings

Open Capture One and go to File > New Session. A dialog appears where you can select the location of your session among other options. I name my wedding Sessions corresponding to the names of the couple, for example, ‘Angelica&James’ (the Session name is important when using Tokens later in the workflow). I have my wedding Sessions sorted by year and month, so the location would be something like ‘…/Images/Weddings/2017/February/’. Great, now hit OK!

Assuming you want to split up your images into virtual Albums within the Session – this could be ‘Preparation’, ‘Ceremony’ etc. – you need to create those under ‘Session Albums’. Click the small plus-icon and select ‘Album’. I usually create the following, which corresponds to a typical Danish wedding:

Preparations
Ceremony
Reception
Portraits
Dinner

You can always add, change, and remove Session Albums as you see fit. Remember, Session Albums are ‘virtual Albums’, meaning that they are only visible from within your Session, and images can be in multiple Albums at the same time. I simply use Albums to navigate my images more easily than browsing through an enormous batch of images. Using Session Albums will also help you when exporting your images using Tokens – we will get back to that later.

Step 2 – Importing and sorting your images

Now it’s time to plug in your memory cards and transfer the images into your Session. Depending on your settings, an Import dialog might show up when inserting the memory card. If not, hit the ‘Import images’ icon in the top left, or choose File > Import.

Import from

This is the location you are importing from. Choose the folder containing your images and click ‘Open’. If the import dialog automatically popped up when you insterted your memory card, the correct folder should already be chosen.

Import to

I like to use ‘Capture Folder’ as Destination for wedding Sessions. This way all my images are in one logical location.

Backup to

Here you can copy your images to a second destination for backup. I do manual backup via a NAS server, so I don’t use this feature.

Naming

Remember in step 1 that I mentioned Tokens? Now’s the time to use these. Click the button next to Format to open the Naming Format dialog. Under Group, open the drop-down menu and select ‘General’. Now you have a selection of general Tokens available. Double click ‘Document Name’, which will then show up in the ‘Format’ field (Document is a shared term for a Session or a Catalog). Click in the Format field after the Token to manually input an underscore, ‘_’, to separate it from the next Token, which will be a counter. Click the small arrow in the ‘1 Digit Counter’ to change it to ‘3 Digit Counter’ and then double click that Token. You now have a fully functional Naming Format, utilizing Tokens.

Metadata

Fill in Copyright and Description if needed.

Adjustments

I usually never do any adjustments to my images during import, so leave this as default.

Now click ‘Import All Images’. Repeat for all your memory cards.

Pro-tip: If you’re shooting with more than one camera, make sure your cameras’ clocks are synchronized, even in seconds. This way, after you have imported all images, you can sort by ‘Date’ for then to batch rename (select all images, right click > Batch Rename) and use the Naming Format with Tokens to rename your images chronologically across all cameras.

Remember the Session Albums from the beginning? On to those! While in your Capture Folder showing all your images, select the ones shot during preparations. Hold down Shift to select multiple images. Now drag those images on top of the ‘Preparations’ Album to the left. They will now appear within that Session Album while physically still be in your Capture Folder. Repeat for the rest of the images, cleverly dividing all your images into smaller chunks.

Step 3 – Selecting the good stuff

On to finding the nuggets among your pile of RAW images! Go through each Session Album and star rate your images using the keyboard. Many photographers I know rate their images in two or three rounds, effectively giving higher and higher ratings for the good ones in each round. Personally, I find this way too time consuming for wedding photography. I have one rating I use, 5 stars. This rating is given to any image that might be good enough to deliver to the customer. My reason for doing this – and not multiple rounds of selecting – comes down to two aspects: 1; it’s faster, and 2; sometimes I find it hard to discard images without evaluating them with a specific color grading or handful of adjustments. Effectively, I usually end up with ~80-90% of my initial selects.

When all images in every Session Album have been evaluated, you can utilize the built-in Smart Album called ‘Five Stars’. Smart Albums are dynamic albums which populate according to certain criteria for the album; the built-in Five Stars album includes every 5-star rated image in the Session. Therefore, changing the rating of an image within the ‘Five Stars’ Smart Album with anything other than five stars will remove the image from the Smart Album – but the image will remain in its respective Session Album. This way I can quickly discard images that don’t meet my standards of final delivery.

Photographers are different in their way of working, and selecting through many images can be done in numerous ways within Capture One Pro. This is just one of them. Read the Sessions 103 Blogpost for more inspiration on how to effectively do selects.

Step 4 – Copying the first touch

My wedding editing workflow is equal amounts of conveyor belt work and individual fine tuning. I want my images to have the same feel to them while making every single one of them shine to stand alone if needed. This workflow requires a good knowledge of how to copy and apply settings from image to image. But first; we need something to copy!

From within the Five Stars album, start with one of the first images. I usually add some contrast, desaturate slightly and play with Color Balance for my initial look. Color grading with the Color Balance tool is a quick and easy way of giving your images an interesting look. This part is very subjective, as every photographer has their style.

When you’re satisfied with the look of your first image (you can always do more adjustments later), it’s now time to transfer the adjustments to more images. There are several ways to do this in Capture One. One way is to click the Up-arrow in the top right corner to copy all adjustments from your selected image (shortcut: Ctrl/cmd + shift + c). Now you can select the next image and click the Down-arrow to apply the adjustments (shortcut: Ctrl/cmd + shift + v). But whoops, Capture One copied everything, including the crop you might have made for the image before. Undo! Ctrl / Cmd + Z!

So now the question is: How do you avoid copying the crop or other specific elements of your adjustments?

And the answer: Enter the Clipboard tool tab!

Step 5 – Controlled, lightning fast copying

The Clipboard tool tab allows you to see which tools have been copied to the clipboard. This is the place where you can deselect the tools you don’t want applied. For example, after copying your adjustments from one image, deselecting the Composition part of the clipboard will avoid any changes in those tools when applying.

Now it’s time to apply it to multiple images at a time. This is simply done by selecting multiple images and making sure ‘Edit > Edit All Selected Variants’ is ticked.

This sort of mass copy/apply method is best for images with a similar raw look. What if you want to be even more specific in what you copy? Let’s say you only want to copy Color Balance adjustments. Not to worry, you don’t have to deselect everything from the clipboard.

Every tool in Capture One has a copy/apply function built into the interface – a small double-sided arrow. I often use this to copy and apply adjustments from a single tool, and only that tool, onto multiple images in a matter of seconds. This is done by first selecting all the images you want to adjust, plus the ‘donor’ image i.e. the image with adjustments you want to copy from. The ‘donor’ image (or Primary variant in Capture One speak) should be the one with the border around it. Next, hold down the Shift key, and click on the (very small) double sided arrow on the required tool. Now your adjustments from that single tool are copied and applied to the rest of your selection.

This effectively means that you can tweak and adjust all your images with individual contrast, crops, exposure, white balance, etc. for then to apply a specific Color Balance (or another tool) across all images in a matter of seconds. Without affecting other tools.

Using these two methods of copying and applying adjustments across images, I find myself switching back and forth between large selections of images, copying and applying adjustments to eventually have hundreds of images tweaked to my liking with a similar feel to them. With some practice and use of keyboard shortcuts, you can speed up your process tremendously for a more efficient workflow.

This blogpost will not go into detail about how to adjust individual images with specific adjustments. It is instead aimed at speeding up your workflow, allowing you to do more in less time.

Step 5a – Duplicating for B&W

Sometimes I want to deliver a group of images in both color and black/white. The easiest way to do this is to select your adjusted target images, right click > Clone Variants. This will create new variants with similar adjustments of the images, suitable for further black/white adjustments. Variants are virtual and exist only inside Capture One; there is still only one physical RAW file on your disk.

It’s a good idea to tag the new variants for later filter management, and the easiest method for me is a simple color-tag. Select all new variants by right clicking one of them, Select By Same > Variant Position (2). With a selection of images and ‘Edit All Selected Variants’ ticked, now press ‘+’ on your keyboard to tag the images.

Use the Black & White tool along with levels and/or curves for exposure and contrast. Copy the settings using the single copy method from previous step to apply to all your new variants. When the desired look has been created on one image, applying to the rest is done within 30 seconds.

Step 6 – Exporting

When I export images for digital delivery to a wedding client, I want to make it easy for them to share the images with friends and family. I also want them to be able to make large prints of the files. This requires two different sizes of each picture with different amounts of sharpening and different ICC profiles. For convenience, I also want to split up the exported images into subfolders, just like I divided my RAW files in the beginning.

Now, here comes the sheer beauty of Process Recipes.

I can select my images in each Session Album, click ‘Process’ (shortcut: ctrl/cmd + d), and Capture One now does all of this for me automatically. How did I achieve this? By setting up my Process Recipes to my exact needs using Tokens.

The Process Recipes are found in the Process Recipe Tab. I have two I use for weddings; ‘Wedding Print’ and ‘Wedding Resized’. Create a new recipe by clicking the plus-icon and name it what you want. Let’s go through the setup for both (I will ignore Metadata and Watermark for now):

‘Wedding Print’

Basic

I use 90 in Quality for wedding exports, which will slightly decrease the file size without affecting visual quality.

ICC Profile is Adobe RGB and images are exported to 100% of their original file size.

Resolution is 300 dpi for print.

File

Root Folder is set to Output Location, which will match the tool below (Output Location). This should, by default, have ‘Output’ chosen as folder. This is the Output folder in your session. You can always click the arrow to check.

Sub Folder is set to ‘Print/[Collection Name]’ where ‘Print/’ is manually written and [Collection Name] is a Token from the Token list, similar to when we imported images.

Adjustments

Here I add ‘Output Sharpening for Print’. Using the Recipe Proofing (glasses icon top right), you can see the effect of your sharpening amount of your selected recipe in the viewer. This way you can tweak it to your liking before doing any exports.

To sum up the first recipe; ‘Wedding Print’ will create a full-size JPG file in Adobe RGB, add a little sharpening to it, put it into a folder matching the name of the Session Album it’s processed from, and that folder is put inside a parent folder called Print.

Similarly, I want to create a resized version for sharing on social media or other fast applications.

‘Wedding Resized’

Basic

I turn down Quality to 80 for this recipe to minimize file size without affecting quality. ICC Profile is now sRGB for web-based applications and Scale is set to 2000 pixels Long Edge.

With today’s retina displays and high-resolution smart phones, anything less might look pixelated.

File

The only difference from my ‘Print’ recipe here, is that I change ‘Print’ to ‘Resized’ in the Sub Folder format.

This creates a new parent folder for all resized images.

Adjustments

Here I use ‘Output Sharpening for Screen’ instead, giving me a simple setup for adding sharpening for my resized images.

The amount of sharpening is subjective, and you should use recipe proofing to make sure you nail it. The image should look sharp and crispy without being overly sharpened. Too much sharpening kills images!

Make sure you have only the two selected Wedding Process Recipes enabled now.

When exporting using ‘Collection Name’ as a Token, make sure you are in the correct Session Album when clicking ‘Process’. Images can be in multiple Albums, and Capture One only knows the name of the collection you’re currently in. Therefore, go to ‘Preparations’ from the Library Tab, Filter by five stars, select all images and process using ctrl/cmd + d. Repeat for the four other Session Albums.

The result is all your exported images are put into a total of ten subfolders, distributed in two parent folders, both within the Session Output folder. Print files are full-size JPGs with ‘print sharpen’ and Resized are 2000 pixels long edge with ‘screen sharpen’. Voilá!

Step 7 – Conclusion

If you found this way of working interesting, try it out and create a Session yourself. You can even save the Session setup as a template, so you don’t have to create the Session Albums every time. This is done from ‘File > Save as Template…’ which is then available when creating new Sessions.

When doing this workflow consistently for weddings, you will have your RAW files as well as exported images neatly sorted in subfolders of each wedding for later use. All your files, including RAW files, are also easily accessible without opening Capture One.

As a last mention – and I can’t stress this enough – the only correct workflow in Capture One is the workflow that works for you. There are numerous ways of doing almost anything in this software, so I highly recommend exploring the features. You might be surprised by its capabilities.

Craving expert knowledge? Read more about the tools and workflows used in this blog post by visiting our User Guide:

Working with Sessions
Color Balance Tool
Black & White Tool
Processing Files

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.