Capture One Myth Busting :: The Easiest Way to Get Started

welcome back in this video I want to do a little myth-busting about capture one capture one is my favorite raw image editor I use it all the time I have done videos on capture one before and inevitably every time I do that I see comments of people saying well capture one looks cool what a steep learning curve it's really difficult to use and that my friends is the myth that I want to dissect in this video because capture one really isn't it has a different user interface and if you're used to another Raw editor capture one gives you a lot more flexibility and a lot more control than most photo editors and so I think sometimes when people see the initial interface there's a lot in there but let me say this about a week ago I did a video on just some essential tools for editing images that if you can get a grasp on how to use sliders how to use levels adjustments curves adjustments or even color wheels some people call those HSL sliders you will get a really good grasp on how to edit images in just about any software and what I'm going to show you today on capture one will probably dispel a lot of that for you if you understand how the structure is set up so I want this to be a baseline video I am going to do a whole series of videos on capture one over the next few weeks in fact capture one reached out to me recently and they had seen the previous videos I had done and said hey what if we did a whole series on these and I was really excited and said yes let's do it so that's what we are going to get into so I want to be this the reference video that you guys can come back to if you're confused or don't know how to do something but what I want to do is walk you through the entire process of setting up a catalog bringing images into capture 1 how to do basic edits and then how to export those images we're gonna do it all in the course of one video here it's gonna move fast but it's very easy so let's get started but let's say you don't have a copy of capture 1 well the first thing you need to do is head over to capture ones website and download the free trial I will put a link in the show description the free trial will work for 30 days it's completely unlocked and this will give you a good solid opportunity to maybe work along in these videos and get a feel for what capture 1 will do capture one comes in three different flavors there is capture one Pro and then there's also capture one Express for Sony and there's a capture one Express for Fujifilm capture one Pro is probably the one you want to go with the one I would recommend the others are really nice if you only use Sony cameras or you only use Fuji film cameras and you want to save a little bit of money you're on a budget that can give you some software that will work very camera specific to your brand I however would recommend you future-proof this just a little bit and go for the full copy of capture one it costs a little bit more but it's worth it in the long run because you're future proofed and it opens up doors to working with a lot more cameras than just one specific brand so the first time you open capture one you're going to be asked whether you want to create a new catalog or a new session and this is a point where a lot of people get tripped up because if you're not sure what the difference is then how do you know what to select well for 99% of you out there you won't just create a catalog it's a newer file structure there's a lot more flexibility with it I'll explain what a session is a session is basically the way capture one was originally designed to work it obviously still supports sessions and the idea being that capture one was the raw editor for phase one this was an application that was used in a lot of photography studio type situations and what it does is when you create a session you can do these like by a client project or for a specific day of shooting or however you want to organize them but when you create a session it creates a physical file structure on your computer and it's going to have a master folder within that you'll see the session file and then there's some other folders too for instance your original capture images will all go into a folder when you make selects they will physically move into the selects folder when you throw an image away it goes into a trash folder as a safeguard so it's not actually permanently deleted and there's even an output folder so once you've edited images and you've made TIFF files or you made JPEGs or whatever that is then all of those live in the output folder the reason for this folder structure is it makes it really easy to have a portable setup that you can share images let's say with a second editor maybe they live on a server and somebody needs to just go pull the final output images on an older client project they can just go to the folder and everything's pretty obvious where that lives now around version 6 of capture one they introduced this idea of catalogs and so when you work in a catalogue it's going to import the files into the catalog and I'll show you an option on that as well but they all live in one place so you can put every image if you've ever taken and as long as your metadata is pretty situated you can actually go search for images really easily and so catalogs are really cool way to work and another thing you can do with catalogs other than managing where files live let's say a hard drive fills up and you need to move everything to a different space super easy to do the other thing it will do is it will actually import sessions so you can work in kind of this hybrid fashion but I'm getting a little head of myself what we're going to do in this video since it's just a basic videos let's set up a new catalog so when we select new catalog it's going to give us a prompt to asked what to name and so I'll just call this example catalog and then it says where do you want to store this the only thing I would be mindful of is if you are going to import tons of images that you put it somewhere where you've got an F drive space you can click on the little dots here I have a whole imaging drive setup so we're going to use that I'm going to capture one let's go to catalogs and I will put my catalog here so let's say choose and once you say ok it's going to set up your very first catalog now the next thing we're gonna need to do is import some images so there's two ways you can do that you can click on the big square in the middle or you can go up to the top right-hand side of the screen which I will explain to you in a second we're gonna say import images now I will go to my desktop where I have a demo folder of images that we're gonna use for this example I'm just gonna say import all and what it's going to do is bring those images in you're gonna see a couple of dialog windows that tell you what's going on with the import and depending on how many images you were importing this could take a second because it's going to build some thumbnail files so we have set up a catalog we have imported some images and now we're ready to edit those images so the first thing that I want to show you is something that I think people that are new to capture one don't realize is here because it's not typically found in a conventional editor but it's kind of one of the keys to getting the most out of capture one so the first thing we're gonna do if you go over to our editing panels over here on the left side of the screen you're gonna select the fourth tab which is the color tab it's the one with the three intersecting circles here once you have that selected if you go down the third tool down will say base characteristics and if yours is collapsed or closed you want to tick the little arrow on the left to open that up the first thing is the ICC profile this says Sony a nine generic now I didn't have to set that when I brought the image in to capture one because it's a raw image that is in the data so capture one realized that it was from a sony a nine so it's selected that profile and what that does is it matches the raw data that's coming in from the Sony file in to capture ones color algorithm and it will do this for whatever camera you're using the next thing you're gonna see it says curve and it says Auto and there's a little drop-down box now the curve is applied after the raw data is interpreted and you can change this depending on what your settings are in here so if I hit this drop-down box the first one is going to say film extra shadow when I select that watch the image you're gonna see the shadows open up just a little bit and these are pretty subtle but this is the default curve that you're applying to the image you also have a film high contrast there's a film standard which I believe is what it picked automatically and then the last one you're gonna see in every case on here is linear response and linear response basically is flat there is no curve applied and this is really useful if you want the ultimate control over what you're doing to the image and if you have something really complex that you're trying to do and you don't want a built in film curve to work on that linear response will allow you to do that it's kind of like working with a log file for video although it's a little bit different but that's kind of the same thinking now I want to select another image here and I'll show you this was done on a fuji film x3 and you will see it picked the icc profile correctly that's automatic I don't have to do anything now I want to show you what happens with fuji cameras when you select this curve drop down box look at this all of your film profiles that the camera has that you can shoot in and this is kind of Fugees thing you can shoot with the Turner you can shoot with classic chrome you can shoot with Pro via or Velvia all these color profiles that Fuji builds into this based on their famous film stocks are accessible to you in here and it's amazing because in the past you totally don't get that in the raw file you have to shoot a JPEG sidecar file at least if not just shoot JPEGs to get your film looks but this is where they are in capture one and this is really interesting in fact I think because they're in here like this I mean it really makes capture one standout is an image editor and it's really cool now the other thing that you're gonna want to look at this is the color profile I just throw in on top of the raw file and this is actually a really important starting point another automatic profile that it does our lens profiles so if I click on the lens tab which is up at the top right next to color it's this little circle let's click the lens adjustment tab and the first thing in here is your lens correction profile and it auto selected the right lens this is the 16 millimeter f-100 four and I have some if this isn't quite the right adjustment I'm looking for I can control and fine-tune some things like distortion sharpness or light fall-off now in general like the Roth profile it's going to automatically select this for you now there are cases though where maybe you're using an adapted lens or something like that and it can't pick that out of the raw file I'll give you an example one is this image I shut this in New York this was done on a nikon z6 but I was using a Zeiss OTUs lens it's a 28 millimeter lens so when I go over here it's going to say profile manufacturer profile if I want to get specific I can select this manually so if you hit this drop-down box I know this was a Zeiss OTUs 28 millimeter lens that I rented so if I go down I selects ice right here is the Zeiss OTUs 1.4 f sorry F 1.4 28 millimeters ze I'm gonna go ahead and select that and that will you can just see it just corrected the distortion a little bit that will tighten up my lens profile and so sometimes you have to go select these manually and if you do that's where they are so now that I've selected the curves for my raw profile and I've made sure that my lens profile is correct I'm ready to start editing this image and this is fairly intuitive at this point so probably where I would start is looking at the image and realizing well you got this great night shot in New York it's a little dark I lose a lot in these shadows down here that's one thing the next thing is the white balance because it kind of the camera went towards the tungsten lights that were on the street but that leaves me with a lot of real blue shadows so how can we work on that a little bit well first thing I'm gonna do is go to the exposure tab here and I'm going to go down to high dynamic range let's bring up some shadows I'm gonna do a whole separate video on getting perfect exposures in here I'm just gonna give you the gist of it right now I might even bring my exposure up just a little bit and bring my highlights back just a hair and I'm Sal ittle too bright but I'm starting to get a nice dusk image here now if I want to make this lean more towards blue than it did the tungsten I might start with the white balance that is found under the color tab fourth one down it's white balance so I might move my Kelvin I could do this with an eyedropper I'm just gonna eyeball it here I'm gonna bring that to be a little warmer and I can either make that leading towards more towards green actually I like a little more red in there and so I'm starting to get a good looking image here and I can continue to work with this if you want to go down to some details I'm gonna go back to exposure all the way down at the bottom you're gonna find some clarity I might turn that just a little bit zoom in make sure this isn't overdoing it and then I can even add a little structure in there anyway I'm starting to get an image that I'm happy with and I can continue to do this more I'm gonna do another video too because we can actually add layer masking on top of this if we want to localize just parts of an image I'm gonna do a whole separate thing on that because it's gonna get really long if I try and do them all in here but remember this is our overview so the last thing I want to do once I'm completely happy with my image is I want to output this image and so there is a tab for that so if you go over to the editing panels it is the second-to-last tab over here it has a little gear on it now what we have is the ability to do some batch exporting within capture one and so we have what we call process recipes and capture one has a few included in here by default there's some different JPEGs that you might want to do there's some TIFF files it just depends on the intent that you have for your output whether this is for print or whether it's for the web but it allows you to combine process recipes for exporting multiple images in multiple formats and this is a big time saver when you have a whole lot of images that you're working with so the first thing you want to do is it'll select at least one process recipe and so I'm gonna just go for the JPEG srgb let's say we're gonna put this on Instagram so I want to make sure that box is ticked the others are deselected at this point and because I don't want to export them and I can go in here and fine-tune my process recipe if I want the other thing I'm going to do is my output location let's just put this on the desktop because I want to be able to find it really fast you can even put that in a subfolder you have naming options here if I want to change the name of the image so if I want to put an attached a job name to it for instance I'm not gonna worry about that cuz we're only doing with one image here when you're ready to process down at the bottom it's gonna say process summary what you're gonna do is click the process button and it's going to go ahead and crank that one out pretty fast so we now have a JPEG file that's been converted to an sRGB color space from the edits that I did to the original raw file and this is where capture one really shines it's a fairly easy process if you've never used capture one and you don't know where things are it can be kind of confusing at first but I think it has such a wonderful balance of ease of use versus taking care of a lot of the complexities under the hood so you don't have to deal with it it's one of my favorite editors and we're gonna do a whole series on this so I want to know if you guys have anything you want me to show on here comment below I'll see you in the next video until then later

Channel: The Art of Photography

Views: 34,504

Keywords: capture one, capture one pro, photo editing software, raw converter, lightroom alternative, capture one vs lightroom, capture one styles, studio software, photo editing, photography editing tips, capture one pro 12 tutorial, workflow, image editing workflow, photo tutorial for beginners, photography, The Art of Photography, Ted Forbes

Id: muAE5RCNiyM

Length: 13min 17sec (797 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 19 2019