On the road to Capture One

[afx]

Ever since Bibblelabs (where I was part of the beta team, wrote an e-book about Bibble and even helped them out demoing it at PhotoKina several times) folded I've been searching for a replacement.
None of the products that are on the market really make me happy. Those that have decent IQ have either political or workflow issues and those that have a decent workflow are suffering.

I absolutely hate the idea of having to use a long chain of programs with intermediary files for regular shots, I want to use a tool that allows me to process 99% in one tool without having to resort to a process chain that involves additional editors or preprocessors. I am a prolific shooter when it comes to events, so time saved in the processing chain is essential.

My workflow for the last few years where ingest, cull and caption with AfterShot (LR is too stupid for placing the files where I want them to be in an automated fashion and I absolutely hate its weirdo keyword management), then process in Lightroom.

I occasionally looked at Capture One, but while I like its IQ (though initially LR had better highlight recovery) and the customizable UI, the silly session concept and the crude output functions always kept me from using it.
Adobe's policies now lead to me re-visiting Capture One.
It still has the same warts that kept me from it initially, but on the other hand, apart from a few nice functions (color adjustments by picker, the previous button) and the more flexible output, I don't think LR really has an advantage.

I am starting this thread to collect my observations and workarounds for C1 in the hope that they are useful for others and maybe someone has an idea how to circumvent obstacles that I encounter.

cheers
afx

[HCS]

Andreas, great idea to start this thread. And while you've set it up to share your experiences with C1, i hope you don't mind me writing up my usual workflow.

1. I start with downloading the images from card to hard drive. I use the inbox concept (sometimes called dropzone) where all images are placed.
2. I then import them into photo supreme (PSU), my catalog system.
3. I've setup PSU to drop the images into a date folder from the inbox. It's just the import date.
4. I then proceed to review and give an initial keyword (set).
5. I then proceed to do a first rating the images in PSU.
6. After these steps, i move the images to my hard drive archive folders. These folders are in my backup routine.
7. Then i run through my selection once more and send the chosen ones to C1.
8. In C1, i'm in session mode, i process the images to my liking. I hardly ever go to another image processing application (Except for HDR, Pano, or other stacking).
9. In C1, i've recipes setup for my usual output channels, like NG and my own (private) web site. These deliver the file type, image dimensions, colour space and file size of my requirements. A recipe usually outputs in one directory. I typically choose a directory manually, but output to original image directory is an option and it's possible to enter subdirectory of choice, or based on job name.
10. After output, i usually update PSU to import the new output files (verify folder). PSU tracks file versions based on a configurable scheme (i've part of original file name).
11. Then, it's all about coming back to the images in PSU to lift images for posting in NG threads 

Hope this gives people an idea of how it could be done. Questions can be asked and answered 

[afx]

C1 offers to apply watermarks in the output recipe.
One can either enter a text or overlay a graphic.

Unfortunately the text is not parametrized.
So if I enter "© Andreas Siegert 2015" but process last years file, the date would be wrong, or when processing the files of my wife or someone else it would be even worse.
Why is it so hard to have a placeholder for the metadata copyright field here? They do it in filenames, so the logic for it already exists.

As recipes do allow the execution of other programs after file generation ("Open with"), I thought it should be easy to use my old watermarking script from Bibble 4 days.
Fat chance, the Windows version of C1 will allow only the selection of EXE files, but not CMD, BAT or other scripting languages.

Well, the definition of the recipes is stored in XML files that are easy to edit.
They can be found in CaptureOne subfolder of the AppData folder on Windows. So I selected some program in C1, quit and edited the XML file to use my .BAT file.
Works like a charm.

But, BAT/CMD files do pop up a window each time they are run. A bit annoying.
As my script is actually Perl based, I am currently trying to get some Perl magic working that will skip the CMD window generation.

cheers
afx

[afx]

i hope you don't mind me writing up my usual workflow.

Au contraire, I hope to gather tips&tricks from other users here as well, so this is very welcome.

cheers
afx

[afx]

A few more observations after having processes two concerts, several portrait series and a few others.

The skin tone WB is very useful to make fine adjustments to skin tones in portraits, especially when dealing with pale teen-agers.

While using it on the Martin Barre concert where I had left the cams in auto WB mode, I was quite surprised how C renders the light. It had a nice olden touch to it, in contrast to AS and LR which both are quite bland...

The highlight recovery by now is pretty cool. When I compared AS, C1 and LR a few years back, C1 pushed the saturation too much. Now it really works.

In contrast to Lightroom and AfterShot you can adjust all selected images simultaneously just like in the Bibble 4 days. But you can decide to toggle this behavior on or off as needed.

Being able to toggle view mode on or off is very useful for switching between image selection and and viewing or working on images. Now if I have selected for example 6 images I can toggle viewer mode and have all the elected images in detail with synchronized pan and zoom.
Similarly to AfterShot and in contrast to silly Lightroom who only handles two images and is completely incapable of editing one image while having a comparisons image on screen.

A PJ friend of mine has the habit of running all noisy images through DxO with their prime denoising function before continuing in LR or PS. As he was swearing by it, and DxO had a special offer on, I thought I give it a try. Well, me thinks I will not spend the money on DxO. There is really no advantage and batching a complete concert into DNGs is just an unnecessary step in the pipeline.

C1 does not have a tag/reject key and no reject and advance function like LR.
The convention is to waste the color tagging for this.
Nicely enough, the "-" key sets the red flag and shift "-" clears it. Works well for a guy with the left hand on the mouse and the right hand at the keyboard.

I did run into some inconsistencies where the counter of red images till showed images even though I had just deleted them all. Seems to be a confusion in the session cache.

Copy and Paste of adjustments is a strange beast.
Copying everything works how one expects it to work with CTRL-C/CTRL-V (in contrast to LR which needs an additional modifier).
But C1 lacks the convenient Previous key of Lightroom.
And selective copy of adjustments needs a trip to the copy clipboard, workable but not really efficient.
But then it also has a button on each tool that allows copying of only this tools value.

What I really like is the configurability of the tool tabs. Saves quite a few scroll operations (LR is a PITA in this area).

The crop tool works mostly like expected (not like in LR which requires a huge mental switch when using several applications). But I really do not understand why I can't control the crop size on the sides when using a constraint crop. Only the corners work.

cheers
afx

[Jørgen Ramskov]

Thanks for your detailed information, quite useful. Using LR, I do miss the rendering speed of C1 when editing.

[HCS]

I'm glad it is starting to work for you, Andreas, rather than against you.

I have no stakes in Phase One, but i'd noticed rather quickly that Capture One is quite a bit different than the usual raw converter, let alone Bibble (which i used too).

One really needs to stick with it to get "through" the first impressions. After that, some of the options seem rather refreshing. Even though some things could use some re-thinking 

[afx]

Using LR, I do miss the rendering speed of C1 when editing.

So why did you switch?

Even though some things could use some re-thinking 

Yup, the whole I/O and a few other workflow related things.

In the end, C1 is much closer to Bibble than to Lightroom when it comes to the UI concepts, which is quite welcome as the LR UI concept is pretty much broken.

cheers
afx

[Jørgen Ramskov]

When I made the switch, LR provided a much better result than C1, including noise reduction. C1 already then had implemented support for OpenCL and it worked pretty well.

[afx]

When I made the switch, LR provided a much better result than C1, including noise reduction. C1 already then had implemented support for OpenCL and it worked pretty well.

LR with process version 2012 was quite a jump in IQ. When I compared C1 and LR at the end of 2012, C1 lost out, not only on HR and noise processing but also on local corrections.
Now with v8 it is equal to or better than LR.
And that even without OpenCL. I run a hex7 and only an entry level GPU, so using OpenCL does not buy me much speed.

cheers
afx

[Jørgen Ramskov]

Yeah, I still hope that Adobe will implement OpenCL or Metal support in LR. I believe the Nvidia GPU in my 15 Macbook from 2013 would do a decent job if allowed.

[afx]

C1 v9 was just released.
Key new features: Masked based on selections from the color / skin tone editor (which can select colors pretty precisely), curves on regions, airbrush, luma curves in addition to RGB, keyword management enhancements including a library, better support for converted DNGs.
No idea what the claimed engine improvements bring in real life.
License is now good for three instead of just two systems.

Installed it last night and batched a concert through, but did not have time to really check out the new stuff.

cheers
afx

[Almass]

Good to see another convert.

The Luminance curve as well as the improved Contrast is great and I particularly like the Color selection masking.

[HCS]

C1 v9 was just released.
...
No idea what the claimed engine improvements bring in real life.

I think the improvements are much more subtle than the V7 to V8 engine upgrade. I believe quite some engine changes are there for the future.

Haven't used it extensively, but the mask from colour selection is something i could use once in a while.

[Jan Anne]

Thanks for the v9 update Andreas.

I have the Sony only version for which there's no upgrade option available yet though