Capture One Editing

Capture One Editing
Capture One Landscape Editing
Capture One Photo Editing Software

Capture One Pro once was just a tool for developing RAWs and didn’t include photo management tools, and I know from my workshops that some users lack the straightforward ability to edit photos without catalogs, imports, and organizational features. Fortunately for them, this function has not quite disappeared, you just need to know this simple trick.

You’ve might have heard of Capture One as a growing software for photo editing. It’s most known for its abilities to control and correct color. And it can offer a tempting alternative to Lightroom. If you’re used to other software, making the switch might come with a steep learning curve. The Color Editor is one of the most powerful tools in Capture One Pro. Rapidly edit colors with the Direct Color Editor, and learn how to precisely select and adjust colors in the Advanced Color Editor. Learn how to: Edit quickly and easily with the Basic Color Editor Select a color range with the Advanced Color Editor and apply changes to it. And with Capture One 21, it’s even faster, thanks to a new tool called Speed Edit. Once you’ve used Speed Edit, you’ll wonder why other editing tools haven’t come up with something similar. Using a series of shortcut keys, you can easily adjust things like exposure, contrast, saturation, highlights, saturation the list goes on. When importing an image, Capture One uses the metadata stored in the image file and if it exists in the.xmp sidecart file. For example, you can edit a.RAF raw Fuji file in Lightroom: keywords, a Title, geo coordinates. Lightroom will create a sidecart.xmp file. When you import the image in Capture One, the metadata will be read.

This tip depends on sessions, which are available only in Capture One Pro, so it won’t work for users of free Capture One Express.

As you may know, Capture One Pro offers two basic options for managing photos: catalogs and sessions. In short, the catalog is a large database for managing many (or even all) your photos, allowing fast and advanced search and sophisticated organization, while sessions can be considered certain micro-catalogs and are usually used to process single job, therefore they are faster and easy to move — for example from a computer hard drive to an external disk or network storage. And one of the sessions features can be used to directly edit photos located anywhere on the disk. The procedure is simple.

The first step is to create a new session using the File → New Session menu. Name it as you like (field Name) and place it in the desired folder (field Location) — the location does not matter much, the session will not even require too much disk space. A new session will open automatically after you create it.

The session always contains few subfolders where photos are typically stored (Capture, Selects, Output, and Trash), but moreover you can browse any folders on any drive in the System Folders section of the palette Library:

Here you can open any photo and start editing the same way you know from using a catalog or sessions. You can also change metadata and use color labels or star ratings, as you can see on the screenshot above.

Specifics and Limitations

This approach has some specifics and limitations that should probably not bother those interested in such a way of working, but it is still good to know about them.

Metadata, such as photo ratings, can be used to search and filter photos exclusively within a single folder. You cannot perform a global search and these photos are not searched by smart albums created within the session (section Session Albums in the palette Library) — for example, a default smart album Five Stars collecting photos with a five-star rating will only find images located in the main session folders (e.g. Capture) and not anywhere else on the disk.

You can partly get around this limitation by adding some folders to the Session Favorites section of the Library palette — you can drag them here by mouse, or you can right-click the folder and select Add To Favorites from the context menu. Of course, it is not very convenient to add all your folders to Session Favorites, so this method has its limits. More often, Session Favorites will probably serve as bookmarks for quickly finding the folder you need to work with.

You can add the selected photos to the standard album created in the session by dragging and dropping them into it, and then you can search photos in these albums in the usual way, however, they still won’t appear in smart albums. This way, you can group related photos from different folders.

Photos you delete are moved to the Trash folder within the session. This should be the only reason why a session could take up unnecessarily much disk space. It is, therefore, necessary to empty the trash from time to time or use the Image → Delete form Disk… function (Cmd+Ctrl+Backspace on Mac,Ctrl+Delete on Windows) for immediate deleting, but be careful — you cannot undo this operation.

And perhaps the most important thing in the end: in each folder in which you will edit photos in this way, Capture One will create a subfolder called CaptureOne with previews and adjustments. Therefore, you must never delete this folder, otherwise, you may lose the edits — in the current version, you will definitely lose all masks of local adjustments and retouching layers.

So, do I really need a session at all? What happens if I delete it? Can I move files around the disk?

You can’t do without a session because Capture One simply needs you to open a catalog or session before you start to work. But if you lose it for some reason, nothing terrible will happen — the adjustments will be preserved, you will lose the albums. The procedure for solving this situation is easy, you just create a new session, simply browse the folder with your photos again, and the previously made edits and metadata will be loaded from the above-mentioned CaptureOne subfolder.

Also, moving the entire folder with images is not a problem — again, just browse it in a new location, and Capture One will use the edits from the CaptureOne subfolder.

If you need to move only a few photos, the easiest and most secure way is to do it in Capture One — simply drag the selected photos to another folder and the application will make sure that the edits are moved correctly with them. You can also move entire folders in Capture One, and I recommend doing it this way when you are using albums — otherwise, moving folders outside of Capture One will break the binding of photos to albums, and it cannot be fixed later.

Conclusion

If you appreciate the quality of output and Capture One, but don’t want to use photo management tools, this method is a rather convenient alternative. Following simple procedures and rules mentioned in this article, everything should work smoothly and to your satisfaction.

You may support my work by buying Capture One license, subscription, or styles using this partner link. As a great bonus, you can save 25% on Capture One Pro annual subscription – just enter code ANNUAL25 during checkout. The offer is valid till November 2nd, 2020.

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In the first part, we’ve customized our workspace and shortcuts for batch editing. Also, we made sure that all the basic adjustments are applied before the processing. Now, it’s time to start editing images.

To make batch editing quick and effective, you need to follow these three principles:

Work with groups of images
Speed up all individual adjustments
Practice quality control

Let’s start with group editing since that’s an essential part of the batch workflow.

Batch editing is all about copying and pasting adjustments.
You need to do as little of corrections as possible and copy/paste all the other.
Of course, you have to crop each image separately, as well as to fix some individual exposure/color issues. Still, most of the events have groups of photos taken in similar conditions. Thus, you can edit only one image from a group and copy/paste adjustments to other images from this group. After that, simply check each image in the group quickly and apply individual adjustments if needed. Then proceed to the next group.

How many images should be in a group?
It solely depends on shooting conditions. Groups of images for outdoor events can easily include 10-20 shots. Indoor events tend to be more varied in lighting. Thus your groups of images will be rather small: 5-10 photos taken in similar situations. If you’ve been lucky enough to shoot an event on a mildly cloudy day in a single outdoor location, your groups of images can consist of 30 pictures or even more.

What if my event contains images from mixed conditions?
That happens. Sometimes you can take images of several different conditions in a single room. In this case, I recommend you to color tag some “sample” shots of each condition to be able to return to them to copy adjustments quickly.

How to edit the first “sample” image in the group?
As you remember, we have set all the basic adjustments before processing. So we don’t need to worry about general corrections; they should be fine. Instead, focus on what has to be fixed on a particular image and copy/apply these adjustments to similar RAWs.
For instance, you see a series of images with incorrect white balance, noticeable color cast, and dark shadows. Fix WB, remove a color cast with Color Editor, brighten black areas with HDR, and copy/paste these adjustments to all images in this group.

Sounds great, but what to do when a crop from sample images is applied to all images in the series?
Fortunately, you can easily turn off auto-copying of the crop in the Adjustments Clipboard settings. Click “…”, go to Autoselect and choose Adjusted except Composition:

What about layers? What if I had made layer correction on a sample image?
Well, there are two ways to avoid copying layers:
1) Adjust all except for layers, copy these corrections, and add some layer corrections. Basically, you need to think in copyable/non-copyable categories of editing. All that can be copied should be adjusted before copying. All non-copyable adjustments should be applied after that.
2) Turn off autoselect of adjustments in the clipboard and select everything manually, except for layers and composition. Thus, Capture One will always copy/apply everything, excluding layers and composition adjustments.

I prefer the first method because sometimes you actually need to copy layers too.

So, we’ve figured out that batch editing is all about copying adjustments in groups of similar images. Still, you can’t get rid of individual adjustments.
How to speed up all the individual corrections you need to apply?

Let’s see which adjustments you’ll typically apply and how to do it faster.

Crop
It’s the most used individual correction, and here I can give only one advice: use shortcuts.
I prefer to toggle crop on/off using shortcuts C and H (Pan tool), respectively. You can use C and Enter keys, but C and H keys fit my workflow better since my left hand is always positioned on the keyboard.

All tools with sliders
There are three ways to speed up adjusting Exposure, WB, HDR, Clarity, and any other tool with sliders:
1) You can hover your cursor over any slider and move it using a mouse wheel or touchpad. Note that in Capture One 20, the mouse wheel and touchpad are now scrolling interface by default. To adjust sliders, you need to hold down Alt key or switch Alt-scrolling to interface in Capture One settings:

2) Most of the sliders can be adjusted with shortcuts. The increment of impact is predefined for shortcuts, and it doesn’t fit my editing style. However, I know photographers who mastered effective work with adjustment shortcuts.

3) Finally, you can use controllers to have quick control over sliders. Previously, Capture One had support for only high-end retouch panels by Tangent. Fortunately, things have changed during the last three years, and now there are way more controllers to choose from. Here I have described all the available controllers for Capture One.

Color Correction
Basically, there are three tools for color correction: White Balance, Color Balance, and Color Editor. WB and Color Balance adjustments usually fit group-editing-concept and can be easily copied. Thus, most of the individual corrections are done with Color Editor.

The problem is that selecting colors manually and adjusting their values don’t really fit high-speed editing. Fortunately, Capture One 20 introduced the Direct Color Editor. It allows you to quickly pick any color on an image and adjust it just by moving your cursor. Check out this tutorial to learn more about Direct Color Editor:

Direct Color editing might feel weird at first, but this is a perfect tool for batch editing. For most of the event photos, you don’t need to perform some sophisticated color correction. All you need is to remove, say, magenta color cast on a particular image. For such a task, Direct Color Editor fits just awesomely.

Layers
Oh, that’s a tough one. Layers work so fantastically in Capture One that you want to use them a lot. Still, any local correction reduces your editing speed. To get advantages of batch editing layers, you need to control all local corrections with shortcuts only.

Here is the thing: most of your images will require only one layer adjustment. Capture One creates the first layer automatically when you start drawing the mask (shortcut B) or gradient (L and T shortcuts). The same applies to the Heal brush (shortcut Q). If you need to add some retouching, Capture One creates the first heal layer right as you start drawing it. Thus, any local adjustments can be applied pretty quickly.
However, sometimes you need to switch back the background layer to add some general correction. You can speed up this action as well by setting a shortcut for it:

So, we have edited all the images. What’s next?

Our vision is highly adaptive. Jumping from image to image, you can easily adapt to a wrong White Balance or contrast. You can miss some critical things to retouch or composition mistakes to fix.

To avoid this, always practice quality control after editing. My rule of thumb is to perform two quality controls after the editing with short pauses between them.
Usually, it works like this: