Instructor – Scott Nidermaier
Capture One is a powerful and fast image editing tool that can be used for RAW file processing, cataloging, tethering, print file preparation and much more. This software is quickly becoming the preferred RAW processing tools of high-resolution digital cameras.
In this event, Capture One expert, Scott Nidermaier will give an overview of the software’s many capabilities. Scott’s clear and understandable instruction will get you rolling with Capture One.
Topics include:
- Capture One as part of your post-production workflow
- Basics and best practices for Capture One
- Cultural Heritage software integration with Capture One
- Question and answer
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:42
Andrea: All right, great. I also want to say thank you to David and Gianna from VII for allowing Digital Silver Imaging to present this webinar. So without further delay, let’s get this webinar rolling. And I’m going to turn it over to basically Capture One expert Scott Nidermaier and Scott Nidermaier is now part of the Digital Silver Imaging team. He’s in charge of our digitization initiative, which he’s going to be sneaking in and out of the presentation, I’m sure. But Scott, previous to his employment here at Digital Silver Imaging, joining our team was with Phase One, and he was there Capture One expert so the man knows his stuff. So without further ado, take it over, Scott.
00:01:34
Scott: Awesome, thank you so much. Super excited to be here with you guys today. Thank you so much for joining us globally. I have a short keynote presentation, it’s mostly to keep me on track with the things that I want to talk about and then we’re going to go right into Capture One. Keep in mind, this is a brief introduction, we only have an hour of your time today. So I’m going to go over some key elements in working with Capture One and what to do with your files once they’ve been digitized and maintaining those assets on a digital platform. Ask questions in the Q&A, Andrea will interrupt me and let me know if there’s a question about something that we’re speaking about. And in the end, my email is there and my contact information so if you need to get in contact with, you know, with us at Digital Silver Imaging, you have that information. So I’m going to start by sharing my screen. Get the right one going here. There we go. Are you guys seeing my Photo Wings here? Yep. Awesome. So, of course, Andrea said, you know, brought to you by the VII Foundations, VII Agency and Photo Wings. So I just want to put them up there on that slide. Thank you so much for letting us be here with you today. Thank you for helping us do this event. And if I can click on the right button, there we go. And of course, I’m with Digital Silver Imaging. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Digital Silver Imaging, we’re a premier print lab based out of Belmont, Massachusetts, offering a true silver gelatin print from a digital file, which is kind of an amazing process, definitely go to our website, there’s a video on there, check it out, you know, we would love to be an option for your printing needs. And we recently have started our digitization experience and just putting a little plug at the beginning with what I’m going to be doing. This is our Dodge Sprinter van that we have just recently built out and customized to be able to take archaization on the road. So like any lab, we had digitization in house, where you could send your film in and have the file converted to digital and then make your prints and do your work with it. With the way that the last year has gone, Eric and Andrea had this brilliant idea to put it inside of a van. We’re using very specific cultural heritage equipment the same as any museum or library would use. And so it’s a meets standards, it’s a contactless kind of thing. And if you need your film, your archive, your collection digitized, give me a call. I’m your guy. There’s my plug, I had to talk about the van. I’m really excited about it. I’m gonna be flying to Boston next week to pick it up and we’re going to be on the road with this thing. Now in the Capture One, what exactly is Capture One? So you know, and given the number of participants that we have and the global reach that we’re doing here, I don’t know everyone’s level. It’s always a challenge when you’re doing a webinar because when you’re in front of a classroom, which is what I did previously, you can see the looks on people’s faces and you can say oh yeah, they either get this or they’re really confused. So hopefully I won’t confuse anyone. Again, use that chat feature ask your questions. I definitely want to get to those. We’re going to do a basic overview today. So what exactly is Capture One? Capture One is a raw processing engine at its very core. In the early foundations of photography, every camera manufacturer had their own processing engine in order to drive their files, so Kodak had theirs, Nikon had theirs, Canon had theirs, and Phase One camera manufacturer had theirs. And it just ended up being a really well designed piece of software. And photographers, of course, you know, really control the market. If you guys think of it, my shooters out there, photographers control the market based on feedback to manufacturers and what they need, what do I need to make my job better? And with Capture One, they just would go into Phase One saying listen, I use a phase one camera, and I use a Canon camera or a Nikon or a Fuji, I don’t want to use multiple pieces of software, I want one. And that’s when Capture One kind of opened up to be used across multiple platforms. When you first launched Capture One, you’re going to be presented with a few options. It used to be just Capture One Pro now there’s Capture One Pro Capture One for Sony, Capture One for Fuji, they’ve divided it out. Realistically, if you’re shooting multiple formats, just use Pro, if you use lots of cameras just use Pro. If you’re very specific, if you’re only a Sony shooter, then that is a good, you know, viable option for you. You can get in contact with the guys at Capture One, I’m sure they’ll answer any of those questions. Now a few notes if you’re using Capture One for the first time, and you’ve never used it before, installation is key. And I want you to download your computer not to an external drive. That happens a lot to where people they download it. And they put it on little external hard drive or a jump drive. And then they plug that into the computer and launch the DMG from that external drive.
00:06:32
Scott: When you unplug that drive every time you go to launch capture, when afterwards, it’s going to ask you for your activation information and we don’t want to do that. So when you do it, make sure you drop that DMG, that installer file to your desktop, whether your Mac or PC, right? So do a local install, double click and install to your Applications folder. Everything I’m really speaking about here is Mac based. I work in the apple world I know with the PC, it’s similar, it’ll go into the right folder if you launch on a PC. Launch the software and then select the version desired. Like I said, if you’re using multiple platforms, Pro is the way to go. I just want to encourage that if you’re specific to a camera, then you have those options. Now, when you first launched Capture One, which we’re going to do here in a moment, you have the option of sessions versus catalogs and the real difference is that a session is a shoot based workflow, what I’m working on right now, the photoshoot that I’m working on the project that I’m working on, I just had my archive digitized of, you know, my 100 most greatest works. And that’s the project that I’m working on a catalog is just that it is a cataloging software. And a lot of times people say well, what’s the difference between Lightroom and Capture One? Lightroom, at its core is a cataloging software, with some other features built in. Capture One is its core as a raw processing engine and then it has a catalog feature built on the side. I like to think of a catalog as my bookshelf, right? All of my individual projects that I store over the course of a year, or a really big project I’m working on that I’m going to utilize a catalog. Whenever I’m working on files individually, I always work in sessions, it’s just a much easier workflow. So for today, we’re going to work on sessions. So I’m going to be I’m going to be speaking, you know, here forward on sessions if anybody has catalog questions, David Grover, Mr. Capture One himself big shout out to David, has recorded several videos on catalogs. And you can find those resources at captureone.com. Now into the tools, right? You like that? This is a tool set from Aston Martin DB six, I found them in the trunk. I used to photograph a lot of cars. So you’ll see some images up here of cars into the tools. We’re gonna start with image organization, creating a new session, importing the images, color tags, star ratings, sorting, and finding, sorting and finding. So let’s get started with that on creating a new session, and then I’ll jump back and forth between Capture One and the keynote here. Like I said, these are more of my notes to keep me organized and when I’m looking away from you guys, I’m actually looking at my eyes over here because I have two screens going so don’t think I’m looking away from you and ignoring you. That’s not the case. When I launched Capture One, if I can get to the right window here, when I launch Capture One I know you can’t see the screen because it’s not sharing everything but I start by holding the Option key when I launched the software. And the reason that I do that is capture one opens up here, drag it over, is that it brings up a sub-dialog box. Are you guys seeing that? Can I get a thumbs up seeing the dialog box there? And what that does, is that you have the option of opening a session that you’ve already created or creating a new session. And I like that habit of just holding that option key when I launched the software for the first time here because then I don’t have to just open up something that I’ve already been working on. I can be very specific about what I’m choosing. I mean up here at the very top Baylor graduation, my daughter just graduated from Baylor University. So I have the Baylor graduation, I don’t want to open up all of our pictures from Baylor, right? So we’re gonna go ahead and we’re going to go new session, and it’s going to give you the option of naming it. Now by default, you can name it whatever you want my awesome pictures, the greatest, you know, works of, you know, Elliott, you know, and we just finished Elliott Erwitt’s collection there in New York, and you know, so you can really name it, whatever you want. I’m gonna name this today, I do everything according to date and again, this is just my workflow. Whatever workflow you guys have in place already, or come up with, you need to be pretty consistent about it. So 202106, today’s the 3rd, right?
00:10:36
Scott: And then I’m going to go VII. By default, it’s going to write to your pictures folder. I’m not a fan of writing anything to my pictures folder and the reason being Apple based period, for my PC people, it’s different but with apples, anytime you have a meltdown with your computer, when you’re working in software’s, it tends to be with the user permissions. And so by writing it to your pictures, if I do have a meltdown, I need to access that data, it’s a lot harder to get to. So I like to write to the shared folder. So if I click the three little dots there, and in Capture One, whenever you see those three little dots next to each other means there’s a sub folder. I call it the Danish Allen wrench. It’s like the IKEA of software. So I’m going to go in here and I like to write to my shared folder ao I’m going to put it in here to my shared folder, choose. And the reason that I write to the shared folder is it’s the in between space. So if I have a problem with my software, on a Mac, in particular, the easiest thing to do is log out of one account and log into another. For my Mac people, you should have a second account on that computer anyway, as a just in case, or I always keep two user accounts on my computer. That way, if I do have a problem, I log out of one account, I log into the other and then I can do whatever I want. Now, by default, it says capture, selects, output and trash. That’s just kind of the way it is. I like to tell people to customize that however you want in the very beginning. And the reason being is that as you do more and more work in Capture One, you’re going to end up with multiple sessions, you’re going to end up with a lot of data and if you have just generic capture, selects, output and trash, it’s really hard to do a search on that, if I’ve given it a custom name, a custom date, and I need to go find something that I did a year ago, I can go in and plug in, start with my search engine and plug in 2020, you know, and it’s going to start to pull up all those 2020 files. And then I can be more specific, it just makes it easier to search later on. It also helps you be organized in your data management. When you store those files on a hard drive or a raid or other place. Having that organization is really going to help so especially with Capture One, I really want to encourage you to just be organized from the very beginning. So now I’m going to go okay, we’re creating a new session. I’ve given it a custom name. Now you see it comes up with that blank screen, there is an import function. So if I’m importing from a hard drive or from a card, I can do that. I already have files on the computer. And so what I like to do is put them in my session favorites. And if you see here in the library tool on the left there it says session favorites and session favorites is just telling this session that you want to look at that file. Now we can access that data by clicking down, clicking down, clicking down, clicking down, or I can very simply go to a Finder window. Let me get a new Finder window, I’m going to go to my desktop where I’ve stuck some files for our VII Agency webinar.
00:13:26
Scott: And I’m really quickly just going to drag those over to the session favorites. So if you’ve already had work digitized, you already have stuff living on a hard drive, you can just really quickly and this is the beauty of a session is that I can just really quickly put whatever file I want into the session. And then I have access to it just really quickly and easily. Now, it doesn’t, the thing about sessions, if I keep my train of thought here is that when I bring pictures into that session, they’re just a folder living within that session. It’s not attached to that session so to speak. A catalog on the other hand, it has to be imported or exported. With a session, I can access any file, anywhere, on any hard drive I plug in and view it within this Capture One session. If I want it permanently within that Capture One session, that’s a part of that organizational structure that we do from the beginning. Or, for the sake of what we’re doing here, I just took that file that I created yesterday and put it on my desktop, so we have some images to work on, right? So then the next thing, keep myself going here, importing color tags. So now when you’re editing your images, you can see that you have the option of color tags and ratings, color tags and star ratings. Certain keyboards have shortcuts built in, I’m using the Logitech Capture One keyboard you can kind of see the colors there. And it’s really easy for me to go in here and short key that or I can click my mouse and change that color tag to whatever I want. I like color tags in my editing process. Everybody has kind of their own style. I use color tags to identify the type of photo that it is. If it’s good to go, if it’s not good to go, and then I use the rating 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, right? To rate that image. So when you’re editing your files, you have those options of both color tags and star ratings in order to keep them organized so that you can, you know, filter them later. Once we’ve given the files color tags, and ratings and everything else, it’s really easy to then filter that down. So I’m gonna go ahead and close up this system folders here. And down at the bottom, I’m gonna open it up, and now we see filters. And this kind of gets hidden in the lower left there, I get asked this question a lot, how do I filter my images? You go to your library tool, look at your, you know, in the bottom left hand corner, and there’s your filters, and it’s really easy for us to then filter out according to images, specifically that we want to see. So we can use those filters, so color tags, and we can filter according to star rating. So I have five stars, there’s all my five stars, there’s all my green tags, and five stars, I can go, you know, where’s my blue tags, there’s my blue tags. Is that making sense? So it’s just really easy once you get those files in there to Capture One to use that star rating and that color tagging, in order to filter out according to what we want to see. So I’m going to go ahead and go none and none so I can see everything there, right? Now, basic editing, I go back to my keynote here, go to my next slide, basic editing, converting neg to pos, white balance, cropping, keystone dust removal, and I’m going to go over all of that. So for our basic edits, I need to get the screen back up here.
00:16:28
Andrea: It’s got you I just want to throw out there that like all the VII Insider webinars, this is being recorded. So you know, Scott’s covering a lot of material here pretty quickly. So don’t worry, if you’re not getting on the first pass, you can always go back and watch the video and scroll through, you can always go back and scroll through.
00:16:49
Scott: Yup. So, once I once I get the files in there, right? The first one I want to do is convert a negative to a positive. And so I have a few files in here. And the kind of standard we’ve used this multiple times before this is shot by Eric, Eric Lewton, there at Digital Silver Imaging, and it’s a 4×5 sheet of film of a you know, a hose on a fence here. And it’s a negative, this is something that was put through our digitization process, so we, you know, we capture this image with our Phase One system, and now it’s a negative. And oftentimes when I’m digitizing files for photographers and for creators, you know, some people are like, just give me Tiffs and JPEGs like, I don’t want to deal with it. And other people want the raw data. And I’m happy to deliver whatever because it’s not for me to determine, you know where your art falls or you know, what that goes. For anybody that I digitize their work for, I say I’m doing this with a phase one system, it needs to be for the best results, it needs to be processed out in Capture One, because it’s just, its proprietary, so it gives you the best information possible. So here’s our negative and we use a very specific version of Capture One called Capture One cultural heritage, which has features built into it to make this process a lot more streamlined. For people who are using Pro, that doesn’t mean that you can’t take your negative and make it a positive and it’s very simple, we’re going to go to our tools here, I’m going to find my levels tool and go ahead and drag that up. And with that levels tool, when you’re taking in a Capture One Pro, I’m just going to reverse my levels, right here. So that I have a positive from that negative, right? It’s looking a little washed out, but I’m going to go ahead and make it black and white because this is a black and white file. So I’m going to go over here to my black and white tab and I’m just going to turn that on, enable black and white so that I’m seeing true gray tones within that image. Now it looks a bit washed out, we have the control because the data in the file to be able to bring that exposure back in check very easily. The one thing to keep in mind, if you’re using the levels reversal tool in order to go from a negative to a positive is that now all of your other tools are going to be working in opposites. So when you, you know it says that you’re increasing exposure, you’re actually darkening the image down, it’s kind of like working in the dark room, we have to think, you know, once we get those files in here from a piece of film, it is like working in the darkroom. And we have those choices within it and we can very easily here in Capture One start to go in and really start to tweak that image around, bring some character back in the sky, and then give it a little bit of midtone contrast and it doesn’t take a whole lot to now get that piece of film the way it was intended, the way it was seen as it was photographed. And so your question?
00:19:39
Andrea: Scott, can I ask a question?
00:19:38
Scott: Yeah.
00:19:41
Andrea: So in this mode in this black and white mode in capture one, are you preserving all the color channels as well?
00:19:48
Scott: Yes. That’s a great question. When we shoot color files, whether it’s color film, or a digital file, you know, a digital file, specifically Unless it’s an achromatic back, it’s going through a bear pattern it’s going through a red, green, green, blue. In, there’s a couple of ways a lot of times in Capture One, everything that you see on the screen is wysiwyg, what you see is what you get, meaning whatever output profile that you have selected here is going to reflect on all of your images. So by default, right here, I’m in Adobe, RGB 1998. That’s just the most common color space used globally. My personal preference when I’m using color spaces, I use Profoto RGB, because it’s a larger color space. Or if I know I’m working only in black and white, I’ll go ahead and put this at Gamma Gray 2.2. And if I do that, if I were to switches to gamma gray 2.2, if you see all my thumbnails on the right there, they’re all going to go gray. All my all my thumbnails are going to go grayscale, because I’ve just said the profile that I’m working in is that grayscale profile. But by default, whenever I’m working generically, I just leave it in that Adobe 1998 because it is the most common space, you see that color information come back. Now within Capture One specifically there is the black and white tool, right here. And that tool, enable black and white, still preserves those color channels because you know, this is this was digitized with a color sensor. The Phase One IQ 4150 digital back that we use to digitize this piece of film is a color, is a color back it has that bear pattern. And so we have data in there to where we can maintain those color channels. So it’s just from visually, I like to click that black and white on because I know I’m specifically working in black and white but yeah, I still have my color files there on the right. Does that makes sense? And you guys can see with the tools, I can drag these tools out and arrange them wherever I want. That’s one of the beauties about capture one is that the workspace that you’re presented with the very beginning is a really kind of basic workspace, you can completely customize that however you’re comfortable, I oftentimes will go in and customize my workspace based upon the project that I’m working on. And when I do that, this is a little more advanced, but for my advanced people, that’s all in those workspaces up there, if you go to the top window and drop down workspace, you can really easily get to one that you’ve saved. Or choose any number of workspaces from all the previous versions of capture one. So if you’ve used Capture One for a long time, you’re like, I really liked the way capture one six works, said nobody ever, you can go to that workspace. The new capture one 21, you guys is absolutely bomber, they just continually improve the software over and over and over again. And that’s something to keep in mind and I just want to mention is that, you know, Capture One like anything else, it’s a tool that as technology gets better, you know, there’s a set of engineers working really hard to make that tool better. And if you have files that you digitize previously, or you have older, you know files from, from a digital camera that are 5-10 years old, you can take those files and get them into a new version of the software and actually get better data out of those files, the software and the computers have gotten better at reading that data. Digital sensors in general have you know, I mean, we’ve been producing 16 bit color for a long time with CCD technology. And now we have 16 bit color out of out of the sea mosses. And the sensors were very good, you know, a long time ago, the software has continually gotten better and better and better and capable of reading that data. And so that’s really important people are like well do I need to upgrade my Capture One? If you’re comfortable, no but the newer versions definitely give you a lot better options and better data reading. Now, one of the things that we want to do, you can see I converted from negative to positive is white balance. And white balance is super key. And everybody’s like, let’s see here, let’s go and pick, we’ll pick this one. Right, I had some other color files, where did they all go? I probably have filters turned on.
00:23:46
Scott: Boom, my white balance, a lot of times when you’re shooting you can get a you know, a gray card or get a, you know, a gray card in there, I still use gray cards, whenever I’m working, I keep them in my bag, just because if it’s if I’ve got all these kind of crazy colors going on, it’s going to be essential to getting back to a neutral point. And the white balance tool lives with our color profile here and I’m just gonna grab it, and I’m going to drag it over. If I click on that dropper, I can go in and change the white balance on my image, right? I can start to click around and you know, do all kinds of awful things to it. If you have that great card, it’s really great to give you a starting point. With digitizing work, anytime I’m shooting flat art or shooting a picture, I throw a color chart in there, the gray tag color chart so that I can have a very specific neutral tone in order to white balance off of and that’s just a really basic tool that you need to become familiar with because oftentimes you’ll get files in here and they’ll just look absolutely awful. And you’re like okay, what do I do, right? And we’re going to be able to need to white balance, I’m going to find a relatively neutral point, even though this is not proper gray in order to get that file back to where I want it. It’s a little warm here. So that’s my white balance tool right there. Now the next thing I want to show you keystoning, I’m going to go out of order on my list here, but keystoning just because I have this image up, that’s always a question and whether the film has been digitized, or whether you shot it digitally, Keystone correction is super easy in Capture One, I’m gonna go over to my top bar here, and I’m gonna click on that Keystone tab. And for this one in particular, you can see that you have vertical horizontal, or you can do all four corners. So for this building, in particular, this is a royal house in Denmark, anything that’s painted yellow in Denmark is owned by the royal family, I believe. So I was told hopefully that information is correct. And so I’m gonna go ahead and I’m going to correct on all four corners at the same time. Now you can do a basic bring in, and I’m just going to bring them in generally, roughly to where I think they need to be 1,2,3,4. But, as with anything, we want to be super precise when we’re making these edits. So I need to zoom to 100% and the easiest way to zoom to 100% is to use my hand tool. So if I hold down the spacebar on my keyboard, you can see my little hand tool pop up there, right, everybody’s seen my hand. Hi, my little cursor hands. If I have that hands tool, I can double click anywhere on the image, and it’s going to zoom me to 100%. So it makes it really easy for me to zoom in and be very accurate with my placement and double click, zoom out, spacebar, double click zoom in, get that put on that corner, double click, zoom out, go to my next corner, double click zoom in, man I did a good job, that one was close. I’m getting better at this. And then I’m going to zoom out and zoom in. Now I’ve got a really good accurate draw on all four corners and then I just simply click Apply. And I’ve just corrected for Keystone across the board. Now again, you have vertical options to correct Keystone, if you’re looking at a building and you have it going on like this. And I also have horizontal, it might cantor is off, or my tilt is off, or I can do all four at the same time. Now the biggest difference between Capture One and say Photoshop, is in Photoshop, we’re really used to just hitting Enter, Enter is my commit mode, right? Like if I’m going to commit to an action, I hit Enter. If you hit enter in Capture One, you’re going to create a compare variant. So instead of hitting Enter, you just need to click on to a different tool. So I’m going to go back to that hand tool but instead of holding my spacebar and making it a temporary hand tool, I’m just going to hit h on my keyboard, which is a shortcut key for hands. Now I’ve just gone from my crop tool, my Keystone tool into the hand tool very, very easily. And if I want to go back and do any other corrections, I can simply go back to that Keystone tool and make more minor tweaks. The thing to keep in mind with capture. One is that you’re working on the front end of a raw file, you’re working on the front end of file, before it becomes something this is why we work in this non-destructive workflow, is with raw data, we have a tremendous amount of latitude over what we can do with that file, right? We have tons of information in there and tons of the ability to pull it or push it to change our colors to change our textures to you know, do all of these edits. When I’m working in Photoshop, I’ve already put that file in bookends, I’ve given it a very specific space to live within now we have a tremendous amount that we can do in Photoshop, it’s a crazy powerful software, right? But the beauty of, we can do as much as we possibly can on the raw file on the front end before it becomes something that just gives us better results once we go into Photoshop. So we’re trying to do as much as we can in Capture One, and then Photoshop is my post-secondary editing. So I’m going to go ahead and go back, click off that hand tool. Now with my Crop Tool, here’s an image that we shot in the southwest. And I’m going to go back to my crop tool, you can see that I’ve already put a crop on that, right? Just as I was playing around, I’m gonna click on my crop tool and just kind of click that off.
00:28:45
Scott: In fact, let’s just reset this image all the way back to zero. So this is the file as it was photographed in the very beginning. And it was you know, midafternoon, though shadows are kind of hard, I got a little bit of the moon up there, you know, you can kind of see it up there. It’s not a bad picture but it’s not an amazing picture, right? It’s not something that like I would want to print and hang on my wall. And I thoroughly believe that an image isn’t done until it’s printed. Once it’s printed, once you get a file, you make a print, you take a piece of film, you make a print, you’re committing to living with that picture, you’re proud of that image that’s created, you’re proud of that piece of history that you have. And so I think this is a cool picture, but it’s not all the way there. So I’m going to start by cropping and I’m going to get rid of kind of this fluff that’s going around on my Crop Tool. You see it has a drop down arrow up there, right? And that way I can go in and choose a very specific crop. Now this was a digital file shot on a phase one camera, but let’s pretend that I shot it on a Hasselblad and I want to do a square I want to do a 1:1. I’m a big fan of that square format. And it very quickly takes me into that square format and now I can go ahead and move that around and make adjustments to it. So I’m working in this square format, and I’m trying to make it fit within that space. It’s not really doing what I want to do right This is not an image that works with square, okay, change games, I’m gonna go back up to that crop tool. And instead of square, I’m going to go ahead and go unconstraint, I’m going to go, you know what, let’s just, let’s just freelance it here, let’s just throw caution to the wind and crop it the way that we want. And we’ll figure out the printing afterwards. Or we’ll let the experts at DSI, figure out how to make it work within a space. So I’m going to go ahead and start to put a little bit of a crop on that, I’m going to bring that in tighter, I’ve got a little fluff there on the left, maybe I’ll get rid of that altogether, we’re going to, we’re going to do an awkward crop here, right? Maybe something like that. Now, again, I’m still seeing the entirety of my image. And my crop and I can change that tonality in my preferences. If you go into capture one and you go to your preferences, up here, you can change like how dark it is, I can have it go completely dark, I can have it and you know, barely be seen at all. For me, personally, I kind of like that off just a little bit. So I can see where I’m cropping got my image. And that’s going on. And again, to commit to this, I don’t hit enter, all I do is click on a different tool. So I’m gonna go back to that hand tool, I’m gonna go bam, and I’ve and that’s what I’m seeing. And again, if I need to see that crop, I click See, and I can go back in and adjust that crops, we’re gonna click on the hand to one of my okay, that’s looking pretty good. Now I’m a big fan of black and white. It’s no secret, I was really excited to tell everybody, I managed to score a new back for my Hasselblad, I know this is gold, right? I’m making everybody in the world jealous right now, because you can’t find these things. They’re selling as fast as you can get them. Thanks to my guy at Roberts camera who found one for me, John Scott. I like black and white. I like film, I like the character of film, even though I shoot digital. So I want to take this image and convert it to black and white. And that black and white tool that we used a minute ago, I’m going to go back to that tool and utilize it again.
00:31:45
Scott: I go into my color tool, I’ve been moving it around, I’m gonna go ahead and bring it out here so you can see it. And I’m going to commit to making it black and white by just enabling black and white. And again, the question was asked, do we still have the color controller, those channels, we do have the color controller, those channels, the same as if I was putting filters in front of my lens, when I was shooting for my old school, black and white people, you know what I’m talking about, right? So I can go into these individual color channels on that bear pattern, and start to make some tweaks and adjustments. Oh, I like that darker sky. Right? Blues and bring that in, magentas, I have all of those options here. Within that tool, right now that’s starting to go somewhere that’s starting to become something but I’m not quite done yet. So what I want to do is make some more adjustments on it. Close up layers, my levels, let’s do quick auto levels, right, I get out of levels works pretty well. So little bit too much. I’m gonna drag that back just a titch. And then I’m gonna go into my exposure unit, and I’m dragging this tool out so that you guys can see it. And I like contrast in a file, I’m gonna add some contrast that file. But now these highlights are really starting to blow out there, right? You guys see that the highlights are blown out, and it’s not quite where I want. So I’m gonna bring out the High Dynamic Range tool. And I’m not quite sure why it’s called that it is dealing with those high dynamic range things I tend to think of, you know, in terms of Photoshop, high dynamic range when you’re taking multiple pictures and combining them into one to get, you know, a kind of a full cross on that. But it’s called the high dynamic range tool, I’m going to specifically grab those highlights and drag them down, bring that exposure down to bring those highlights up, I’m gonna lift the shadows up a little bit. And now I’m starting to take this image into something that I really like, right, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of work, we have all of the tools there. For people who are new to capture one, there’s a lot going on, I get that just take your time and play with each individual tool, it’ll all make sense because this is just an incredibly powerful software, we have a tremendous amount of latitude over what we can do. So I’m going to go ahead and drag those back. Now one of the things that I like is film grain. And we see this is a super clean image, right? There’s very little grain there’s not a lot going on there but you know, when I’m photographing this image, and when I was looking at I was going man, this should look really great, as if I had shot it on a 4×5 or an 8×10. Or, you know, the film had some character and one of those really wonderful tools, which I don’t think I was going to cover today but I’m going to cover today is the film grain tool. And if I go over here, and I bring that film grain tool out, now the film grain tool is absolutely one of my favorites. And the reason being is that it’s not a filter that slapped on top. There’s a lot of other software’s where that you can apply film grain to an image. And it’s literally a filter that gets stuck on top of the image, if you will, you know it’s a here’s film grain, here’s the image to put it on top. The film grain that’s happening in Capture One is an actual algorithm, a really hardcore nerd sat in a lab tweaking out on Red Bull, studying film grain and writing the code to best represent it. So you can see there’s fine silver, rich, soft, tabular, those are all representative of known film grains but because of trademarks, you can’t call it that right. So I’m gonna go ahead and go silver rich, which I really like. I’m zoomed into 100% here, and I’m gonna start to just bring that impact up just a little bit. Now, if I’m looking at this at 100%, and I’m seeing that film grain that I’m bringing in there, I’m starting to bring a little bit of character to that file, right? We’re zoomed into 100%. So it’s really looking like, I don’t know, maybe I shot it on Tri-x. And I’m going to zoom back out. Some people are opposite of me, some people don’t like film grain. If you’re not a film grain, you like everything. I’ve got a friend shooter in California, and it has to be clean and perfect. Everything has to be clean and perfect. And that’s your style. That’s totally cool. Capture One can help you do that. I like the film grain. I like the character. There’s a reason I like true silver gelatin prints because of that beauty. You know, that beautiful texture that you get in that image. And then when you hang it on the wall, you know it’s unique, you know, it’s yours, you know you created it. I love to still get pictures printed, and I still send them to my mom. Her house is covered, at least somebody likes to hang up my art.
00:35:56
Scott: Right? Moms are good for that. Thanks, Mom. I’m sure she’ll watch this webinar later. So big shout out to my mom, love you. Cool. So here we’ve just gone in now, you can see here I’ve got a little bit of dust up there by my moon and that’s just distracting me and really starting to drive me crazy. So I’m gonna go ahead and use my dust removal tool and there’s a couple of options for that there’s the Spot Removal. And you can see that I have spot and dust and a spot is something that’s in a file, like if a fly lands in your frame, you know, you’ve got to provide a file that I use for educational purposes here, that model is sitting on a haystack and she has a little fly on her leg, I would use the spot tool to remove that because it’s a temporary object, whereas dust it tends to get on your sensor and it tends to live there. So for this one, we’re using the dust tool, I’m gonna go ahead and click on that. And bam, I’ve made that dust go away. That’s one way of dealing with that issue right there. Now, if I have a ton of dust in this file, and it’s just all over the place, I’m going to be sitting here clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking. And it’s really kind of frustrating. If you have a really, really dirty file, Photoshop and J Brush is your friend, right? I’m just gonna throw that out there. If I’ve got a couple of pieces of you know, dust in my sky here, it’s not too hard for me to go in with my little dust tool. Oh, there’s another one, I’m gonna zoom in on it, I’m going to make it go away. zoom back out. And I’m not seeing it. Now the beauty is if I’ve shot three or four pictures in succession here, and I have some dust spots that tends to live on the sensor, that tends to be in the same place. The reason that we would utilize the dust tool versus the spot tool is that if I can, I can copy and apply settings from one image to another. So if I have multiple images, let’s just say I’ve done all this tweaking on this file and I want to apply the same edits, right? The same edits that I’ve already done to this piece of film that we had digitized, right? So just for example, so by copying to the clipboard from this image, I’m going to click that up arrow which is going to copy it to my clipboard, I’m going to select the file or files that I want to apply it to and I can apply those same edits, right? Which not great for these two images side by side but that copying in fly feature is great if I’m doing multiple images in a batch and that’s one of those beautiful features is that you edit the first one copy to clipboard you can apply it to all those images in session now I can go, oh man I didn’t mean to do that to this image nondestructive workflow you guys nondestructive workflow I can simply go back up to my undo redo button here and go nevermind that’s not what I wanted. That’s not what I intended, right? I can always take it back to a starting point.
00:38:33
Andrea: Scott, my question for you is, does so the nondestructive workflow that kind of answered part of the question I had in mind but does capture one form something like a layer or do something like that? So if I wanted to eliminate just one portion of my edit, is that possible?
00:38:52
Scott: Yes, it is. I am, let’s see here, layers layers layers, where’s my images? It’s great for layers. Give me one second, undo that. So that capture one, layers is a bit more advanced and I think I put it in here. Yeah, this is the one I like to use for layers. This is a bit more advanced but bear with me. This is the Brudir church in Iceland known as the black church, I think it’s awesome because Iceland’s you know back in the day was one of those countries that had a thing where if you had a public space on your property that you got a tax break and so all of the farmers built churches in the corner of their fields. There’s churches all over Iceland. Iceland’s one of my favorite places in the world ever I know it you know has been overrun with tourism in recent years but what an amazing country it’s just so beautiful. So this is the black church is a very well-known spot to go and photograph. For layers. I’m gonna go ahead and go to my layers tab here. Layers in Capture One is similar to layers in Photoshop and you know that was it was a proprietary thing with Adobe, you know, they invented the whole layering structure of working in these files, and it was a, you know, it was a boardroom business deal between Adobe and Capture One, they got access to a color engine Capture One got access to layers that keep in mind these layers again are on the front end of the raw so you’re not committing to anything it’s nondestructive workflow, I can do a layer, I can remove a layer. The question always gets asked, well, if I do layers in Capture One, will they be visible in Photoshop? No, they will not. There are two different engines, they’re talking to different languages. Photoshop, again, is in those bookends, so it will see the edits that you’ve done, but not the editing process. Does that make sense? So layers that I do in Capture One, it is going to affect my image, I can see the results of that in Photoshop, but not the layers themselves. So now really quickly here for this layer, I’m going to go ahead, and I’m going to put a gradient mask on. So I’m going to select that gradient mask tool there in the bottom. And I am going to create a layer, it should do it automatically. That’s one of those new things that would that was added in Capture One, you know, 12 or 20, where you could just click on a thing, and it would automatically create the layer for you. I had to think about that for a second because I’m used to going in and building the layer and then making my adjustments but it doesn’t automatically so I’m going to grab that gradient, and I’m gonna go ahead and drag that down on that sky. Now one of the things that I want to do with this layer is I want to give it a custom name. And again, we can do up to 16 layers I believe in Capture One, I like to give it a name as I’m working to make it really easy. If I shut down my Capture One, I come back four days later, and I’m starting to edit again. And all you have to do is highlight it and give it a name. It’s really simple. The more organized you are as you’re editing, the better results. Now with this sky, I think that I’m going to bring those highlights in, I’m gonna hide my mask, because I don’t like it on when I’m working. I’m gonna go ahead I’m going to bring those highlights in a little bit. I’m going to increase the saturation on that sky. I’m going to bring those colors in just a little bit better a little bit of contrast. And the other thing that I want to do is I want to cool it off because I like a sky that’s nice and cool. Anytime I see a really warm sky especially in the morning, it scares me like you know, LA in the morning with the smog in the summertime. Sorry, LA, you guys have bad smog. Actually, this year is probably been pretty good for that because nobody has been driving anywhere. So I’m gonna go ahead and go to my white balance tool. And I’m just going to cool that sky off a little bit rather than the choosing my picker and picking around the image. I’m gonna go ahead and grab that slider. I’m just going to cool those colors off just a little bit, right? I’m just gonna give it a little bit going on. I think that’s looking pretty good. Now I want to do another layer, I’ve got all this beautiful grass down here in the bottom, I’ve got all this stuff going on. And I want to do something with that grass. So I’m going to go ahead, I’m going to create a new layer, I’m going to do it this way, I’m going to give it a name grass. Really quickly, I’m going to grab my paintbrush, and make sure that I Opacity and Flow are all the way up. And to get to that when you see the tool you can control click or right click and that brings up that control over that tool to where we can adjust the size. You know people always ask can I adjust the size like with the brackets the same as I do in Photoshop, absolutely the brackets on your keyboard, dial that up and dial that down. So I’m really quickly and sloppily, turn my mask back on. I’m really quickly and sloppily, always better if you’re using a Wacom tablet, or you know, for people who do a lot of photoshopping and editing you know, but I’m doing it with a mouse. So I’m being kind of down and dirty here. And I’m just going to highlight the area really down and dirty that I want adjusted. Now I can sit here and scrub this in and paint it in, or I can utilize the tools that Capture One is already built for me. And I’m going to go up to my Danish Allen wrench those three little dots again, and now I’m going to go fill mask.
00:43:46
Scott: And anything that I’ve highlighted there, it’s going to fill in automatically for me. So if I’m working on a big space, I’m working on a sky I’m working on something, I simply highlight it, I go to those three little dots and I fill my mask in. So now that I have my mask there, I’m gonna hide it and I’m just hiding it by hitting the M on the keyboard. That’s my shortcut key for that. It’s the default shortcut key. More advanced techniques, you can customize your keyboard shortcuts. We’ll have to cover that another time. So I’m going to go ahead and I think that the grass I want to lift the shadows up on that grass, I want to brighten it up just a little bit. So rather than brightening the exposure I’m just gonna bring the shadows up. I’m going to give it a little bit and I like grass that’s a little crunchy. So I’m going to go ahead and go to my clarity and natural, I’m going to leave it there. This is midtone contrast. And I’m just going to give it a little crunch to that grass. Now it’s looking a little green. I kind of like the fall thing again, I’m going to go back to that white balance tool and I’m going to warm it up a little bit, I’m going to add just a little warmth to that grass so I’ve made it a little crunchy, and I’ve added a little warmth. Now I haven’t done a whole lot. I’ve done two layers here. But if I take this image and I go well, I want to know how it looks compared to my original image, right? Like I’ve done these edits on this file now what do I do, right? How do I know that I like what I’ve done? What I’m going to do is I’m going to go up to my image in my drop down screen, and I’m going to select new variant. Now you see here you have new variant, and clone variant new variant simply creates a virtual file. And again, I’m not increasing, it’s a set of instructions, right? It’s the software making notes on what you want to do to that file. It’s a virtual copy. So it’s not taking up any room on your hard drive, it doesn’t become room on your hard drive until you process that file. So I really quickly I just go image, new variant, so you see it has the number two, and I can bring those files up side by side there and see where I started on the right, versus where I am on the left. So with those layers, you don’t have to do a whole lot, it doesn’t take a lot energy to take a picture and go, okay, it’s kind of a flat, uninteresting file. Now there’s something that I would love to hang on my wall. If I was to do more editing this, I would probably highlight the church there. And I’d bring a little characteristic out of the church as well, right? And that would be a third layer. With those layers. I can if I’m gonna go back to my file that I’ve been working on here with those layers. If I’ve overdone something, you know, let’s say with my grass here, like I’ve really, I really messed that grass up, right? I put some hard tweaks on it, and I go, well, I like the direction that it’s in, but it’s a little bit too much. You see in the layers tool, here we have opacity, I can grab that opacity. And just say, you know what, let’s rather than going back and trying to reset the tool and starting over, I can grab that opacity slider and just start to bring it back a little bit, I can just take out some of the edits that I’ve made. So that’s where we started. And I can go with my tweaks, I’m going to drag it up. That’s looking pretty good to me. So that’s the layers tool in Capture One, right? Dust removal, we’ve gone over that. With dust removal, there’s also there’s the spot and the dust tool. Here’s a shot from Xi’an, the other tool that you have is the band-aid tool and you can see I’ve got a bunch of layers on here, this file is edited already. If we go image new variant and a new variant, again, it’s going to take it back to its root raw, you can see here’s where I started. And here’s the tweaks that I put on it, right? So starting with a pretty flat interesting file and now I’ve started to go in and work that file over but I had dust all over my sensor. Now I can use my dust tool, my spot tool, or I have the band-aid tool and the band-aid tool is relatively new to capture one, it started in capture 12, I believe. And it’s kind of like the J brush in Photoshop, but it does it on a layer. So rather than being my spot dust tool where it lives, it’s not a layer, it’s in that database at that basic edit of that file. With this one, it creates layer and I’m gonna go ahead and shrink that sucker down. Make it a lot smaller. And this is really great if I have trash in the street, you know, if I have a power line going through my frame, this is a tool that I can use to do that, I’m just using it on dust here. And what it’s doing is it’s looking at the file next to it, right? So it’s created a layer and it’s gone in and it’s looking at the file next to it so it’s really easy for me to then do that. If I had a longer line, which I don’t have, let’s say this log, it’s not going to be a great example but it’s an example let’s say I wanted to get rid of the, you know, part of that log right there I don’t want that in my picture. So I can go ahead and bring this up and I can start to get rid of that log and what it’s going to do is it’s going to look at the data next to it and then bring it in on top and I could go in the log is a little bit big. Not awesome, I don’t know why you’d want to get rid of it. It’s beautiful in the picture but you can then go in and it’s gonna start to look at that and go you know, how can I adjust that, right? And I don’t love what that’s doing. It’s just a layer, it’s really easy for me to go up to that layer, highlight it and then delete it I can just make it go away. So that’s the beauty of that.
00:48:54
Andrea: Hey Scott, I just want to throw out that we’re at the 50-minute mark so I don’t know where you’re at.
00:48:59
Scott: I’m going to cover processing a file. There’s tons of tools in Capture One like I said an hour is just not enough time. Generally when I would teach these classes a lot of times they’d be an all-day affair because there’s just so much to cover. But really importantly I’ve given you guys some just super basics on editing, your white balance, your cropping, your keystone stuff, that’s key to photographers and image creators. Now, processing the image like getting that file out of capture one and into that one’s folder two, boom, boogers all over that. Zoom back out to 100%. So here’s a file Morro Bay, California, big fog storm tugboat that got scuttled on the rocks. I think the captain was drinking too much. So here’s a picture and I’m like, okay, I’ve edited it. Let’s pretend that I’m done. Even though there’s all that dust in the sky. Let’s not look at that. Clearly my sensor was dirty. I wasn’t taking care of it. And now I want to process this file, now with capture one because it’s raw data, whether it’s film that’s been digitized that we’ve digitized for you or it’s images that you shot. With your digital camera, your phase one, your Sony, your Fuji, your Nikon, your Canon, you know, all of those, you know, wonderful tools that we have. The only ones that won’t work in in Capture One is Hasselblad, because it’s an enemy thing, right? Sorry, I know, makes me sad. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to, I’m going to process this file. Now, some people go up and they go File Export, or image export, and exporting your file, you can take a raw file with edits and export it or whatever. But that’s not what we want to do capture one has a tool built into it and our process recipes. And if we look here, our processed recipes are the soup recipes. It’s like being in the darkroom, you know, am I using retinol? Or I’m using D76. You know, what is my developer? What temperature is my developer at? You know, how do I want to take this file and process it out? Do I want to make it a JPEG? Do I want to make it a TIFF? Do I want it to be a PSD? Is my workflow storage DNG? Right? Like whatever that is, this is where we build that out. Now, these two are already highlighted, I’m going to go ahead and uncheck those, I’m going to turn those process recipes off. And I’m going to create a new one by clicking the plus here and I’m just going to call it VII because that’s what we’re working on today. So this is specific to what we’re working on here. So now with the VII agency, right? With my process recipe, the next one down is my process recipe box here, this is the one that matters to your life, everything else in there short of choosing the recipe that you want done, everything else is fluff. This is the important one, this is what we look at when we create this process recipe. Now I know I’m going to print with this file. So I’m going to go TIFF, I’m going to go full 16 bit, let’s get as much information out of it as we can uncompressed Adobe 98. That’s pretty general, I’m going to leave it that. And I’m going to have it open straight into Photoshop, when I’m done, I can go ahead and turn that on. So if I know that I’m doing another level of editing, I can have it open straight into Photoshop. Now underneath file right here, it says root folder output location. Clue one, what did we do when we customized this in the very beginning? We gave our output folder a name, I don’t see that name there, how do I know it’s writing to where I want it to write to? So what I’m going to do, I’m going to go down here and I’m going to select the folder, see it’s going to my pictures folder. That’s not where I want it. If your files ever get lost when you’re processing, start there, look at that, because that’s telling you where it’s writing the data to. And I know I created this, I added it to my shared folder. There we go. VII output, and then open. Now it says up there in my root folder, it’s writing to the specific place that I want it to write to I’m telling those files where I want them to live. Now subname subfolder, I’m going to go ahead and create a subfolder. And I’m going to call it Tiffs, or print. I know that these are Tiffs for print. If you see the three little dots here, this is naming tokens. I’m not going to go into it because we don’t have time, they’re your friend, explore that. This is one of the greatest ways to be organized when you’re processing your files is utilizing those tokens. Keep in mind, if I put a forward slash after that file, that means a folder a subfolder within a subfolder, right? I’m creating folder structure, not gonna worry about that. I’m just highlighting it because I want you guys to go check that out. So I’m going to go ahead Tiffs for print, create a thumbnail on save under adjustments, I want to respect the crop, I put a crop on that file, I want to make sure that that crop is there because that’s the image the way that I want it to be. If I’m delivering files to a client, and they want the full of everything and they say I don’t want any crops on it or anything like that, then I go ignore crop. The crop is my visual but because I know that this is a file I’m sending to print, I’m going to go ahead and respect crop, no output sharpening.
00:53:41
Andrea: Scott, can I jump in right there?
00:53:44
Scott: Yeah!
00:53:45
Andrea: So I’m jumping in because there’s a there is a question about that, from Magdelena, it says when I cropped images in Capture One it sometimes changes the aspect ratio, when I specify the aspect ratio is original. Is there a way around this?
00:54:03
Scott: Yes, when you’re in your crop tool. If you go in here and in the crop tool, select a specific aspect ratio, right? When you’re doing the crop, and you can you can build a custom one. There’s default ones built in all these on the bottoms are ones that I’ve made. And so what I’ll do is if I’m doing a very specific to what I want it, I click on add aspect ratio. And then I can go in and tell it what I want it to be so based on my print. Does that answer the question?
00:54:34
Andrea: I think so. And then when you’re going into export, then you have to make sure that you select.
00:54:38
Scott: Yeah, we’re gonna call it process, when we process the file process. Yeah, and that’s a common thing is people say, oh, export, I’m not exporting. I’m processing the data. I’m taking this raw data, and I’m turning it into something, I’m turning it into a file that takes up physical space on my hard drive, which is kind of, I know I said physical space on a hard drive, but it’s all ones and zeros, man. It’s not really anything, but it takes up room on the hard drive, right? So I’m going to go ahead and respect crop and by having respect crop selected, that’s going to maintain that crop in that aspect ratio of however you designated that file as you were editing it, right? You know, output sharpening Capture One does pretty good with output sharpening, if I’m going straight to Instagram or straight to the web, I’ll do my output sharpening for screen. If it’s going to print, a lot of times, the lab that you’re printing with has, you know, they know how much sharpening they want on the file based upon their system. So I tend to leave that off. Metadata, of course, your copyright better be in there. You know, copyright, copyright, copyright, get your data on your file, make sure that you’re protected. I teach an entire class to my students just on copyright law, just on getting your copyright, attach those files, it’s really essential that you do that. So I want to leave that on there. I want to make sure that my copyright is attached to that. And then there’s a watermark and watermarks are one of those things like there’s a couple schools of thought, I can’t stand it. You know, you get senior pictures, you get your print pictures in the mail, and they have big proof written across it. And I understand why that’s done. But I think it’s silly. Yeah, everybody knows that your work. Like we’re all respectful people. My buddy Tony Hewitt in Australia, really talented photographer, he uses a watermark and puts his logo down in the lower right hand corner. You know, Tony Hewitt photography and if you look at his work, and I think that’s a really useful tool, because you’re advertising your business. Now, I don’t need a watermark on this, because this file is going to print, it’s ready to go. So now everything is good to go. It’s ready. I’ve got Tiff, Adobe 98. The next thing I do is I just click process. And if you see right here, that button is right in that process recipes. Now, you see all these recipes, I can have multiple recipes turned on. So I’ve got this file, I’ve created a folder for it to go to print but I also want to go straight to Instagram, right? I’m going to post this on my social media. So I’ve built out a second recipe here 72 DPI long edge, I’m not going to open it with anything. I can I can actually tell it to open an Instagram right there, I just click other and then have it open up. But I’m not gonna have it open to me, I can have as many recipes selected as I want. And then I click process. And it’s going to give you that status bar, it’s now, the software is now taking that raw data, and it’s turning it into something. Now it doesn’t mean that our raw file itself or original file has been affected. It’s the software looking at all of those instructions that we’ve given it as we’re making edits, taking that information and building a new one. Right? So now it’s going to open up straight into Photoshop, because I have all that nasty dusty dust on my sensor, because I wasn’t diligent about cleaning it. Hey, we’ve all been there. I’m not alone. And there’s my file that I can edit in Photoshop. Cool. So exporting versus processing, right? Output locations, tokens, and organization, we don’t have a lot of time to go into tokens. I’m telling you they are your friend. Questions?
00:57:53
Andrea: Right, let’s get into questions. I’m going to, I’m trying to some of the questions are similar here. So I’m going to try and group a couple of them. And for example, we have Athena and Ted both ask, and I’m going to read rehost Athena’s question, is Capture One a replacement to Lightroom? And then would you move into Photoshop? Or, is this software to use on its own, so no need to use Photoshop? And then at the end, Athena asks, can you print from Capture One? And there’s a lot of questions about using Lightroom in conjunction with Capture One so can you address that?
00:58:37
Scott: I’m gonna address all of those in succession number one Lightroom and capture one are two different software’s Lightroom at its core is a cataloging software, Capture One at its core is a raw processing engine. I’ve used Lightroom since version one, I’m very familiar with it Adobe makes a great software. They do similar things when you’re editing a file. I think Capture One and the engine and the algorithms in the file does a better job than Lightroom and you know for my diehard Adobe people out there, I tell people like, use what you’re most comfortable with. You know, if you’re using Lightroom and it really works for you and you’ve got your workflow down Capture One can be a fun side experiment, you know, don’t go changing your entire life, you know, like try the software out gets to know it, it’s a really powerful software. I tell people when you’re comparing Lightroom to capture one, take the same picture, take the same file bring it into Lightroom process at 300 DPI with no edits take the same picture in the Capture One process at 300 DPI with no edits and then bring it into Photoshop and look at them side by side. And I think that capture one does a better job particularly in line detail and shadows. It’s just it gives you a better file. And I say that very delicately because I don’t want to offend anyone. I believe in Capture One I think it is just the absolute bomb of a software. It does a better job which is why I process all my data in Capture One. As far as going into Photoshop, and when we take that to the next step going into Photoshop, it’s not here to replace Photoshop. Now you can do a whole lot in Capture One. And you can go if you’ve got a really great file you can go from start to finish and capture one and not need to take it into Photoshop for that second level of editing but Photoshop is incredibly powerful for what it does. It has tools and things that you can do for my really smart Photoshop people out there, man. I mean, you can do so much in Photoshop that you can’t do in Capture One, because Photoshop is just that. It is built to edit a file. So the answer is no, you know, it’s yes and no, you can do most everything in Capture One, a lot of times I’ll be editing files, and I don’t need to take them into Photoshop, because I’m happy with what I’ve gotten here. But then there’s situations where I really want to do something unique to that file, I know there’s more layers, there’s more edits I want to put onto it. That’s why that has that feature built into the process recipe to go from my raw file, turn it into a TIFF, turn it into a PSD, and then go into Photoshop for next level editing. As far as printing goes, yes, there is a print dialog in Capture One. To add that in, you can go to the blank space in the top customize toolbar, it’s going to bring up I can customize that toolbar. Again, this workspace is completely customizable. And there is a print dialog there somewhere. There it is, the printer. And I can just drag that up in the space. And then I click Done. And then I can print. Now I’ve done a lot of testing. If any of my Capture One people are watching this, please don’t be angry with me. I’ve done a lot of testing personally with the print function. It utilizes whatever the native engine is of your computer. When I go to print personally, I do it from Photoshop, I think the engine just does a better job and there’s more tools built into it that give me a stronger printing option. So if I’m just cranking out a quick proof print, something like that I don’t need to open in Photoshop or go through all those levels. I’ve got my Canon Pro1000 here, I can just really quickly hit print and knock out a quick 8×10 or something. Yes, I can print from Capture One. If I’m making a print that matters, I’m going to take that file and send it to DSI and have them make a beautiful silver gelatin print to hang on my wall. If I’m making a print to send to my mom, I’m going to take that into Photoshop and print that out.
01:02:12
Andrea: So I have a follow up question that relates to exactly what you’re talking about, which is printing. Let me see Menno asked he said output sharpening, he’s surprised that you said not to use it I could go on but I’m gonna let you talk about this. Could you go into that a little bit and why?
01:02:35
Scott: It’s the, I think it’s just workflow the output sharpening in Capture One is exponentially better than it ever has been. I’ve been doing a little testing with it and they’re just they’re really smart engineers man, they do a really great job. I tend to output sharpen when I go into Photoshop just because I’m comfortable with it. Again if I’m going straight to social media output sharpened for screen because it just gives a little tweak on the edge. What ends up happening on the print side of things and I’m sure this is what Andrea is talking about, is that we’ll get files in from people and they’ve done all this sharpening and say it’s ready to go this is what I want and then it gets stuck on the printer the file comes out and it just looks crunchy and so you know I think oftentimes unless you’re working with a really high end monitor, you color calibrate regularly, you’re very specific about what you want. I mean I’m going to be able to see that in in my monitor if I’m working on a monitor that’s not a hardware profile monitor it doesn’t have a high refresh rate. I think it looks good and then I go to print and it just looks overly crunchy. And so I tend to say you just back off the sharpening a little bit.
01:03:46
Andrea: Yeah, I think that you know worse we become so accustomed to looking at things on monitors. And you know, even with today’s HD monitors and televisions, we want things to look razor sharp, ultra-sharp, overly sharp. And in the lab, the biggest problem that we see coming through from customer files is that we oftentimes have to ask the customer to actually remove the sharpening from their file because they’re getting jagged edges and soft places where they shouldn’t be because they’ve over sharpened the file because it looks great on the screen but in print it’s a problem and you can always add the sharpening later or what I really like about the Capture One process feature is you know you can you could select the process for Instagram so if you want a super you know sharp file for Instagram with all that sharpening you could do that, correct? And then have a different one for your printer engine.
01:04:44
Scott: Absolutely and that’s the beauty of the process recipes is that you know it’s not like it used to be where you know we get our negative, we go to the darkroom, we create our own, you know, 11×14 or 16×20. I can build as many products. This is one of my favorite things I used to work as a digitech. That’s my background. There was a photo assistant turned digitech turned photographer. So I’ve been through the food chain, I get it, I know what you guys are experiencing. And when I was digitech, working with early versions of Capture One, I could only do one process recipe at a time. And so I would, you know, be working catalog for Land’s End and sitting in a hotel in Savannah, Georgia. And I’d hit process and I’d sit there and wait for it to be done and then I build the second recipe and I hit process and wait for it to be done. When they added in multiple process recipes and the ability to do multiple at the same time. Oh my God, for me, it was life changing, because now I could build all my recipes, highlight them, designate where I want the files to live, I can have it write to multiple hard drives, I can have it live in different places, I can have one for social media and one for print. And you know, all of these abilities, I just build out those recipes in that process tab, highlight the ones that I want, and hit that orange checkbox, right? Make sure that orange check boxes on and hit process. And it does its thing and it’s great.
01:05:55
Andrea: Yeah, yeah, of course, you could make a workaround in Photoshop that does the same thing but it’s just not that elegant and simple. So let’s, I have another question here. I have several questions. So Jared asked, is there a history tab similar to Lightroom, to track adjustments, undo, redo, etc.?
01:06:15
Scott: There is not a history tab, per se, but you can go back and you just click back over to capture one here. If I take a file like this one, if you see at the top right here, with the undo, redo, reset, because we’re working in the native raw, I can always start to step backwards, right? Go back to that file. I can always take it and I can go all the way back to zero, right? I hit that reset tab, or I can go well, nevermind. Let me put it back the way that I wanted, I don’t see that history tab. That’s a question that’s been asked for as many years as I’ve been working in Capture One, it’s just not something that exists, you do have your clipboard and if I go to my clipboard here, you can see everything that I’ve done to that file. So it’s not really a history tab, but I can see all of the tools that I’ve used.
01:07:10
Andrea: So at least you know how far back you need to go on your undo.
01:07:13
Scott: You can go, you know what, I really hate that color sensitivity and black and white, right? I don’t like what I did here. I don’t like what I did there. And I can simply uncheck it and turn it off. So I can turn it off, I can turn it on. As always, if I’m doing something, there’s the before and after that’s built into Capture One now this is new to capture 120, it didn’t used to exist, you’d have to hold the Option key and hit the reset button, which would give you a before and after glimpse. Now there’s that before and after tool built in. So I can sit here and do a slider to see the work that’s been done to a file. So, not really a history tab but..
01:07:49
Andrea: Okay, Boris, I didn’t forget you, your first question. But Boris, I think has asked the most technical question so we’re gonna go with Boris’s question now. So one of the things that he says has bothered me for years in Capture One is the poor preview image quality when using Leica M DNGs. That is why I still sort with photo mechanic before going into Capture One and the reason for that could be two different preview files inside the DNG and Capture One uses the wrong file. Support could not help, any ideas?
01:08:27
Scott: So I would say up until a month ago, two months ago, yeah, absolutely nothing but a headache, especially when working with the Leica files. That has been fixed in capture 121 with full Leica support keep in mind the preview file that you look at in any software is just that. It’s the engine, if I look at the same preview file in Capture One, in Photoshop, in Photo Mechanic, in Lumiere, right? They’re all going to look differently, because it’s the software interpreting that data. So yes, I understand your headache capture 121 and solve that problem exponentially. Give it a look, see, because that’s something that’s just been really been a problem. Photo mechanic as a software does something that’s faster. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know what they do. As far as loading previews and getting that data in and attaching metadata. They do it just blazing fast. And you know, God bless them for that. And I understand your workflow on a commercial side, I worked similarly, when I bring my previews in to photo mechanic, I’d have my metadata, my copyright and all that and then plug it in there. As far as the preview images itself, take a look at capture 121 I think they solved that problem.
01:09:42
Andrea: Boris said he’s already using 21. So Boris, what I would suggest is maybe you get in touch with Scott. Scott, you’re open to that, aren’t you?
1:09:54
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to help.
01:10:00
Andrea: So, and you could reach Scott at [email protected].
1:10:03
Scott: Check it out, I have as we get to our last one here, there’s my contact information, right? There’s my email, there’s my phone number, if anybody has a collection they need digitized, I got the van, man. Let’s rock this, I’m ready to get on the road and start digitizing collections so there’s my contact you can get a hold of me cell phone right there.
01:10:27
Andrea: Great, I think I have just about really one more question, Scott. Then I think we’re going to call this a wrap. So Steve asks, If using DXO specifically Nik Silver Effects Pro2 for black and white editing, what are your suggestions for when to access after processing?
01:10:55
Scott: As far as starting with the..
01:10:57
Andre: I think I can paraphrase Steve’s question, like, would you process an image and then do your adjustments in silver effects pro?
01:11:07
Scott: Yes. Yeah, I would do my basic edits in capture one go through you know, any layers or tweaks, get rid of the dust, anything like that. And then once you have a file that’s living in the realm that you want, solar effects is an awesome software. We’ve got another webinar coming up on June 24th, right? there’s another one with the VII Agency here and it will be specifically in working with Lightroom and silver effects.
01:11:35
Andrea: Yeah, Joe Brady, you should check that out.
01:11:39
Scott: Yeah, I’m gonna watch it But yeah, I’m going to answer the question just to make sure that I did answer it. Yeah, I would do whatever I was going to do in capture one first and then take it into silver effects.
01:11:50
Andrea: Okay, oh, we got a couple more questions. Okay. Steve says thank you so I guess we answered Steve’s question, great. So when asked I’m shooting IR and process first for white balance before Photoshop. Is this required?
01:12:12
Scott: If you’re working, I mean if you’re shooting IR, film or digital?
01:12:19
Andrea: That is a good question. So maybe Gwen, you could let us know, are you shooting film or digital? Gwen is shooting digital, okay.
01:12:30
Scott: Yeah, I would start with capture one. I’d start with Capture One because as soon as you go into Photoshop, I mean Adobe has their ACR, Adobe Camera Raw. When you’re working, if you take a raw file into Photoshop it’s going to open up that ACR and you have tools and adjustments in there. And you know, it has to go through ACR in order to get into Photoshop like I said in order to properly be within the realm of Photoshop it has to live within those bookends it has to be processed file. The beauty of working in Capture One is that it’s just a really powerful engine. I would say work in capture one first and then process that file out into Photoshop for secondary retouching. There’s a, phase one builds a camera back that’s IR full spectrum and you know I’ve worked with the files and worked with the system in Capture One before shot I played with a little bit I had it on an Alpa technical camera and you know it was loads of fun because you start to put those you know you put the 640 or 720 nano filter over it and you get all these amazing results and I think you’d be really happy with what you can get out of Capture One.
01:13:33
Gwen also mentioned, she said that the Photoshop doesn’t recognize the white balance I think she’s talking about her process from Capture One, is she not processing correctly then?
01:13:45
Scott: Yeah, if you’re round tripping, it won’t recognize properly but if you do your edits and you do your white balance in capture one and then you process, you build a process recipe and process the file. Photoshop is gonna see those results because you’re taking all of that data, right? You have your raw file which is living over here on a pedestal and then we all the edits, or those set of notes right? All of that information that we do is we edit that file and then capture one takes that that set of notes and then builds the model, right? It builds the new file that you then take into Photoshop.
01:14:20
Andrea: So, you can do anything you want in Capture One but if you don’t process the file and then open that file in Photoshop, the Photoshop is just gonna see that file as the original RAW file?
01:14:30
Scott: Yeah, if you’re editing an image in Capture One and you’re tweaking and editing but you don’t process it, you don’t turn it into something and then you take your root file and open it in Photoshop it’s like nothing is being seen because of that settings file. So it has to be processed in order to lock that data in place to be seen in Photoshop.
01:14:49
Andrea: Yeah, I hope that answers your question Gwen. So I think that at this point, yep, she said she got it. I think at this point. We’ve already been on for an hour and twenty so I think that we need to call this to wrap and so I’m just gonna say before I turn over to Scott again, thank you to VII Insider and Photo Wings for putting on these great presentations. There’s so many awesome presentations also you know in the video portion of VII Insider and I suggest you go see that and also if you go to the Digital Silver Imaging YouTube site we have lots of YouTube webinars and things recorded there too so I just want to say my thanks so I’m gonna turn it over to you Scott to sign off.
01:15:38
Scott: All right, thank you everybody for joining us, really appreciate all you guys being here. There’s my contact information if you have questions, ping me. I’ll do my best I can to answer them you know if it’s if it’s way beyond me then you know we’ll work on getting you in contact with Capture One support but I am a plethora of knowledge so hopefully I can help and definitely check out..
01:15:57
Andrea: You are indeed.
01:16:00
Scott: You know. I’ve done it once or twice. Definitely check out DSI, check out our website, please. And like I said, watch the Instagram, I’m picking up the van next week and we’re going to start a road trip here of digitizing your archive we just wrapped up Elliott Erwitt, which is amazing. Working with another really talented photographer, Jeff Katz in LA. I’m just working with some awesome people and I would love to digitize your archive. So if you’ve got work for me to do, I would be happy to come see you.
01:16:28
Andrea: Definitely. And Henry, just answer your question, is this video will pop up on the VII Insider site, probably within a day or two. Giana, is that correct? They are on it. You just have to say something magically, it will appear in the chat.
01:16:50
Giana: So I’ll post it within about within two or three days. So probably by Monday, it will be up. Yeah.
01:16:58
Scott: There you go. Awesome. Well, thank you, everybody. I’ll see everyone later.
01:16:59
Andrea: Bye bye.
