This morning, Capture One released a service release for Capture One 20, version 13.1.3. Included are several bug fixes, new camera support and support for Windows 10 ver. 2004.
Along with the release, the company also announced that it’s offering 25% off its annual prepaid subscription plans for a limited time. To get started, just visit the Capture One store and use the promo code ANNUAL25 at checkout.
Capture One is one of our team’s favorite tools to not only edit photographs, but to organize and manage them, too. With precision editing tools like a heal and clone brush, moire removal, noise reduction, advanced color editing, layers and more, you can fine-tune your photographs with ease.
Ready to get started with Capture One? Here are some articles to get you started.
Arranging tools your way in Capture One - As you work with Capture One Pro 20 (CO20), you’ll find that certain tools become your favorites and you may want to create one or more custom tool tabs and arrange these tools your way. In this article, I’ll walk you through how to create your own custom tool tab in CO20. For this example, I’ll create my own custom Exposure Tool tab and add my favorite tools to it. The first thing we need to do is add a custom tool tab. We do that by right-clicking on the tool tab area, selecting the Custom Tool Tab and naming it. You’ll also be able to choose an icon to easily identify your custom tool tab. Your new custom tool tab will look like this. You can move it to where you want it by holding down the Command key on Mac, or Alt key on Windows, and clicking and dragging it. Next, you can add the tools you want to the custom tool tab by right-clicking in the tool area of the custom tool tab, choosing Add Tool and selecting the tool from the list. Here are my favorite tools for My Exposure tab. If you add a tool you didn’t mean to or just want to remove one, click on the 3-dot menu at the upper right of the tool and select Remove Tool. Or you can right-click in the Tool area and select Remove Tool and choose it from the menu. With this information, you can now create your own tool tabs and add and remove tools from them. Note that you can also add or remove tools from the built-in tool tabs the same way. In addition, you can move tools around inside a tool tab by clicking on the top of the tool and dragging it to the new position. Be sure to check out this new version. You’ll find a 30-day free trial to Capture One Pro 20 here.
Lightroom Classic users, is it time to consider Capture One? - As far back as I can remember, I’ve been using one program to manage and process my images — Lightroom Classic. And while I still have great memories using it, there were some things that were starting to bug me. For one, the lack of updates. While Lightroom Classic is an extremely robust program, it was starting to get long in the tooth, in terms of getting feature updates. It’s younger cousin, Lightroom (formerly CC) was getting most of the attention. And rightly so — Lightroom is a great program. But if you rely on a local storage workflow, it’s not ideal. And two, speed. While Lightroom Classic had improved its performance due to things like GPU Acceleration, it is by no means fast. It was manageable, as long as you had a computer that was amped up enough to handle it. So why Capture One? I had heard a lot about Capture One in recent months, mainly surrounding their v.20 update. While I had tried Capture One before, I found it to be overkill for what I needed at the time. But now, with time on my hands, I figured it was worth another look. In my discussions with other pros, Capture One was known for speed and accuracy when it came to color performance. But for me, it’s well-known throughout the world of Olympus that Capture One does the best job in terms of RAW processing its files. Getting familiarized I did a lot of reading and YouTube watching before I got started with Capture One Pro 20. One of the first things I did was set up the interface so it looked similar to Lightroom Classic. To do this, you can go to Window > Workspace > Migration. This will do two things. One, it’ll add the Tools sidebar to the right (instead of the left), and it’ll put the filmstrip (known as the Browser) at the bottom. With this change alone, you should feel much more at home. From there, I dove into my tool tabs. While many tutorials will tell you to activate the Quick tool tab, I really don’t think it’s necessary. You’ll find pretty much all the tools from Lightroom’s Develop module in the Exposure tool tab. If you find yourself not using some of the tools in the Exposure tool tab (like Levels), you can right-click and remove it. The great thing is, as you decide to personalize your workflow more, you can make your own custom tool tabs. Check out this article from Chris Anson, which will show you how. If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide on the above steps — including using the Quick tool tab — check out this video from The Phoblographer below. It really helped me in getting started! The catalog While some people say that Capture One’s catalog system is inferior to Lightroom Classic’s, I disagree. Capture One offers a wide variety of organizational tools through User Collections. But figuring it out is a bit confusing at first. There are four parts to the User Collections area — Albums, Smart Albums, Projects and Groups. Groups (which have a folder icon) and Projects (which have a Collection Set icon from Lightroom) are basically just there for organizational purposes — you can’t put photos inside of them. For my workflow, I have a Group, then a Project under that, followed by Albums and Smart Albums. The nice thing is that you can have nested Smart Albums, meaning you could create a “Selects” album that automatically pulls from, say, a color label or star rating. But it only pulls in photos in that Project. This is something I’ve been asking Adobe about forever, and it’s definitely already improved my workflow! Groups can be nested under other Groups too, meaning I can stay more organized than ever. Plus, your entire User Collections area does not have to be alphabetical, meaning you can click and drag them to any order you wish. Finally, if you like to use edit EXIF and IPTC metadata through keywording, star ratings and more, you can do those just like you would in Lightroom Classic. You can even add metadata for Getty Images (which is built-in by default). Some helpful tips Filtering If you want to filter by star rating or color tag, that can be done in the Library tool tab. But what if you want to select multiple filters at once, and show only, for instance, blue and green tagged photos? On a Mac, hold down the Command key as you click each option. On Windows, use the Control key. Changing keyboard shortcuts If you want to change your keyboard shortcuts to be more like Lightroom, go to Edit > Edit Keyboard Shortcuts. For instance, I set mine up so I could use regular numbers for some of my color labels, just like Lightroom. I use 6 for red, 7 for yellow, 8 for green, 9 for blue, and Cmd+0 to zero out the colors. Exporting While Capture One offers a basic export option, you’ll probably find yourself using the Process tool tab, instead. This will export all the photos you have selected according to what processes you have checked. This makes it super easy and quick to automate your exports and perform export options like Output Naming and size adjustments. There are some great built-in export options already there for you. Watermarks You can’t add a watermark during a standard export — it has to be done through the Process tool tab. What’s missing While Capture One is a great program, there are a few things missing. Limited plugin support Sure, there are plugins in Capture One, but they’re super limited. In order to edit in Luminar, for instance, I find myself right-clicking on a photo and clicking Edit With > Adobe Photoshop, and then using Luminar’s plugin mode in Photoshop. This automatically brings the photo back into Capture One. I tried sending it right from Capture One to Luminar, but
Switching to Capture One: Choosing an organization strategy - When I first switched to Capture One as my primary photo management and editing tool, I knew I wanted to come up with a workflow that suited how I photograph. But I also knew that I needed a quick and easy way to find the photos I needed, whether it be in a week, month or year from now. I did a lot of research on Capture One’s organization tools when you use a catalog system. If you use a session, you’ll obviously treat your photos differently, and we’ll have more on that in a future article. But what’s the best method to organizational madness in Capture One? Understanding Capture One’s organizational tools A lot of people say that Capture One’s weakness lies in its organizational tools. I couldn’t disagree more — I find that Capture One has put together a toolset that can make it easier to keep track of your photos, as well as offer some automation that isn’t present in Lightroom. In the User Collections area, you’ll be reminded of Lightroom Classic in that you can make projects (like collection sets) and albums (like collections). But you can take it much further, too. There are four different options in Capture One’s User Collections that can help sort your images: Group: This can’t hold images, but it can hold projects and albums, and display the photos that are present inside of the albums. Groups can be nested within each other. Project: If you’re used to Lightroom, think of a Project like a Collection Set. These again can’t hold any individual photos. You can nest groups, albums and smart albums inside of projects. Album: This is exactly what you’d think it is — this holds your photos. Smart album: Smart albums can display photos based on a specific criteria, and can be nested inside of groups and projects. If they’re inside a group, they search from your entire catalog. But if they’re inside of a project, they only work with images that are a part of that particular project. Common organization strategies As a corporate event photographer, I’ve found that it’s often most convenient to organize my catalog based on client name. When I open the Library tool in Capture One, I see three groups, one smart album and one album. The smart album holds any images I’ve given a 5-star rating to, which gives me easy access to photographs that I might want to post on social media for promotional purposes. The BTS album holds any of my behind-the-scenes photographs I’ve taken. Client-driven strategy If I drill down into my Clients group, you’ll see that it has sub-groups for each individual client. This makes it easy to quickly and easily find a client, which I sort alphabetically. If I expand one of those sub-groups for a client, you’ll see an individual project. In this example, I photographed several people for a local magazine for an upcoming July issue. So the project is the July 2020 issue, and underneath that are nested albums. Group and album strategy What happens if you don’t have a specific project you’re working on? Well, simply put, that’s when you would take projects out of the mix. In this example, I have a main Photofocus group and a sub-group called Gear Reviews. Inside of that I have individual albums for each product I have reviewed. In this case, projects aren’t necessary because it’s not an ongoing thing I’m working on. And it’s not a specific use case to a client. Utilizing smart albums I’ve learned to really love smart albums in Capture One. As I said earlier, these can be nested, so I can have them only pick up the photographs in the parent group and project. In this instance, I have a project under a sub-group called Coronavirus. This is where I put all of my Coronavirus-related photographs that I’ve taken for various clients. Inside of that are two albums. “All” holds all the photographs, while “Selects” is a smart album that only pulls images from the project’s photos that have color labels of yellow, green and blue. You can obviously edit this to show photos based on ratings or other data, too. What’s the right organization for you? Only you can answer that question. But Capture One gives a lot of organizational options to help you keep track of and manage your photos. With the latest update to Capture One, there’s never a better time to switch. Do you have a method to your organizational madness? Let me know in the comments below! Ready to try out Capture One? Click here to get a 30-day trial.
